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After lunch, I attended a couple of ARIS customer breakouts, the first of which was Marc Kase of SAIC. I won't give a lot of detail about their business processes, since I'm not sure how much that they really want to share outside the conference, but there were some great points and lessons learned that are more generic.

One of the first stats that hit me on the SAIC case is that they moved from 700 to 70 (it may have been 78 -- I was in the back and the print on the slide was small) job roles as part of their process modelling efforts, which is an incredible success story.

They've focussed on building a business architecture, with process models created for projects stored in local repositories, then promoted to a central enterprise architecture repository at certain milestones. From this, they've been able to see a number of benefits:

• Context, e.g., which systems use which data
• Documentation that allows requirements and design to be traced back to business processes
• Standards enforcement
• Ability to cascade changes across models
• Web publication of process and architecture content
• Strengthened ties between IT and functional process owners

They also learned a few lessons, such as some of the difficulties in enforcing change control in moving from a single project to a portfolio of projects, and some practical issues around setting tightly-controlled standards in order to reduce the user learning curve; in fact, with the appropriate filters and standards in place, their users find ARIS "much easier to use than Visio".

They have a number of plans for 2007, including simulation, integration with a number of other systems including their BPMS, building out the complete enterprise business architecture, and using "system of systems engineering" to track interdependencies between projects.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:43 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • EnterpriseArchitecture | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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