ArchiMate Metamodel

A business process or function may be interpreted as the internal behavior assigned to a single business role.

In some cases behavior is the collective effort of more than one business role; in fact a collaboration of two or more business roles results in collective behavior which may be more than simply the sum of the behavior of the separate roles.

Business collaborations represent this collective effort. Business interactions are used to describe the internal behavior that takes place within business collaboration.

A collaboration is a (possibly temporary) collection of business roles or actors within an organization, which perform collaborative behavior (interactions).

Unlike a department, which may also group roles, a business collaboration need not have an official (permanent) status within the organization; it is specifically aimed at a specific interaction or set of interactions between roles. It is especially useful in modeling B2B interactions between different organizations such as provider networks, and also for describing social networks.

A business collaboration may aggregate a number of business roles or actors, and may be assigned to one or more business interactions or other business internal behavior elements.

A business interface or an application interface may serve a business collaboration, while a business collaboration may have business interfaces (through  composition, and also through aggregation via derived relationships).

The name of a business collaboration should preferably be a noun. It is also rather common to leave a business collaboration unnamed.