Jim Rhyne (21A6)
Jim Rhyne, PhD Owner and Principal, Software Renovation Consulting California, USA email: jrr-at-enterprisesoftwarerenovation.com (21A7)
see: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jim-rhyne/2/522/493 (21A8)
My academic background is in AI and Computational Linguistics. I did my Ph D at the University of Texas at Austin with Bob Simmons and Carlota Smith as co-chairs. I also have a strong systems background and joined IBM Research to work with Ted Codd on his project to create an English-like query language for relational databases. Later I worked on Computer-Human Interaction and then on software architecture and development for enterprise IT systems. (21DQ)
I left IBM Research and joined the IBM software product organization. For the last decade, I have been working extensively with IT architects and business analysts on business transformation. (21DR)
I am now an independent consultant specializing in enterprise architecture for business transformation, renovation of enterprise IT systems, and business architecture. I work with a group chartered by the OMG to develop standards for modeling business architectures (see http://bawg.omg.org/ ). (21DS)
I am developing courseware and tools for the Business Knowledge domain of Business Architecture. The other four domains are: Business Strategy, Organizational View, Business Capability, and Business Process. Domain specific ontology is the architectural model of the Business Knowledge domain. It defines and relates the concepts of the five domains, and specifically defines the information concepts important to the business (e.g. customer, product, channel, ...). The domain specific ontology relies on other basic ontological domains (upper and middle, units of measure, ...) and on definitional patterns for chains of action and chains of causality. This would be way too much work to do alone, so I am looking for discussions and reusable assets in this and other communities to reduce the burden. (21DT)
The interesting challenge (beyond creating a suitable ontology e.g. for retail banking) is creating methods for using the ontological information for: (21DU)
- business analysis - how can the effectiveness of a sales process be measured? (21DV)
- planning for change - what differences exist between the ASIS model and the TOBE model and how important are these differences (21DW)
- defining common concepts across multiple lines of business or between a business and its customers, suppliers and partners to improve communication (21DX)
- providing a business oriented guide to operational and warehoused data - is there data on customers who inquire about a banking product on the website and subsequently interact with a CSR at a branch or on the phone? (21DY)
These challenges will require linking the information architecture ontology to other information systems. The logical and technological nature of these linkages is unexplored, along with low burden techniques to keep the linkages current in environments where the other information systems typically see substantive changes every 90 days. (21DZ)