CTOs Blog

Our second user conference will be run this week - 25th and 26th of October. There will be be a number of excellent customer speakers, as well as our CEO and key Holocentric staff. We hope this year will be even better than the the previous one.

We've recently shipped Modeler 6.3 and Modelpedia 1.3, both significant enhancement releases that have a large number of additional features. The Modeler is faster and even more stable than previous releases and the Modelpedia also has some significant performance improvements - in particular, it can handle over five times the number of concurrent users over the previous release. We'll be covering this and other exciting features, including enhancements to the Solution Framework, in more detail at the conference.

I will be presenting the Holocentric Future Roadmap, as well as a workshops on Modeler and Modelpedia. I hope you can make it to the conference!

Over the past year people have asked me to articulate what makes our approach different to that offered by other vendors, along with what the approach is moving forward. In answering this, I’d like to tie together some thoughts around the business focus we’ve taken for our products and how this relates to a number of topical issues in the marketplace. These include:

• Pretending that executing systems are the sum-total of an organisations process;
• Failing to engage with the business through the use of techno-centric toolsets;
• Using a drawing tool to model processes and failing to get a return on investment; and
• Using a notation designed for system execution to represent business processes.

Before launching into today’s discussion though, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Do Away with Programmers?

Let’s start by looking at whether programmers and their tools will eventually become obsolete. This is something that some vendors have been touting for at least 2 decades now. I think that the need to program will never go away, it’s more that the role people play will continue to change, along with the tools they use, so that eventually everyone will program at least a little bit. Whether it’s graphical programming with bubbles and arrows, setting up a device to record movies, or using a text editor with fields, it’s still programming of sorts and what people recognised as programming in the past will be very different to what it will become in the future.

I raise the debate because it has relevance to the argument that a single process modelling formalism is enough to satisfy business users and that you can get a free kick on creating system executable processes at the same time.

Pega Systems for instance is an impressive example of how a workflow and rules engine can be focused to capture business execution rules, process definitions and form design. It provides a great mixture of intelligent execution engine design, along with programming tools that can be used by people who have traditionally been involved with the business, not the IT side of an organisation. But can we really do away with all programmers and just let the business come up with rules and have software execute them? Yes and no.

Business users can become programmers of sorts. It’s just that the skill level required in order to perform these tasks means that few people today will be able to do this without considerable assistance. They will also need to get comfortable with concepts like version control and change management at the same time. Also, large companies don’t have the luxury to replace existing systems with shiny new ones based on modelled system processes. Often the best these businesses can do is to use an SOA-approach to encapsulate services and relate these back to system processes; and this kind of work requires developers that use traditional programming tools.

Even if you can get business people more involved in the programming of systems and change the toolset they use, this is certainly not the only avenue for improving the cost, efficiency of effectiveness of an organisation. Other things need to be taken into consideration for this to occur.

A Techno-Centric Approach

Technologists in particular come up with ways to improve business processes using new and innovative technology, often in response to a new business need. In some cases there are green opportunities to create new systems, in others, say when there is a dependence on a legacy system, the technology can hamper the business to adapt to new market conditions. So, technology choice is important as this can help or hinder in the execution of a business strategy.

But can organisations simply focus on the technology that executes, rather than requirements and outcomes? More efficient ways to define process models have lead to a tendency to reduce things to their most essential elements – what executes in a computer system. Whilst this is efficient for computer execution, it is not effective in an organisation if it forsakes creating a more complete model of the business, including the human dimension and the purpose for the system in the first place. The politics of many organisations alone will mean a technology-based approach is doomed to fail. This is because the approach lacks consulting people, getting their buy in, and jointly arriving at an outcome.

Many technology vendors claim to represent “the business” and at the same time offer an execution of business processes as the answer. This results in only a portion of a solution. I’ve seen this kind of approach from products ranging from BizTalk, WebSphere, and UML-based tools (although typically repurposed as being “Enterprise Architecture” tools these days), claiming to be business oriented, but still without a doubt rooted in the software engineering space. That’s not to say these tools aren’t useful for system design and implementation; it’s just that they are still used by IT people to focus on the system definition and execution space and only offer a thin veneer of business modelling around this, which leaves the models relevant to and owned by software developers, as opposed to a business audience.

