University of Applied Science

Most companies are faced with slower growth and stronger competition nowadays. Gaining and maintaining competitive advantages becomes crucial for superior performance. Resent analysis show that competitive advantages grows increasingly out of the value of IT-Solutions. CIO therefore are urged to measure the value of their IT solutions in terms of their contribution to the companies success. In monetary terms, IT value represent the amount customers (internal and external) are willing to pay for their IT Applications. Corporate-Governance is faced with the challenge to develop and implement a meaningful IT-Strategy. Which goals should be traced in the IT-Business-Unit and which context exist between IT-Application-Systems and businessprocesses that are more or less supported by IT-Applications. IT-decisions typically have enterprise-wide significance and Business-Process-Reengineering (BPR) is hard to imagine without IT-Application-Systems changes. The enlargement of the value of IT through innovation and integration is the corporate goal. To improve the benefit of IT-investments, their impact on real existing business-processes must be analysed and proven. In the past, several IT-Applications were developed or implemented (purchase-software), which have not been applied for Business-Process-Reengineering but only for the support of various business-functions. By this investment pattern, the economic benefit of these IT-Applications can not be assessed. Ideally, each IT project should be embedded in a strategically business context and a holistic IT architecture. Modern object-oriented softwaredevelopment is more and more driven by Model-Driven-Architecture (MDA), which is based on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). This is the key driver for software-supported BusinessProcess-Analyse (BPA) and –Modelling (BPM) to generate Businessand IT-System-Models in UML-notation. The most existing Software-tools for Business-Process-Analysis (BPA) are geared towards standardized norms as quality assurance ( ISO 9000 ff) or EFQM which does not support direct the IT-development-process. In this sense there is a semantically gap between BPM and ITSystem-Modelling (ISM). In this work, theoretically desirable requirements at software-tools will be discussed and exemplary, available software-products on the market separated into four groups which cover the bandwidth from complete independent UML-tools via strictly UMLcentred tools to comprehensive UML based tool-suites will be assessed. Thereby will be clear that methodical assistance concerning BPA and object-orientation is absolutely necessary.