Would you be willing to work with me on turning this into a Use-Case for
our Track 3 Collection? (01)
Cheers,
Rex (02)
On 2/28/11 7:23 PM, Jack Ring wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> OBTW, I do not claim that our employer was pleased (they were billing man
>hours not class libraries). However, our customer was.
>
> Jack Ring
>
>
>
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> (03)
--
Rex Brooks
President, CEO
Starbourne Communications Design
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison
Berkeley, CA 94702
Tel: 510-898-0670 (04)
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