This is in vast contrast to drawing tools like Visio, which allows you to create very pleasing images, or even maps. In many ways, it’s really like a more advanced kind of PowerPoint presentation, and allows for a person with basic skills to draw something and at the same time appear to be productive. However, this is certainly not something that can be consider a model and the benefits attributable to models are therefore forgone—such as the ability to keep content up to date and use it for multiple purposes.

A good deal of customer feedback to date has been around how with previous approaches, they had to create models using a system modelling tool, and that these were not even close to being consumed by a business audience. The models subsequently had to be redrawn in Visio or PowerPoint in order for the business people to understand what was happening. It’s hardly surprising that some organisations decide to skip “as-is” modelling altogether, given the difficulty surrounding the capture of validated process models. Needless to say, modelling to the wrong audience and drawing maps is a waste of time and effort and is avoidable if the right toolset can be used from the start.

Skill Sets and Abstraction

People in an organisation have a vast range of skill sets and requirements. Many business users don’t ever want to become expert process modellers, let alone system process modellers; they want to review and follow easily understood representations of their business, such as standard operation procedures or business requirements, without having to complicate this with execution syntax or the latest technology-based standard.

From a traditional programmer’s perspective, looking at a business model is like looking at a map that doesn’t have code in it – what’s the point of doing something that can't run? To a business person, it’s more of a question of creating an artefact that they understand, and ultimately are prepared to sign off on as representing their business. However, it’s not just one view that needs to be catered for, a system view is just as valid but this is related to the business view.

Traditional use case modelling struggled with business requirements versus system design and came up with a separation of Business Use Cases from System Use Cases, where the business ones were higher levels of abstraction (and less implementation focused) than system ones. To this day, use case modelling is inherently textual in nature and therefore open to analysts writing copious amounts of prose for a use case body, which can make them hard to read and follow. The ability to integrate use cases with process modelling has since assisted with keeping use cases focused on system design, leaving the business focus as part of a process model.

One Notation to Rule Them All?

For process modelling, some would argue that the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) has the ability to represent high level business processes, as well as system processes. This notation was initially created by a group of process execution vendors, and in a way, it is possible to represent a high level business process, but in practice the shapes (and even many of the execution formalisms) of BPMN are a turn off to business users that don’t have an IT background, in the same way that diagrams with shaded colours and images of people are a turn off to system developers. The notation also tends to downplay, if not ignore the role of the user.

Even from an execution perspective, few if any successful process execution vendors have plain vanilla, “standard” execution models; they offer some kind of customisation to make the models work properly, or simply make the notation style look vaguely the same as BPMN for instance.

The bottom line is that having a BPMN-like support in a modelling tool is not going to be enough to meet the demands of business modelling, where business users have diverse, non-technical backgrounds and there is also a need to integrate these with system processes. It’s a myth that there exists a lowest denominator notation that caters for everything.

A Holocentric Approach

The approach we have taken is to focus on business users in an organisation, first and foremost, from executives through to people doing work on a shop floor. We provide relevant views for this audience, as well as providing a bridge into system design and implementation.

Business models are the lynchpin and it is therefore essential to be able to work with a flexible metamodel that can capture multiple models, which are effective for their intended audience. These models should also allow costing and return on investment to be calculated.

This approach is not fundamentally based on kludged extensions to a software metamodel model, as is the case with UML profiles, but one that encompasses business and system concepts; and these must be seamlessly incorporated into the metamodel.

Whilst not advocating BPMN for business process modelling, there is a role for BPMN-based models around system design and execution and this certainly can be catered for as one of the views in a model, provided it's related back to business activities.

The Holocentric Inaugural User Conference went off with a bang last week; that’s really the only way to describe it. In my first post I mentioned that I would follow by talking about how customers have benefited from using Modeler and Modelpedia. The conference certainly provided the best examples of this. I’ve never before been involved with a conference that had the kind of buzz and quality of both customer and partner talks.

