Differences between meta-classes

Post Reply
aschoijett
Posts: 26
Joined: 01 Jun 2018, 14:16

Hi,
I"m new in this forum and I'm exploring the features of the Essential Project. My first impressions are that the massive metamodel, obviously intended to represent most possible problems an enterprise architect need to model, is confusing for a new user of the product. I wrote asking about the training courses but no one has responded to me yet, so in them meantime, I'd like to try the forum.

I have way too many questions at this stage but in the spirit of not trying the patience of the people in this forum too quickly, I will just ask if someone could clarify for me by providing some real-life, related examples, of what to put in the following Business layer classes:

- Business Capability (Conceptual)
- Business Process Family (Logical)
- Business Process (Logical)

In addition:
I'm a bit confused over what is the value to the company of keeping information about the first two as distinct components and curious about what is the level of granularity that people use to call something a Business Process.

Many thanks in advance,

Alex
JohnM
Posts: 467
Joined: 17 Feb 2009, 20:19

Alex,

Not sure why your email hasn't come through so we have contacted you directly.

For the business layers, have a look at the tutorials as they have examples: http://docs.enterprise-architecture.org ... modelling/

- Business Capability (Conceptual) . - Finance Management
- Business Process Family (Logical) - Accounts Payable Family (grouping all the accounts payable processes)
- Business Process (Logical) - Account Payable - Global, Account Payable - London (A local Variant)

The value of the top two: Capabilities describe the business, decompose into processes and act as an anchor for questions around efficiency, rationalisation, risk, etc. They are really important for your EA when looking for opportunities, and when communicating with both management and the business

The process family is a way of grouping similar processes, again it is useful when you want to see opportunities to rationalise, or purely to see how you do similar processes across your organisation. For one client, we recently added cost to the processes and showed them in the business process family view to allow relative cost of similar processes to be seen

Hope that helps

John
aschoijett
Posts: 26
Joined: 01 Jun 2018, 14:16

Thank you John
I had read the documentation prior to asking

So, using your example, I understand that there are three instances here:

Accounts Payable
Accounts Payable - Global (variant 1 of Accounts Payable)
Accounts Payable - London (variant 2 of Accounts Payable)

Let's say that when I start modeling I don't know of the variants.
What is the preferred approach to model this? In other words, what class should I use to create the instance of Accounts Payable within Protege? Business Process (BP) or Business Process Family (BPF)?

I may be tempted to create it as a BPF, so if I discover variants later, I can simply create them as BPs and link them somehow.

That said, I don't know how the reports in the viewer are created to report on BPs or BPFs.

Many thanks in advance for your insights!

Alex
JohnM
Posts: 467
Joined: 17 Feb 2009, 20:19

You should probably create the process first, once you have a second similar one then create the family.

Views wise, the business process family is in the business process catalogue see: http://essentialviewer.com/demo/report? ... 5&cl=en-gb

and if you click a family, the family shows as:

http://essentialviewer.com/demo/report? ... s%20Family

John
aschoijett
Posts: 26
Joined: 01 Jun 2018, 14:16

Thank you, John.
Post Reply