Janet and John talk Business

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Modelling. All in all it takes a degree in maths to really achieve something in this area. Even in the context of modelling business processes and organisational structures, we don’t seem to be able to get rid of the analytical halo that surrounds the persons that are doing it. Look: it’s IT people in disguise!

Even dogs and cats see right through them. I suspect it has something to do with magnetic fields. Or it may just be karma.

Despite everything, IT people persist in their attempts to bridge the worlds of information technology and business. It doesn’t always work and every time again there is this genuine astonishment that the other side is just not getting it.

Take for example Service-oriented Architecture. It is difficult enough to explain to the non-initiated what services exactly are. Let alone to clarify how to define them or – let’s go wild – actually use them in practice. And then we haven’t even touched on architecture, something that IT experts have taken for granted as an advanced concept in their profession.

Bring that to the business side. There they perceive architecture – like all normal people – as something that pertains to homes, offices and other buildings. And the translation to information systems is simply not being made, not even when IT experts try to explain the concepts in plain Janet and John language.

The fact of the matter is, the Janet and John from the IT world are just a little bit different. John likes to solve complex differential equations. And if Janet grows up, she wants to master theoretical physics. Just another frame of reference indeed.

The gap becomes painfully clear if we watch subjects such as business architecture evolve. Intuitively, everybody has a picture of the advantages that would be achieved once we would have a clear, well-defined business architecture.

Well, within the circle of IT people, that is.

Because no matter how much it is emphasised that business architecture has nothing, really, really nothing to do with technology, it is predominantly the more analytical type of professional that seems to be involved in it. I once made sort of an exploratory remark about this phenomenon, addressing the audience of a conference on business architecture: that the breakthrough of standards for business architecture and modelling may be hampered by the fact that mostly IT experts (or former IT experts) are working on it. The room was all denial, but nobody could fail to notice that roughly three-quarters of the audience was making notes on their opened laptops. Or they were just processing some e-mail, never mind that.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised if the business once again shows a lukewarm response. Not only when reacting to the concept of business architecture, but even so to standards for modelling business processes and organisational requirements. Especially the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) currently receives a lot of attention. But from which target audience exactly, that is almost a rhetorical question. Anybody who has had a quick look at the flowchart-like symbols of the notation knows enough.

We can only hope that BPMN will not go the same way as IT experts have gone with their Unified Modelling Language (UML): version 2.1 sometimes shows such a preposterous complexity, that only rocket scientists can discuss it. Not so strange anyway, if we realise that the founders of UML respectively were occupied with telephone centrals, guided missile systems and jet engines.

Maybe it is time for a breakthrough. For example through domain specific languages. Each market sector would have its own Janet and John as spokespersons, speaking a targeted business language that everybody would understand.

Very promising concepts indeed. And yes, invented by IT people.

Probably karma after all.

p.s. After some careful research, I concluded that ‘Janet and John’ may be the best-known names in the UK, trying to suggest simple language explanation. In the US ‘Jane and John’ might work better. In the Netherlands, we refer to ‘Jip and Janneke’. If you have any suggestions from a different regional perspective (Germany? France? Italy? Sweden?), let us know by all means through the comments.

ps2. Sorry about the bad link to a Gartner report about DSL's. You needed to be a suscriber to read it. Replaced by link to Microsoft's definition of DSL.

Posted by Ron Tolido on March 14, 2007 in Architecture | Digg this | Seed Newsvine

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Comments

# on March 15, 2007 9:51 AM, Johan Bergelin said:

In Sweden I am quite certain that we would use Johan and Johanna to keep up with the aliteration standards. Opps, my name exactly that is.

By the way, this is interesting facts.

http://sixx.se/nextgen/2007/03/14/hur-manga-bloggar-pa-ibm/

Even though it is in Swewdish, the numbers could be understood. It's the number of active blogs/bloggers at IBM. Do we have similar numbers for Capgemini?

# on March 15, 2007 10:57 PM, Ron Tolido said:

Johan, I'm not sure what an 'active IBM blog' is, but the facts certainly look impressive. Keep a close watch on both our internal and external sites, as we will quickly be ramping up blog (and wiki, and social network and tagging...activity) activities. Glad you didn't point us to 'the number of IBM employees with an active Second Life identity', though. I'm not sure if I have the stomach for it.

