EA Voices

<p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>BiZZdesign has a long tradition in model-based design and improvement of organizational processes. Building on this tradition, we have extended our portfolio with a method and tool for implementation-independent design and analysis of business logic, which seamlessly integrates with business process and information design.</span></p><h2 class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>Why yet another modeling domain?</span></h2><p><span class=”s1″>A problem that many organizations are facing is that the rules originating from legislation or business policies eventually end up in many different places in the organization, with many opportunities for misinterpretation along the way. The resulting business logic is hidden in business processes or hard-coded in software, which makes it very inflexible and hard to manage. Although most of the current business rules approaches promise to offer a solution to this problem, by “separating the know from the flow”, this promise is often not fulfilled, due to a number of reasons:</span></p><ol><li><span class=”s1″>There is still a lot of confusion as to <strong>what a business rule actually is</strong>, and what different types of business rules exits.</span></li> <li><span class=”s1″>Business rules are often<strong> specified in a very detailed way</strong>, in one of the proprietary languages of a rule engine. As a result, they usually have a technical <b>'</b><strong>technical</strong><b>’ </b><strong>flavor</strong>, which makes it <strong>difficult for business stakeholders to verify them</strong>, and they are <b>tied to a </b><strong>specific implementation platform.</strong></span></li> <li><span class=”s1″>Business rule specifications, and the tools that support them, are often <strong>poorly integrated</strong> with the existing process and information models and tools.</span></li></ol><p><span class=”s1″>​When modeling your business logic, business processes and information as separate, coequal domains, loosely coupled through a limited set of linking elements, the resulting designs become much more flexible and manageable. By first specifying them in an implementation-independent way, it becomes easier to verify whether a design actually meets the requirements of the business. And once there is agreement on the correctness of the design, different implementations can be derived from it.</span></p><h2><span class=”s1″>Towards an integrated design</span></h2><p><span class=”s1″>As illustrated in the picture below, your business processes, information and business logic can be developed in separate design ‘flows’, in an arbitrary order; but ultimately, these flows will have to come together, to form an integrated design of your organization:</span></p><p><span class=”s1″><img alt=”The integration of Decisions, Processes and Information” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/20130517_Implementation-independent-design/Integrated-decision-modelinglegenda.jpg” style=”width: 607px; height: 550px;” title=”Integrate Decisions, Processes and Information”/></span></p><p><span class=”s1″>For the implementation-independent design of business processes, we use our proprietary modeling language Amber or the BPMN 2.0 standard. For information modeling, a wide variety of formalisms is available, e.g., Entity Relationship diagrams or UML class diagrams. To complete the trio, we have adopted The Decision Model, as described in the book “The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology” by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg, as our language of choice for designing the business logic. This approach turned out to be perfectly suited for our purpose. It matches a simple graphical notation to model the decision structure with an intuitive tabular specification of the business logic and a rigorous set of integrity principles. Moreover, it can be combined with business process models and information models in a natural way.</span></p><h2><span class=”s1″>The Decision Modeler</span></h2><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>On June 11</span><span class=”s2″>th</span><span class=”s1″>, we will launch <a href=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/tools/the-decision-modeler/”><span class=”s3″>The Decision Modeler</span></a>, our software tool a tool for implementation-independent modeling and analysis of business logic based on The Decision Model. Because the tool is part of the BiZZdesign design suite, decision models can be linked to other models in this suite, including business process and information models, but also enterprise architecture models and requirements models in the ArchiMate language.</span></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>The figure below summarizes how the different elements of a decision model in The Decision Modeler are related to each other, and to element from process and information models.</span></p><p class=”p1″><img alt=”” src=”http://www.bizzdesign.com/assets/BlogDocuments-2/20130517_Implementation-independent-design/The-Decision-Modeler-relations.png” style=”width: 600px; height: 468px;” title=””/></p><p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>In my next blog in this series, I will give a more in-depth description of the concepts and functionality of The Decision Modeler, and apply the approach described here to a real-life example. In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions, please send me an e-mail on <a href=”mailto:h.jonkers@bizzdesign.com” target=”_blank”><span class=”s2″>h.jonkers@bizzdesign.com</span></a>, or add a comment below. </span></p>

I planned for quite a while to write a post (or series of posts to be accurate) but there was always something distracting me. Well, that happens, so no worries. Yesterday and the day before I have been on the Gartner EA Summit which was truly great and enlightening in many different ways, despite my incapability to plan a bit ahead. When I left the hotel today 5:00 in the morning to catch the first flight home I truly planned to write about it, more than one post actually. But then something was brought to my intention, something what really matters. (I might though come back to the Gartner EA Summit and what I learned later).

