We are currently about to embed a completely new feature in our rich client products, which is intended to boost collaboration capabilities between BPM stakeholders significantly. It’s a type of session sharing where you can invite your colleagues ad hoc in a well-directed way. This can be useful in many situations where you need instant feedback, e.g.:
a sign-off of a model
aligning a process or organizational change
walk-through of some models with affected process workers-
This means you can share your ARIS window with others in real time, you can hand over a partner the control of your mouse, you can make temporary annotations, chat, VOIP and so on.
I believe this new dimension of collaboration will help organizations which are highly distributed with offices in many different locations and in many different countries to save time and money.
For a start, we plan to allow up to 30 or 50 users in one session, all of which can make annotations, chat and more. To make such sessions manageable we plan to restrict the number of concurrent mouse pointers to 2 – which means two modelers can edit objects, create new ones in several models, and do whatever is necessary at the same time. It is of course possible, to hand over the control to other participants at any time.
My colleagues will provide more details soon in the ARIS Community about this upcoming feature.
I would however, now like to kick-off a discussion to get your feedback on a set of questions. We will be discussing internally:
Would it make sense to also offer this kind of collaboration in ARIS Express?
Based on your experience, what concrete scenarios come to mind for inviting colleagues/partners?
How many people would join and how many would actively change the model in real time and parallel?
1. About ARIS Express. IMHO, it doesn’t make sense to add this feature to AE because AE cannot be used in serious process modeling projects. And AE is ‘eating’ too many resources of PC now to support also this feature.
2. Skype scenario would be nice! (select model -> select user -> make ‘call’)
3. Very interesting question! But we should answer on two:
3.1 Number of users. Average number of ARIS users is 4-5 for Easters Europe company, and as a rule all this staff is concentrated in same department / same office. Do you need this feature at this case? I think no (IMHO).
3.2 Purposes of using. IMHO again, but I think this feature would be nice for ‘online’ model check, for example by PM. But for model building it can be useless, because it is impossible for different Business analysts build the same model at the same time :)
I appreciate your input. I understand your arguments - if typical Express use cases are in general geographically restricted (especially in one office ;-) ) this feature wouldn’t add value. We’ll check this in our further analysis!
I agree in regards to AE - the use case for AE is the casual modeler that might not use this type of collaboration.
<offtopic> If we start a wishlist here - I would love to see the asynchronous collaboration features of ARISalign in the professional ARIS installations. An alternative would be to include social networking open source SW as an add-on to an ARIS installation (e.g. WordPress with BuddyPress on Publisher server). This would be very helful for the org change management activities in a project. </offtopic>
This is a feature in the right direction, collaboration across a team and teams is key in any project. What would however be nice to see is a solution based more on the model of the different web based collaboration suites currently available. Say Google Docs for example where an entire team can share document and model data in real time and in a shared environment allowing for check ins and chek outs including versioning control. Google Wave (wave.google.com) is another collaboration site which also includes a model designer although a bit limited but the idea is there.
Hello Jo, I also believe that all the new collaboration possibilities - synchronous and asynchronous ones - will offer a new ways of driving BPM projects. We will take your ideas into account when we further discuss our offering in this area, this won't be our last collaboration piece, I’m pretty sure.
1. It makes all thesense to extend the collaborative feature to Aris Express, since in small team which are beginners with the software is is key get help or peer review of the modeling , or to do in a team the modeling together.
2. Answered in item 1
3 the members of the stakeholders team , but managed by the organizer that can or allow them to do it.
That discussion is 12 years old. Since then the commercial ARIS product has been evolved a lot. ARIS Express' architecture doesn't offer user management, hence, a collaboration between users couldn't be established without that.
If you need collaboration for your joint modeling project approach, then have a look at ARIS Advanced which offers that: ARIS Pricing - ARIS Cloud
n to allow up to 30 or 50 users in one session, all of which can make annotations, chat and more. To make such sessions manageable we plan to restrict the number of concurrent mouse pointers to 2 – which means two modelers can edit objects, create new ones in several models, and do whatever is necessary at the same time. It is of course possible, to hand over the control to other participants at any time.
