The ARIS concept by August-Wilhelm Scheer aims to ensure that an enterprise information system can completely meet its requirements. This framework is based on a division of the model into description views and levels, which allows a description of the individual elements through specially designed methods, without having to include the entire model. The methodology serves as a systems development life cycle for mapping and optimizing business processes. These processes are mapped for each description view, starting with the business management question up to the implementation on data processing level.
ARIS house (description views)
ARIS relies mainly on its own five-view architecture. These five views are the organizational, data, service, functional and process views of a process. The classification is made to break down the complexity of the model into five facets and thus make business process modeling simpler. Each view of the ARIS concept represents the model of a business process under a specific aspect:
Function view: The activities and the groupings and hierarchical relationships that exist between them are described in the function view, for example in a function tree. Since functions support goals and are controlled by them, goals are also assigned to the function view
Product/Service view: Provides an overview of the entire product/service portfolio
Process view: The process view connects all other views into a time-logical schedule, for example in an event-driven process chain or BPMN
Description levels
Each description view of the ARIS house is divided into three description levels: Concept Structured representation of the business processes by means of description models that are understandable for the business side Data Concept Implementation of the technical concept in IT-related description models Implementation IT-technical realization of the described process parts
Dissemination and related work
The ARIS concept forms the basis of various software products, such as the ARIS Toolset from Software AG, which has been the owner of ARIS trademarks since IDS Scheer AG was acquired. At the end of 2004, part of the concept was reflected in the graphical process integration of SAP Exchange Infrastructure. ARIS is a very well-known approach for the description of information system architectures, especially in German-speaking countries. As a concept of the Management Frameworks group, however, it is one of over fifty existing frameworks for information management on the market. The architecture of interoperable information systems was also published in 2010 at the Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik in Saarbrücken, which was founded by Scheer. While ARIS describes company-internal information systems and business processes, AIOS describes how cross-company business processes can be realized by adapting and loosely coupling information systems. With the "Model-to-Execute" approach, business processes can be modelled in ARIS and automatically transferred to webMethods BPM for technical execution.
Applications
As one of the Enterprise Modeling methods, ARIS provides four different aspects of applications:
The ARIS concept
*is the architecture for describing business processes.
* provides modelling methods, the meta structures of which are comprised in information models.
* is the foundation for the ARIS Toolset software system for the support of modelling.