The flight went fine and I got picked up as planned by the taxi. Perfect service by the way including Internet access and bottled water to drink. As always the travel went smooth and perfect, so I could work my way through a stockpile of email to put some things into context, sort one or the other topic. Basically normal travel type of work. But then, something was brought to my intention. Heavy impact actually.

1. All of a sudden the driver had to go into the breaks, not really, but strong enough for me to recognize, so I looked up to see whats up and of course the classical motorway road works traffic jam.
2. I heard some breaks, but nothing really worrying and then suddenly the driver was taking his hands away from the steering wheel and in that very same moment a large truck was blowing his horn and then the noise of metal, plastics and humans screaming.
3. Something bumped also in the car I was sitting in (normally I was sitting always on the front seat, but this time I was sitting in the back to work) and a giant truck was sledging diagonal from the back into my sight field and into the farming field next to the roadway.
4. [total silence]
5. The driver of the truck left his truck within 10 seconds as far as I was able to recognize unharmed and the driver of the taxi I was sitting in just drove 20 meter forward to secure a way for potential emergency cars.
6. Then we left the car, and it was a field of demolition. Apparently a second truck was standing on the emergency lane obviously heavily hit by something in the rear. A small bus for 8 persons was wrecked and standing on his wheels but into the wrong direction (later my driver told me that he has seen that bus doing a rollover), 2 cars have been hit heavily (airbags executed) and bumped into the cars in front of them, one of them obviously hitting us.

Our car and another car almost unharmed, just small scratches in the rear, but have a look at the red truck who litereally was flying in as my driver told me on the rest of the travel more than once.

1. Almost at the very moment 4 people from Johanniter Unfallhilfe came running. I was truly impressed, but in reality it was just luck that they have been driving a couple of cars behind us. So the professionals could take over and did that really great. It was very fast clear that noone was harmed heavily. Everyone involved could walk, talk and was cleary able to response reasonable (despite some really shaking knees and white faces).
2. Shortly afterwards police officers came to secure the area and a helicopter flew in. Impressive speed by the way, I haven’t clocked it, but it for sure was well below 10 minutes till the helicopter with the doctor was there.
3. The volunteer fireworkers from that area also arrived with quite some vessels and people.
4. What was obvious in that realm of chaos was high professionalism, but also quite some communication and handovers. From Johanniter to police to doctors to fireworkers. The cars were triple checked (Johanniter, Policemen, Fireworkers) All of the involved professionals spoke to the people involved in the accident, quite some confusion about many things for example insurance (how irrelevant at THAT moment, yet important for some. As far as I recognized it, that insurance concept was at least one thing people understood in that moment).
5. They collected all of us and explained the steps and there was a fairly good atmosphere, because everyone was well aware that things could have been way worse. Personal data was recorded by the police people, the doctors did a short examination and send those from the more heavily impacted cars into hospital, the fireworkers cleaned the street to allow the emergency cars to drive through, lots of pictures were made.
6. Not that I want to make that experience again or wish that anyone, but it was brilliant to see them in action, coming from knowing nothing to full control of the situation in less then 15 minutes.

1. Preventive
1. A Traffic Jam is signalled back to the following cars (and to traffic control) and warns the drivers (like red alarm in Star Trek if you want) or even better forces the car to slow down, no matter what the driver believes.
2. A car in trouble signals to the other cars (and traffic control) that it is in trouble.
3. Cars are forced to have a relevant safety distance.
4. Cars are forced to not overspeed (yes, there will be people who believe this should not be done, but in that case it would have helped a lot and under worse circumstances it would have saved life).
2. Impact
1. On an impact the car or environment is signalling to other cars as well as to traffic control.
2. Traffic control sends a drone to examine the area and create a 3D model.
3. That 3D model gets send to all potentially involved parties which can use it to plan the operation while already driving to location.
4. Each unit supported by augmented reality updates new information real time into that model, so that everyone involved has the full picture and can therefore act acordingly, e.g. more people, specialized vessels, specialized skills, but also retreat if the impact was less harmful than thought. There could be way more parties involved than in this particular case.
3. Afterwards
1. All the information can be directly fed into the system including the 3D model for reports, insurance, news, whatsoever.