iO’s Charon bridges the gap between business process modelling and IT design, thus raising business/IT communication to new levels.

As business processes evolve and applications requirements change, two very different organizational units are involved in bringing about a solution: line-of-business units and IT departments supporting them. Solution development often suffers from different vocabularies and methodologies used on either side of the fence. Requirements are passed on verbally rather than exploiting the level of formalization business process modelling has to offer and which IT departments so often depend on. Our experience in both business analysis and IT processes has led to our Charon solution toolkit, enabling a coherent solution development process that strives to support the seamless translation of business requirements into IT solutions. Charon targets the critical transition from semi-formalized BPM models to high-level IT design models, providing immediate feedback on BPM constructs used as well as catering for iterative and incremental transitions, thus increasing process quality and efficiency.

Why does the business/IT gap lead to chaos every so often?

One of the most recognized analyst reports states that 75% of all software projects fail. If a project succeeds it will have consumed an average 200% of its planned budged upon completion and will thus have exceeded planned costs beyond acceptance. The initial phase of a project determines its further progress. This is where three main reasons for project failure have to be sought:

• The business unit does not have a clear and internally agreed understanding of the impact and importance of raising or changing a requirement.
• Requirements are not sufficiently formalized for a straight-away implementation by software developers.
• An IT department’s attempts at interpreting a requirement are often biased by existing solutions and may result in failure to implement the original requirement.

Communication between business and IT departments usually happens in a grey zone. Each party adheres to their own processes and media. Even in the best case where modelling tools are used by either side to formalize designs, manual translation is the rule rather than the exception, resulting in time-consuming and error-prone monotonous tasks. As a result, a business process carefully modelled by a business unit in ARIS will be as carefully re-modelled by an IT unit in their UML tool – or directly translated into code. In the process, misinterpretations and loss of information can hardly be avoided. The smallest change of requirements will lead to costly adjustments and coordination.

Choice of Strategies

Traditional approaches either solely rely on tool support or dictate procedures:

• Tool-based. Vendors of business process analysis tools make an attempt at integrating with business process modelling tools. Vendors of business process management systems offer simple GUIs to orchestrate services. However, any such approach reduces the challenge to its technological dimension and does not address the organizational and cultural gap.
• Procedure-based. Consultancies, sometimes backed by tool vendors, offer tools and methods to integrate business and IT through co-ordinated interaction of parties involved. While interaction is essential, such approaches focus on process and coaching, neglecting the potential of tool-based translation to free up staff for creative tasks.

Either approach solely serves one aspect of the challenge and in reality accepts the business/IT gap as given without proposing a viable and cost-efficient way of bridging it.

Why opt for iO’s Charon?

Charon, as you may remember from Greek history, was a ferryman between fairly different worlds. Leaving details of the metaphor aside, iO’s solution toolkit by the same name strives to combine both of the approaches mentioned above, targeting the challenge as a whole rather than reducing it to its seemingly disparate aspects. iO’s Charon toolkit offers comprehensive support to conveniently, consistently and quickly ferry from the world of business processes to the world of IT. It is based on mapping business process models (eEPCs) and class models from ARIS to their UML equivalents, but its capabilities reach much further. Charon facilitates a bi-directional mapping between ARIS and UML, thus complementing the usual cul-de-sac with formalized feedback from IT departments to their business sponsors. Its ARIS/UML mapping technology caters for incremental, iterative and selective transitions. It makes business requirements traceable from business process models to IT design models and on to actual application code if applied in a holistic process and with an appropriate tool chain. There is an unavoidable overlap between fine-grained business process modelling and high-level IT design in terms of design decisions made. iO’s Charon acknowledges this noman’s land by protecting IT design decisions from being overwritten when synchronizing the respective business process model, flagging conflicts for review. iO’s Charon utilizes IBM Rational Software Modeler and hence seamlessly integrates with the Eclipse platform. Intuitive Eclipse plug-ins link a proprietary ARIS environment to UML2 models in IBM RSM and Eclipse EMF and let you employ readily available solutions for model-to-model and model-to-code transformations.

Benefits of Using iO‘s Charon

Let your business and IT departments talk core rather than losing themselves in translation: Charon keeps your stakeholders focussed on agreeing approaches and providing solutions rather than spending time on restating their intentions to fit tools and media on either side of the fence. Our toolkit minimizes misinterpretation and loss of information. We help you set up and control a flexible development process. Charon transitions business process models from ARIS to your IT world – selectively, iteratively and incrementally. The Gordian knot of waterfall processes is cut, facilitating agile development and shortening time to market. Part-automated information interchange helps your projects to become more predictable and also more cost-efficient. Charon’s tool-based approach ensures a scalable and reliable synchronization of business and IT designs, improving the quality of the application under development by excluding human error and relieving your staff from monotonous and error-prone tasks.

Align IT with Business Reality

Charon keeps ARIS business process models and IT UML models in sync. Depending on the scale and volatility of the business process model, employing a part-automated solution such as Charon will pay for itself after just a few iterations. The benefit of applying Charon will significantly grow in the context of a consequently iterative development process and in combination with code generation from IT design models. In comparison with its competition, Charon features a number of advanced capabilities:

• Selective. Transform part of an ARIS model rather than the whole of it.
• Iterative. Repeatedly transform part of an ARIS model, merging changes rather than replacing the target UML model and losing additions or changes.
• Incremental. Transform additional parts of an ARIS model and merge them with a target UML model rather than creating a disjoint UML model.
• Traceable. Trace ARIS constructs to UML constructs and on to code artefacts – and back.
• Protected regions. Protect conflicting changes to UML models made by the IT department from being overwritten in iterative or incremental scenarios and flag conflicts for review.