MJ
I've reviewed previous discussions on data flow and I've not seen a complete answer to my problem. We have engineers who receive data directly from external partners and in an effort to understand these data flows and hopefully introduce some managed services in the future we need to model in detail these data flows. On the surface the attributes are simple, who's sending and who's receiving the data (role and group), what's moving (data format and charateristics, xls, txt, zip, etc), how (the transport method, email, ftp, tape, etc) and where (current file storage solution associated with role/group).
I'm leaning towards an EPC material flow as the template contains everything I need, but I'd like to know if there are better methods for capturing such a data flow.
These data flows will become children of data connection lines from existing workflows (BPMN).
Cheers in advance for any tips.
Part of my plan was to assign a data flow model to a connection line in BPMN, but as Rick mentioned this is not possible (and now my model is incorrect). It seems not being able to assign child models to a line is a restriction of the method filter and not the application. Does that mean I could modify the filter to allow this sort of association?
Likely the answer is no. The only connection that I know of that allows assignments is the "transfers data to" which connects 2 application system types in an access diagram. The ability to modify the method in ARIS is restricted to taking away or renaming things that exist in the complete ARIS Method, you cannot add things that the it does not support. You can create the assignment from the data object to either of the 2 model types discussed above if that helps. In order to get around this in EPC models I generally connect an Application System Type object to the Function which represents the interface and do the assignment from there.
Rick, thanks for the information. I won't waste any time looking to modify the standard method and I may use your suggestion to introduce a new element to represent the data flow associated with a particular function and data type pairing.
One of the issues we're trying to expose through modeling processes is that for a given data type its data flow is unique to the function or task calling that data. We'd like to, if possible, introduce some data access and flow consistency.
Yes, unfortunately there is no other connection type you can assign a model to. An alternative for data flow which I applied was using EPC's w/o connection between functions, just OrgUnit-Function>output>Cluster/Data Model>input for>Function-OrgUnit and then assign other models to Clusters. Of course TechnicalTerm, Class, ERM attribute and other data-related objects can be used instead of Cluster as appropriate.
