In the mid-1990's Tom Love's object technology practice was busy introducing
Smalltalk-based software to the marketplace.
Two projects had been enjoined with major insurance companies. Both projects
directly engaged Smalltalk class designers with insurance-domain specialists.
Progress was slow on both projects even though both were staffed with 90
percentile object technology practitioners. After six months a lot of
refactoring had happened but only a sparse class library had been achieved. (01)
A third customer signed up for which I became responsible. Instead of the 8-15
Smalltalkers as on the first two projects there was only one senior and on
fresh-out available for this third insurance project. Time to innovate. Instead
of engaging in class library design Doug McDavid proposed that he discover what
insurance people really talk about. After processing 200 or so documents
ranging from Annual Reports to underwriter risk analyses he produced a stunning
semantic map. Two more Smalltalkers showed up and in two months time we had a
class library designed and reviewed that was "better" than either of the other
two projects in their ninth month.
The cost comparison was approximately $X for us and $11X for each of them. (02)
I think this experience highlighted two factors.
1) Because business activities entail lots of knowledge exchange and choice
making the coherency of the persons' respective mental models is key to
adequate, accurate and timely knowledge exchange and choice making.
Accordingly, the main challenge in discovering a 'fit-for-purpose' ontology is
overcoming the extant diversity of erroneous or conflicting mental models. A
business sans common ontology is somewhat like a middle school orchestra
playing Brahms --- Brahms loses.
2) Application software is an executable model of a business activity.
Particularly in object technology a class library is quite similar to an
ontology of the respective business domain. It was this premise that motivated
the semantic mapping approach. Good thing we didn't have lots of Smalltalkers. (03)
OBTW, I do not claim that our employer was pleased (they were billing man hours
not class libraries). However, our customer was. (04)
Jack Ring (05)
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