The Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite comprises Oracle Corporation software products that provide modeling and analysis of business processes based on the ARIS tool suite.  The BPA tool suite is used by business analysts and technical architects for modeling of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and implementation using the Oracle Fusion Middleware. The models from BPA suite can be converted to other tools such as Microsoft Visio or published to SharePoint.

Many surveys regarding tools used for process management and modeling show that Microsoft® Visio® is most frequently employed for this task; along with (amazingly) Excel® and PowerPoint® for business process documentation. The quality of such deliverables and their value for the company/organization differs by the functionality and modeling capabilities of the respective tool (and do not forget about the people’s experience and skills). The interesting question is: How to close the gap between the easy-to-use Office tools (so much loved by business folks and consultants) and those complex and costly tools preferred by architects?

People mostly believe that Microsoft® Visio® is just a simple drawing tool which is limited in scope when it comes to business process modeling and the complexities of business architecture. BPM-X® has enhanced Visio® by a smart repository approach so that the construction of a real business architecture is a breeze. As a result you can easily achieve a business and functional decomposition and structure your process diagrams into according to different levels of detail. In this way you may start from the overall enterprise perspective and end up on the implementation level with supporting IT systems and applications. And there are modeling languages like ArchiMate® and BPMN™ which help to visually express your enterprise and architecture using different viewpoints (diagrams).

In a February I have posted about a project using HTML5 and scalable vector graphics (SVG) for smarter publishing of business process models. The project now has come into the QA phase and I uploaded a first teaser of published content to be accessed from this blog post.

IBM Rational® System Architect is a one of the leading EA and BPA modeling and analysis tools. It has great functionality; it supporting many standards such as BPMN 2.0 diagram types and famous frameworks like TOGAF 9, ArchiMate v2.0, DoDAF 2.0, MODAF 1.2, NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) 3.0, IAF v4 Integrated Architecture Framework, Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework 2.0 (FEAF 2.0) and last but not least the Zachman Framework. This rich functionality unfortunately, also builds complexity that is obstructive to efficient use by business analysts or project team initiatives like BPR (business process re-engineering) or blueprinting  of ERP solutions. These later teams and much prefer the easy use of Microsoft Visio® to map business processes or to scope existing best practice content for customer requirements.

Many CEOs and IT deciders think about Microsoft® SharePoint® as the ultimate BPM system. The question is: What are they expecting from “BPM” and how do they define “BPM”?

Microsoft introduced with Visio 2013 a new file format (.vsdx) that replaces the Visio binary file format (.vsd) and Visio XML Drawing file format (.vdx). The Visio 2013 file format is now supported by Visio Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.  Without the need of an “intermediary” file format, SharePoint 2013 can now render and publish Visio diagrams. And as the file format is very different from prior Visio versions 2007 or 2010, the question is how to export and import Visio 2013 diagrams from ARIS®,  ProVision®, Corporate Modeler®, System Architect® or other BPA tools?