Simple is Beautiful
Wednesday, April 12th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
One of the overarching themes for IT|Redux is the reduction of complexity in IT. As far as I can tell, there are too main ways one can achieve such a goal. The first is to provide radically simpler approaches that can address 80% of our needs. The second is to provide sophisticated tools that offer the right level of abstraction in helping us deal with the remaining 20%. In the past 36 hours, I got to experience both, with demonstrations from Thingamy and Contivo.
Thingamy is a perfect example for the first approach. It provides an online application development environment that requires absolutely no coding and allows non-technical people to develop fairly sophisticated applications through simple wizards. What makes Thingamy unlike anything else I’ve seen so far is that it treats both objects and flows as first class citizen. Usually, application development tools will either be data centric and relegate flows to the background — Salesforce.com is a good example for that, or take a process centric approach and provide no easy way to build custom objects. Thingamy is the first tool that I have seen that does both equally well. It’s still under heavy development, but what Sigurd Rinde showed me was enough to convince me that he is up to something quite interesting. Many thanks to Jeff Nolan for his introduction to Thingamy.
Contivo is a perfect example for the second approach. In its early days, the company had developed one of the most advanced data mapping and transformation tools available on the market. In its more recent incarnation, it is focusing on building what could very well be the most advanced schema development tool. If you’re dealing with thousands of objects, hundreds of schema files, and complex relationships between them, I do not know very many tools other than Contivo’s that can help you deal with such a level of complexity. In a nutshell, Contivo does for data schemas what Intalio does for business processes, and I must say that the demonstration I got from Dave Hollander really impressed me and made me think about ways we could integrate both products.
Simple is beautiful.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, Office 2.0
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Ismael,
Looks like James Governor at Redmong shares similar views on Thingamy on his blog. I would appreciate your view, if any, on IBM’s “Do it yourself - IT” as it was covered by Rod Smith at O’Reilly’s ETech this year.
Tomoaki,
I tend to agree with Rod Smith’s views, but one problem remains to be solved: how do you bridge the gap between unstructured content and structured data, or to me more precise, between publishing (a blog, a wiki) and transaction processing (an online database)? I had this discussion a month ago with Ross Mayfield, Socialtext’s CEO, and we pretty much reached the same conclusion: it’s a pretty darn difficult problem to solve, and as long as it’s not solved, DIY-IT will have limited scope with respect to IT’s responsibility to deal with the reliable and secure processing of transactions.
Ismael,
Thanks for your answer. As for your comment about bridging the gap between unstructured content and structured data, it seems to me that IBM is bringing UIMA (Unsturcture Information Management Architecture) based products to market under an Open Source license to address this issue. You can understand this better than me by accessing Marc Andrews’ blog. You can also take a look at Alfred Sepcto’s presentation on Semantic Accceleration for Practical Web focusing on UIMA, and Charles Lickel’s research work on Situational Software & Consumable IT.
Tomoaki,
Thank you for the very detailed background information. I will take a look.
Ismael,
Good to see software that treats business objects and business processes as first class citizen. Currently, enterprise information systems largely fail to deliver in time and are a big threat to business adaptability. Enterprise information systems are made of a very large number of applications, which are connected in different ways. Today, IT organizations spend most of their time and money tying all these applications together in order to build an integrated information system.
I think that the problem comes from the nature of the application itself. Applications are built to help businesses realize their objectives. Therefore, business people expect things from an information system from their specific point of view. In fact, an application is an automated system which embodies a specific point of view on business objects and executes a process from the narrow viewpoint of a small number of business users. An application is just an implementation of a business process, and the business objects they need. As a result, an application embodies a narrow ontology of the enterprise ontology. With time, you have different representations within your information system. The information system integration task is to connect all these different narrow ontologies to build a global ontology from the point of view of the enterprise.
If we want to have an integrated information system, we have to stop building applications that are specific to a small class of business users, and instead build a system that is aligned with the needs of the business itself, being treated as a first class citizen. A firm is an organization that takes things or services as input and combines or transforms them to build new things or services. Therefore, their first class citizens are these things or services they use and the way they use them in order to build other things or services. Things or services are called business objects and the way firms use them is called business processes.
I think that if we build enterprise information systems from the viewpoint of the business, we will never have all these problems of ontology integration, because processes will be integrated right from the design phase. I believe that the reason why the ERP has been successful at integrating global information systems is because it was built in an integrated manner. Of course, it comes with its own drawbacks, especially its rigidity. But at least we know that an integrated enterprise information system is possible. IT organizations have to go beyond being the owners of applications and become the owners of business objects and business processes. And because accountability cannot really be shared, any business object and business process must have a clearly identified owner.
I try to explain my views on my blog. It’s in French though ;-)
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