# on March 16, 2007 3:16 PM, Niraj J said:

My position on this is that pure play business analysts(Examples Product Managers in an insurance company , Business Guys deciding the operation flow in a large retail store etc) - are never going to learn any notation we in the IT world make. So there will always be a layer in between developers and the Business guys in the form of an IT Business Analyst OR a Functional Analyst etc.

So whatever language we come up - the target audience will be this layer. Now , keeping this in mind understand the goals of this layer
1. Developers get accurate and detailed requirements
2. The Business gets a visual representation of what they have been saying so that they can validate the understanding between the IT Analyst and the Business guy.

I am not very familiar with BPMN but if it fails to express the details required by developers and the graphical information required by the Business it will not succeed.

Note that UML was great from a developers point of view but did not communicate the workflow to the Business in terms that they could understand. The IT analyst was forced to adaopt thigns like flowcharts etc to depeict the business flow

# on March 16, 2007 5:20 PM, Ron Tolido said:

Niraj,

The thing is, I believe that the layer between IT and bsiness world predominantly will be populated by (former) IT people that DO have this analytical background.

I'm not so sure if business will actually need (or appreciate) graphical models to understand and express business requirements/rules.

For example, we have seen pension experts that clearly prefer to work with a (semi-formal) combination of text and tables, rather than with flowcharts or any other graphical notation. This may be the way we will be going with Domain Specfic Languages for business.

By the way: business people don't understand UML, so we give them these good old flowcharts, that we don't use any longer in IT, because they are ineffective. What's wrong with this picture?

# on March 19, 2007 9:19 AM, Johan Bergelin said:

Ron >>

The official IBM blogroll can be found here

http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/index.html

for any defintions and a full comprehensive list.

I also saw that Andy commented on the internal Swedish SOA blog which is great! Thanks.

# on March 19, 2007 3:46 PM, David Chassels said:

There are two aspects to "modelling” one is the IT Architecture (where SOA sits) the other is the business process - one IT, one business. Let's just look at the business end where the aggro exists. You currently have at least 4 parties involved in trying to build new applications - the business person, the business analyst, the IT department and the coders in development. Misinterpretation is inevitable so putting in "modelling" is an attempt to reduce such errors. But the world is about to change. The business analysts can now build solutions right in front of the business - conventional coders not required – IT remain in support to be ready to deploy. So “modelling” for business processes (see Gartner definition of a process) now only has business focus so technical notations etc not required – in fact the future is direct interface between the two so just talk through step by step what is required with dynamic development environment. From this much more effective to produce a deployable prototype (in days) to engage users and get feedback and “buy-in” – same applies to future change.

# on March 20, 2007 2:41 AM, John L said:

I've always seen Alice and Bob used for such explanations. It supposedly eliminates confusion and allows you to label things with A and B.

I think Niraj is right about pure play Business Analysts not being able to understand the technical specifications given to the user. It's the job of the modeller to understand the requirements and be able to communicate them effectively at a high level through flowcharts, etc., as well as at the developer level as specifications.

It's an inherently difficult job - if there was a way for business folk to draw a pretty picture which was translated into low-level specifications then the role wouldn't exist. The closest thing to this that I have seen is xtUML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML),
in that it can provide several views of the same system (and do some other pretty cool stuff). It appears to me that it's pretty similar to the domain-specific language tools mentioned, minus the fuzziness.

# on March 21, 2007 1:58 PM, Niraj J said:

Ron -- "The thing is, I believe that the layer between IT and bsiness world predominantly will be populated by (former) IT people that DO have this analytical background"

What you are saying will only happen when the Enterprise Changes structurally. i.e As long as there is a position of CIO in the Enterprise this will not happen. what I am saying is that as long as IT is viewed as a function where other departments come for services this is not going to happen. If IT becomes core part of the business group eliminiating the position of CIO to be more of a governance position ,what you are saying will happen. You see this in organizations like Amazon and Google where IT is infrastructure support and not application development and maintainence.

On your comment of "I'm not so sure if business will actually need (or appreciate) graphical models to understand and express business requirements/rules"

I agree , what I meant was some representating that is closer to business rather than the implementation. So Excel tables , etc are just fine. But UML is closer to implementation rather than the communicating what business wants

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