BlueDolphin and ArchiMate

With BlueDolphin you have the ability to capture all the information about your business objects (assets) and relationships between them. In this way, an entire enterprise architecture can be mapped. To work with enterprise architecture within BlueDolphin, the independent modeling language ArchiMate is used.

ArchiMate

ArchiMate was developed in the Netherlands by a project team in cooperation with several Dutch partners from the government, large ICT companies, and academia. It is nowadays a technical open standard from The Open Group® that has been adopted worldwide.

ArchiMate offers a common language for describing the construction and operation of business processes, organizational structures, information flows, IT systems, and technical infrastructure. All users of the language can interpret the information in the same way, which can be seen as an advantage. This makes it possible to communicate with both internal and external stakeholders. For example, a third party can use the architecture information during the organization's processes in which it is involved.

BlueDolphin offers ArchiMate as the standard modeling language, but also allows you to change the language if needed. This gives you the freedom to opt for another modeling language, if it makes your company's overall communication easier.

ArchiMate makes use of concepts and relationships. Concepts are representations of business objects, such as company processes, company products, employees, applications, services, and servers. Relationships are the links between different concepts and receive a definition, such as: used by, composed of, and receives information of.

This makes it possible to visualize a business architecture. Suppose you noticed the following: the business process procurement makes use of the ICT service ERP, which is realized by the Microsoft Dynamics application. If this is only a written description, it sounds complex and makes it difficult to communicate various dependencies. Within ArchiMate, you can create the following diagram to present these in a clear way:

The diagram is much easier to understand for everyone. However, people will have to make themselves somewhat familiar with the types of concepts and relationships used by ArchiMate. Each concept has an icon that indicates the type of ArchiMate concept. Thus, every relationship has a depiction that matches the ArchiMate definition. However, there is no steep learning curve for this language and basic knowledge is sufficient to understand and interpret diagrams.

Also, BlueDolphin offers the possibility to add additional information to concepts and relationships, from which the modeling could be explained. So, for example, a short text can be added to a relationship. This allows you to further specify the kind of a relationship or the type of information transferred between two concepts. Other information can be added to both concepts and relationships. This information may not be displayed in the diagram but will be registered in questionnaires that are answered by the users. This additional information will further contribute to the understanding of the enterprise architecture.

Reporting

All information contained in BlueDolphin is available for analyses and reports in various forms. Besides the standard visualizations of ArchiMate, BlueDolphin uses Jaspersoft for reporting. Jaspersoft uses the defined concepts and connections to create visual reports, so that information can be extracted from BlueDolphin.