A good use of product and time
I have spent some months recently working with David Thompson of Vision42 on a cyber security governance project. It has been really interesting! Dave brings to the table his background as a business consultant and Cyber Security Auditor. I bring leading edge process and information design skills and tooling. We have made a fierce team together as we kept pace with some very clever guys in a start-up.
One thing working with start-ups has taught me is that entrepreneurs and innovators work at a fast pace and they need people who can make sense of all their ideas, translating them into strategy diagrams, organisation models, business process models, data designs (UML or ERD) and application interaction models. I know from forty years of IT and business experience that trying to manage all this is a document is like fighting over a dog’s breakfast!!! There are so many relationships and connections between the diagrams and artefacts in them that things can easily get out of order because you end up trying to maintain information in multiple places due to the flat format.
I started using business modelling tools as they appeared on the market, back in 2003. I first used ProVision, which was excellent for the time, but pre-BPMN. I commented on the draft BPMN standard from a holistic modelling perspective and was thrilled when BPMN 2.0 came out. Over 20 years later, I have used several tools, some of them very good.
May Favourite Tool - ADONIS
My favourite tool is ADONIS by BOC Group, for which The Process Expert is a partner. I have used it for nearly nine years now, initially dipping my toe in with the Community Version, which is free, so ideal for projects that don’t have a modelling tool. Using the power of the commercial version of ADONIS is great! It really gives you increased control over your business concepts by making every diagram immediately accessible; every object (or artefact) is each diagram searchable and by providing an amazing depth of information about each diagram and object according to its type. For example, a task gets a RACI (amongst other things). A role gets its own special information too.
Many Moving Parts!
An application can have lots of information too, covering Organisation, Competencies, Tasks (RACI), responsibilities, Contunuous Improvement, Performance Indicators/Goals, Compliance, Data Protection, Changes, Lifecycle and Simulation Data. You get the idea – apply this amount of capability to all the object types and you can virtually construct a Digital Twin!!!
This first image is my home page in ADONIS. It lists recent diagrams for easy access. There is also a diagram and object tree on the left of the page. I break the diagrams down by Organisation/People; Process (BPMN conversations and BPMN business processes); Technology (applications) and Data (logical models). There is normally a Strategy folder too, and the artefacts in there relate to all kinds of models and artefacts.
This is one of the processes in my methodology.
- I am able to allocate a Role to a swimlane and all activities it participates in
- I am able to specify task type as user, manual, service etc. and it shows as an icon on the task.
- I can allocate an Application to User tasks and it shows against the task
Ther is a stack of capability and it is very, very cool!
Business Benefit!
In the end, it is all about business benefit! ADONIS makes my life easier and makes modelling more interactive and faster. It provides an amazing communication mechanism and I can furnish Reader licences (which enables commenting) as well a few kinds of functional licences according to a user’s involvement. The return on investment is quite immediate and the value is significant. As a consultant who strives to deliver the very best in modern business architecture and business process design, I could not wish for a better tool.
Try ADONIS to help remedy the mess!
If you want to get your business analysis, projects and overall business architecture under control instead of spread through many documents in different states of completion and ageing to irrelevance, you should try ADONIS!
Option 1: Get a free Community account at https://www.adonis-community.com/en/
Option 2. BOOK ME for a discussion of your business needs and I will answer your questions and show you ADONIS myself!