Customers, including Qantas Engineering, Western Power, ATO and Defence did a great job explaining where they were able to achieve benefits, whether this was a greater engagement with the business, achieving a return on investment in the order of 20 times, or putting in place the foundation of a Business Management System, these talks focused on results.

What struck me most was seeing straight-talking customers cover details about the benefits they were getting, as well as swapping notes on approaches and goals they had, and not just talking product. The magnitude of customer success really has changed over the past 2 years, not only because of the maturity of the product set, but also because customers are demanding greater results and have been prepared to learn from each other.

I enjoyed getting back into doing presentations and running workshops, having been locked up running agile development projects of late. I covered the essential milestones for the Future Roadmap presentation and the conference also gave me an opportunity to put together some long overdue “tips and tricks” workshops for Modeler and Modelpedia. I have to remind myself at times that some features are taken for granted and these are not always known by others – so it’s our job to let people know!

Of course the star workshop of the conference was the metamodelling talk given by our Product Manager Aaron Davison, to a packed audience. Given the increasing success on projects and obvious customer and partner interest in the feature, it’s certainly an area that will be getting more attention in the future.

Well done Charles, Bruce, Geoff, Keith, Jo, Michael, Tanya and others for making the conference happen. I can’t wait for the next one now!

I had the pleasure of being invited to a dinner last night honouring the winners of this year’s NSW Pearcey Award – Lars and Jens Rasmussen.

For those that don’t already know who they are, these are the guys who invented the technology behind Google Maps and Wave.  To put their achievements into perspective:

“Lars and Jens's development of Google Maps has positioned Australia as a global leader in online services. It resulted in Google establishing a significant research and development team in Sydney and the creation of many high tech jobs.” said Pearcey NSW co-chair Charles Lindop.

“Google Maps is now used by around 1/3 of all Google visitors and represents over 3% of all total global Google traffic. This values Google Maps as a multi-billion dollar enterprise.”

“It was a great entrepreneurial achievement; Lars and Jens bootstrapped their company Where 2 Technologies, attacking a major business opportunity with highly innovative technology, sold to Google, and then continued to build out the business. They then did it all again with Google Wave. What better example of entrepreneurship and innovation can you get?”

It was great to catch up with these guys, share stories and meet other entrepreneurs who have received recognition awards. As a former NSW Pearcey Award winner, I am truly humbled to be listed alongside these people!

Most large organisations have either heard about, or are interested in implementing ITIL. Earlier this year one of our customers had their hearts set on using the superb models created by IT Process Maps, so we investigated the potential to work with them to bring this capability to the Modeler and Modelpedia environment.

Before we go any further, what is ITIL? The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management, Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations. Published as a series of books (each covering an IT management topic), ITIL details a number of important IT practices, along with comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to suit its needs.  The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

Supporting ITIL is important for us because it provides another aspect of the Solution Framework that we have been working on here; with a view to providing reference models for Holistic solutions. Having partners that are the best in the business always helps a great deal and as a team we been able to build a first-class Accelerator for Modeler.

As part of this project we wrote an ARIS to Modeler conversion, because most of the model content had originated in this product. We developed options to convert the model content into BPMN or Role-Based Process Modelling (RBPM) metamodels. As it has turned out, the semantics of Process Areas in the RBPM have turned out to be extremely useful in the port, and the ability to use existing System Requirement & Fulfilment (SR&F) metamodel concepts, as well as custom notation node styles.

A number of feedback requests from our partners challenged us to enhance Modeler, which we agreed to do as part of the project. We also added some specific support to the metamodel in order to represent better the intention around some of the relationships in the process model, along with boundary processes and normal courses of operation. The scripting engine of Modeler certainly helped to make changes post import and it allowed large sets of data to be transformed quickly and easily. These changes along with the base Modeler 6.2 platform have allowed us to enrich the original content.

As a result of this effort, the Modeler ITIL Accelerator is not just a set of pictures (as it is in Visio for instance), but a complete modelling environment. With these maps you can build real model extensions, perform cost-benefit analysis of implemented processes, as well as Service catalogs. Using the Modelpedia environment, not only can the processes be made available to the right people in an organisation effortlessly, but people can help to improve them without having modelling experience themselves.

