Feature request: owner relation

Started by Hiawatha, August 28, 2014, 14:43:53 PM

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Hiawatha

Hi,

We're using Archimate more and more to describe our ICT landscape. One of the things I'm missing is a way to describe the owner of an information system or proces. I'd like to have an 'owner' relation for that.

Kind regards,
Hugo

Phil Beauvoir

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

The ArchiMate specification only allows certain given relationships between concepts, so we can't add another type of relation. But I'm sure what you want to achieve can be modelled another way. Perhaps this could be best answered by one of our ArchiMate experts.

Phil
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Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie

#2
Hi,

What you are looking for is documented in detail in Gerben's book "Mastering ArchiMate Edition II". I would really suggest to buy it, you will not regret it as it's a fantastic book !

In short, the approach is to define a Role for each Application Owner (this role being assigned to the real Actor if needed). This Role is associated with the related Application Component.

Depending on your need, you can then assign processes to this "Application Owner" Roles to describe what they are really doing (e.g.: they validate changes in a typical ITIL change management process...). That's what we call secondary architecture.

Remark: "Assignment" relationship is weak but ArchiMate allow us to specialize relationships, so you could define a "own" relationship as specialization of association. There's no "official" way of doing it in Archi, so I would suggest to use "Own" as a label and also add a property named "stereotype" with the value "Own", so this is cristal clear in both views and model.

JB
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arnedh

I wrote a script to export a model from a different tool, and to hold the extra information I chose to add Owner(Org Unit), Service Responsible(Person), System Manager(Person), Vendor (Company) and Contract as textual attributes on Application, filling these with names rather than object ids.

It becomes very easy to search by property, if I want to find all the systems owned by "John Doe", or similar searches.

Best regards
Arne D H