The Value Management Platform and ArchiMate –Towards an Integration? An Illustrative Example for Value Stream Mapping

The Value Management Platform (VMP) of VDMbee is one of few strategy and business model development tools that were inspired by the Object Management Group's VDML standard for value modeling. ArchiMate is The Open Group's specification of an enterprise architecture language that goes well together with their TOGAF framework, which is widely used by enterprise architects. Although VMP and ArchiMate were developed for different reasons, the evolution of both enterprise engineering instruments seems to converge towards a large(r) common ground. For instance, the most recent addition to ArchiMate is the Value Stream element, allowing ArchiMate to be used for value stream mapping (in line with TOGAF), for which support is also provided by the VMP. As another example, VMP now integrates the Process Designer tool which allows generation of BPMN 2.0 business process diagrams from value stream maps. Despite this observed convergence, each approach has its own purpose like providing a framework for strategy planning and execution for VMP and providing structure and context amongst the many artifacts that comprise an organization’s architecture for ArchiMate. In this paper, we question whether the integration of both instruments would be useful for practice and present a scientifically viable research topic. As a preliminary, but necessary, step for any kind of integration, we propose to investigate how VDML (and other) artifacts underlying enterprise modeling with VMP map onto ArchiMate. As an illustrative example, we demonstrate how value streams designed with VMP can be visualized with ArchiMate.