Special thanks to our customers for having the foresight to help kick-start the project, Simon for his tireless efforts, Stefan and Andrea at IT Process Maps (Pfronten, Germany), and Allen of ESP ITIL (Sydney, Australia) for all helping to make this Accelerator come to life!  (See here for product information)

The team here has been working diligently on the next enhancement release of Modeler and Modelpedia since Christmas 2009. Typically, we create an enhancement release 6 months after the last one. In the case of Modeler 6.2, this makes the next Generally Available (GA) product just on the outer band of these estimates. However, during this time frame we also had the added challenge of creating three supported releases, two of which were not pre-release and not GA, but made specifically to address requested features for key customers. We also created an important maintenance release for Modeler 6.1 in February of this year.

There has been a lot of work done by the development and testing teams, and we have had the support of a select number of customers and partners, who have all contributed to the new features and stability of this release. The Modelpedia Web 2.0 interface in particular feels like a major release itself and the Modeler has many enhancements and is becoming increasingly polished to use. It’s difficult not being able to talk about new releases until they are GA because of the time and effort that gets put into the product, and of course the new features.

Stay tuned for the official announcement!

Hello everyone, I thought I’d kick off the blog by introducing myself and then talk briefly about what Holocentric does, before looking into the past and the future.

Who am I?

I’m Derek Renouf, Chief Technology Officer at Holocentric. Holocentric Modeler and Holocentric Modelpedia are both products, which my team and I have been building for many years. I’m an avid Object-Oriented and Model-Driven Design developer, keenly interested in SCRUM and other related methods. I’ve worked as a director of a consulting firm, designed business process accelerators, spoken at international technology conferences, written training material, designed and implemented graphics frameworks, code generators, language parsers, runtime and scripting engines. Outside of my work, I love reading, spending time with my family (I’ve got two young boys and a beautiful wife) and when I make time, I meditate.

What is Holocentric?

Holocentric is a software company that builds modelling and collaboration tools, as well as operational frameworks for organisations wanting improve their governance, processes, work practices and IT systems, and in doing so reduce the cost of operating.

We do this by taking a holistic approach that captures the vision and strategy of an organisation, encompassing value chain, processes and procedures. All of these things when implemented help to drive a business. In doing so we solve one of the greatest challenges faced by organisations: how to implement strategy or policy in a consistent way, from top level executive views to detailed working practice in an organisation, without enormous effort and duplication of work. When populated, we call this operational framework a Business Management System (or BMS for short).

How did our products come into existence, where are they going and how do organisations gain benefit from this today? These questions are going to take some time to answer. I thought I would start by sharing some of my background, motivation for being here and basis of much of our technology today. In later posts I plan to discuss more technical aspects of the product strategy, including our Web 2.0 product offering and how this provides a scalable platform for modelling and collaboration.

Motivation

I’ve always had a passion for writing software that involves people.  At a young age I was motivated to learn how to program because I wanted to write adventure games. This would let others experience a created world. It took me a number of years, but I eventually learnt BASIC, went on to write story lines, design graphics and code entire applications. This all happened at a time when using computers was strictly for nerds, Apple Computers were even expandable and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had not yet commercialised the technology already developed around user interface, object-oriented programming and networking.

Adventure games for me were really a precursor to writing larger applications and toolsets. For games, a critical mass of features had to be present before a person can enter a world that had been created. There are many parallels between this and the software at Holocentric today. For instance, tools exist to capture models of a business, including their processes, and a platform provides the means to share this information with others and ultimately improve the way people work. In this environment people are invited into a world of process and related information, in order to validate a view of the business so that work will improve. The experience needs to be holistic in order for this to succeed and at the same time provide compelling value.

So, although we’re not creating games today, I like to think that we’re improving the experience many people have around business processes, so as to make them as enjoyable as possible, to a point in the future where I dare say they will have fun.

Holocentric Modeler

Back in 1993 Holocentric Modeler started life as an application to model items and relationships between them. Prior to this at university I always curious as to how “MacDraw” worked. Whilst this vision may sound like it’s a pretty broad abstraction, I wanted to build an environment that could host various kinds of models rather than just creating a drawing tool. Anyway, it would also be fair to say that the technology began life being developed in a “garage”. Of course since then the product has been re-engineered and today we have a great team of people both expanding and maintaining the product.

