Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence

TURNING OPERATIONAL KNOWLEDGE & COMPLIANCE INTO A COMPETITIVE EDGE

We systemize tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge

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Posts Tagged ‘OMG’

Feeling Feisty Today. Any of These Points a Burr Under Your Personal Saddle?

1. No government or regulatory or similar body should issue operational policy unless the vocabulary is fully and precisely defined (in people language, as possible under SBVR) and the business rules are spelled out in practicable form (as in RuleSpeak). Try to imagine the amount of time and energy wasted because everybody has to do their own interpretation. Ridiculous in a knowledge economy. (Same basically true for legal contracts and agreements, etc.) There ought to already be an eMarket in off-the-shelf, industry-specific know-how models (vocabulary and rules). It will happen … sooner or later. 2. Is the DMN standard going to solve all your problems? No, of course not. It’s an important step in the revival and reinvigoration of decision tables, but you can already see all-too-familiar patterns of hype and misguided thinking. Yes, I would like the standard … needed badly (if it turns out to be good — an open question, but I sure hope so). 3. The OMG mission focuses on machine interoperability. When people need so badly to speak to other people precisely, and in a day and age when machines have become so powerful that they can begin to speak limited people language, isn’t perhaps the OMG mission a bit outdated or incomplete?

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Why Don’t Requirements Approaches and IT Methodologies ‘Get’ How to Use Strategy as a Technique? … Not Acceptable!

An enterprise architect recently said to me, “The motivation (why) column of the Zachman Architecture Framework is the most underrated, underutilized construct in architecture.” Absolutely correct. Even worse, IT methodologies (that is, the people who create and use them) don’t realize how far afield they are on the matter. As a result they cause business people to focus on the wrong things … or to drop out entirely. Ironically, IT then becomes the impediment, rather than the solution, to much needed business innovation. A bit of background: The Business Rules Group (BRG – www.BusinessRulesGroup.org) identified the area of business strategy as a missing ingredient for business rules in the mid 1990s. In 2000, we came out with a standard for the area, now sponsored by OMG, called the Business Motivation Model. It’s a highly readable document with lots of good examples (and free): http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/bmm.shtml. It provides standard vocabulary and structure for strategy. Zachman, by the way, was a key participant. I am proud of my role as co-editor and author of the first working draft. My business partner, Gladys S.W. Lam, and I have just come out with a new book that explains how strategy (and business rules) can be an integral part of business analysis. It’s actually not that hard to do (if you have the right people, motivation, scope, and approach), and it doesn’t take all that long (ditto same caveats). Those are big myths. Gladys is generally given credit for some of the key ideas in the standard. She grew up in a highly entrepreneurial environment and has a natural sense of business risks and solution sinkholes. But I digress … See Chapter 4 of Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Ruleshttp://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php.

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