To be smart: that's it?

I've attended a speech of Ivar Jacobson for the first time. He was at the Innovate 2010, an event organized by IBM on the theme of the Ration product suite. The title of the speech was "Filling the gap from IT and the Business". The title was really facinating for me since I'm struggling with this issue since a while. I was interested also because the usual phrase "aligning IT" was not used, and for sure it was done on purpose.


The destruens part was routed about the fact that IT and Business shall not play the role of customer-supplied, the entire 60 minutes was spent by Jacobson in stating that to reduce the gap it's essentuali to:

• be smart
• apply practises
• involve the business

Is it all that? I was really disappointed of this low value statement about IT and Business. It's really underestimating the difficulty of addressing this problem. With smart people and with best of breed practises it's easy to address any problem, even out of IT. It's like saying that in order to do good builtings it's essential to have a smart project, apply good building practises and involve the client. I was expecting more from the professor who invented the Use Cases. In addition he was repeating rather frequently, with false modesty, that he invented the Use Case and he did not realize how much this'd have spread the IT and influence the way me do software.


Ivar has it's own company now, and this was pointed out pretty clearly during the speech. It's was crear that he was selling himself and this compamy of smart people with good practises. My partecipation at the speech had no return of investment.
But the devil is in the details. Is it enought to be smart, act smart and applies the best practises? But we need to ask ourself what those best practises are and how to recognize smartness? Often smart people are recognized by the result they provide and this does not assume there is a underlyng method, in IT we have to identify the patter for repeatibility. In addition people comes and go, and a team change. There is the need to factor out those aspects whatever they are, identify the method, abstract the recurring features and create values from them in order to be able to repeat them.


It is almost useless to act smart if it takes decades so reach this ability: there is too mucht time to wait and the cost of these professionals would be very expensive, as probably the people working in the Ivar jacobson Company are.

Business and IT alignment, how to escape from the sand-trap

The need for the IT to be fast enough to supply Business demand, is a false problem and can even probably be dangerous, leading to disastrous solutions. Often this race creates more and more inertia to IT itself that will be less and less capable of keeping pace with the Business. In addition an IT innovationa boost the business leaving IT even more in the dust, it's a vicious cycle. The approach to be fulfill is to make the Business "ride" the IT and create a virtuous circle. There are risks in insisting with the cool idea of Business-IT alignment, the way to go is to leverage a Model Driven Arcihtecture and successfully have the Business to "ride" IT. This can be obtained with discipline, applying Actionable Architectures in the organization leveraging EA, BPM and SOA essentially, not forgetting about application architectures.
The classical style development-deployment is to be replaced by a "modelling-time" approach leaving code to only enabling infrastructure and platforms: hard-coding functionalities is evil, modelling and the separation of concerns, as conceive by MDA, is the way to go to have the IT.
The end point of the road-map is a Business Control Room where the business is measured and affected by IT actions.

business ecosystems

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for addressing the Business to Business (B2B) requirement is underestimating the impact of enforcing a unique functional models. It is not realistic to force business partners, and especially competitors, to comply to a unique data schema or service model. In B2B the standards cannot be enforced, not even if defined by a commission or by a standards body. There are complex mechanisms that allow standards to emerge and become de-facto, and that motivate IT and business communities to adopt them.
Also, having the support of industrial “titans” helps in the adoption process. As a general consideration, it is relevant to note that often “good” standards are not necessarily in a better position to emerge.
It is expected that reference functional models will emerge in a natural way, under the same laws that regulate standards adoption, but at a faster pace. What is expected is to replicate in a digital environment the natural selection process.

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Actionable models

Because wording is important: it is the way to communicate a clear message. I have found to be useful to use the wording “computable models” to communicate those kind of precise models that can be used to drive software generation, that can be processed in order for example to be transformed, stored, searched. The message to drive is that there are type of models that are semantically rich.
A weak model is one that has been drawn with MSPaint or Powerpoint, even if drawn with a correct notation it's value is very limited because a software program can not 'decode' it, can not extract the semantics, its value is clear (and even partially) from a human being.
This is the effect I'm trying to deliver with the wording “computable model”. But I realize that this is not enough, a model drawn with PowerPoint is also computable because it can be transformed in pdf or in Open Office Impress, a more useful way to drive the message can be “actionable model”.
In this way we deliver a more efficient message, a model can be target of an action or drive actions, can perform something.

This goes beyond the property of being 'simply' computable: it's not a picture of button in a console, in a button that can be operated to deliver an action or perform a function.