When I talk about models, I’m not just talking about a diagram, a collection of diagrams or a spreadsheet. I’m referring to a collection of items that represent things like requirements, goals, objectives, documents, processes and activities, as well as the relationships between these things. A model therefore is both content, as well as relationships to other content that is not stored directly; it can be seen as the glue that binds things to create an ecosystem. Another important factor around models are the views they provide; not everyone needs to see the same view, in fact people need specific views that are relevant to who they are and what they need to do. The language of one community in an organisation is often different to another. For instance, an Executive is likely to want to see different information to the process improvement and software application implementation team. Models help by presenting views that are familiar to each community, and at the same time provide relationships between elements of these views to ensure that concepts are truly related.

Well before UML or even the Unified Notation came into existence, early versions of Modeler were directed towards designing and generating software and the provision of consulting services around this. An early requirement of the product was to unify the myriad of methods and notations around software development to begin with, so this easily adapted then to encompass UML as it emerged, as well as the capture of requirements and business processes. Whilst software modelling was the original application of the Modeler, it is certainly not the principal destination of it. The focus has been long since adapted to squarely focus on a more holistic approach, whereby business and IT architectures can be captured.

The ability for the Modeler to change itself really has been key part of the tool’s longevity; we want to continue to make this as easy as possible for users to do this, without requiring compilation, installation of JAR-files or DLLs, and certainly not require the installation of complex memory-hungry application shells that are only suited to programmers!

To date, we have achieved much of what we set out to do. The latest Modeler version has pushed the envelope further, especially around the provision of role-based perspectives and simplifying how the tool can be used by a variety of users.

Modelpedia

Modelpedia enables our Business Management System approach. It is both a set of repository services and Web 2.0 interface for model content. It has been designed using Modeler and is in fact almost 90% code-generated, based on our own Model-Driven Architecture.

Modelpedia has come a long way over the past few years. Looking back, I remember a cornerstone meeting where I sat down with Aaron Davison (our then Senior Developer, now Modelpedia Product Manager) wrote up a product vision. We quickly gained the support of not only the key decision makers within the company, but also from many of our largest customers. This has led to the product we have today, and a platform for the future.

Behind most ideas are influences. Some of the main ones for us came directly from repositories and object databases – not just the advantages, but also the pitfalls to avoid with this kind of technology. I wanted to use an environment where items are free to roam, updated by many people and for them to have explicit relationships, rather than being sterile rows in mindless tables. This environment was not simply a database then, but something that had database-like capabilities along with an integrated toolset that included diagrammatic capabilities and even animation.

Following on from this, in order for organisations to get real benefit from a software environment, we needed to provide an enterprise-class platform that is scalable. This includes the ability to version control model content, provide configuration management facilities and have good control over user-defined metadata. Just dumping content into a database was never going to be a solution for this. We needed something that was intelligent, that would save people time and effort, as well as take advantage of Internet protocols and integrate with other services. It is this kind of thinking lead to the technology behind Modelpedia.

Modeler and Modelpedia really just part of the story; other important facets include integration with widely used products such as HP Quality Center, Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Team Foundation Server, IBM’s WebSphere, MicroFocus’ Caliber RM and Optimal Trace; and there are others still to come. Modelpedia opens the door to a whole world of integration beyond what typically has been considered for interfaces and it may be surprising to some how far we push this envelope in the future.

Looking Forward

Anyway, this provides some background and motivation for the future topics. Our software has always provided great benefit to customers. I am personally committed to building on this heritage to meet the challenges of a changing world where an organisation’s ability to be flexible, nimble and meet their own customer’s expectations will be a deciding factor in their success. To this end we’re not just focusing on the toolset, but how people can gain benefit from it. This has led us not simply towards providing models (in the broader sense), but also Business Management Systems.

If you have any topics you’d like me to comment on please send me your thoughts to feedback@holocentric.com. Stay tuned for more to come!!!!