Communicat.us

The debate rages on and on – is it better to have the best individual products or the best integrated capabilities ? These are rarely the same thing.

When it comes to collaboration, you typically don’t collaborate for collaboration sake. You need to get something done. I’s more important to focus on how seamless collaboration is to the tasks and processes you need to accomplish. It’s a waste of cycles to kept bouncing between your work and your collaboration tools.

Imagine you just received a document (email, proposal, white paper, etc) and there is an acronym you don’t recognize. There are two possibilities – you use a separate tool to look up the acronym or you click on the acronym and immediately see the expanded form. Assume you don’t find it. Now assume you right click on the document and see the recent edits and can directly ask the question of the person who inserted the acronym – use a text chat, click-to-call, etc. That’s much faster than getting the author’s name, looking them up in the directory and placing a call from your desk phone.

In this example, “click-to-call” may not has all the functions of your desk phone but it sure was quick and easy and you stayed within the context of your work.

There is another dimension to consider – different people work differently and have different tools. Do you mandate a narrow set of tools and force everyone to use those and only those tools. What if you don’t command everyone and you want to allow people the flexibility to be as productive as they possibly can be ? This requires that tools integrate with flexibility. The best plan to avoid getting painted into a corner is to look for “open, simple interfaces”. “Open interfaces” mean you get to decide where, when, and how you integrate capabilities. “Simple interfaces” mean you dedicate less resource to performing integration and more resource getting work done.

So, how do you proceed ? Ask these questions …

• What are the task and processes your staff must do often ?
• What are some examples where they need to reach out to systems, people, and support tools while performing their duties ?
• What collaboration capabilities would help people reach out ?
• Do those tools provide open, simple interfaces so they integrate with *your* processes and tasks ?

Many IT professionals know they *should* do their architectures. How can you build a system, or preferably a capability, without an articulated architecture to backstop it? But UML is a complex art. The tools to wield it can be daunting. So very few IT professionals, going by the name architect, actually build them. Most times, when built, they are a snapshot of what was wanted and are sent to the bookshelf to live out a long life.

It is with this as context that IBM undertook an effort, about 6 months ago, that we now understand as “the democratization of architecture” – making it safe for the masses. The gist is that we wanted to accomplish 2 things:

1. Lower barriers to entry
2. Make IT capabilities more accessible at design time

Step 1 – Using a simple spreadsheet input approach we ease the entry barriers into a real UML tool – Rational Software Architect (RSA). We can consume customers’ mission elements via a simple Excel spreadsheet breakout. Customers sit with client personnel and talk about their 5-7 major mission elements that they need in the solution. Next they break each of those down to its constituent parts, and so on down to 4 or 5 levels of detail. RSA consumes these mission elements and produces a strategic mission model.

Back on the IT capabilities side, we’ve done a market survey for each of the major IT capabilities groups;  e.g., Security, User Experience, Development Tools, Information Management, Transactional Management or Enterprise Service Management. For all the horizontal middleware capabilities, we build simple models. These models are labeled using the customers’ vernacular – the way *they* talk about capabilities.

Step 2 – Now that we consumed the mission elements and have the IT capabilities, we can produce a simple spreadsheet with a page for each of the IT capabilities groups.

In the picture, you see an example of spreadsheet produced from RSA that maps mission elements (columns) against the IT capabilities (rows).

Step 3 – The user to sit with a client person and map IT capabilities, that could satisfy requirements, against the corresponding mission elements. A simple “x” in the intersecting cell is all that is needed.  We could also enter a statement about that relationship in the cell. These statements will automatically be added to the eventual UML model.

Step 4 – Once the spreadsheet is filled out, it is consumed back into RSA (using a plug-in authored by Fred Mervine – the granddaddy of this democratization effort) to generate the UML joint capabilities diagram. Essentially we join the mini-models from each sheet into one overall model that shows the collection of relationships.  “Modeling for mortals.”

A real UML jock can take that joint capabilities diagram and decorate it with NFRs, sequences, and other essential architectural elements and produce a final actionable architecture.  However, what we’ve done is to ease the process of identifying the basic mission elements in the solution and the basic COTS architectural elements needed to satisfy those requirements.   “Architecture for everyone.”

Situational Awareness is the the understanding of data and events within a given space and time and understanding the meaning in the present and near future. The majority of applications for situational awareness deal with multiple sources of data with correlating attributes and are often rendered in a geospatial visualization such as a map or sphere of space.

However, visualizing large amounts of data still burdens the user with the labor of correlation, analysis, and event detection.

The user’s workload is dramatically reduced and better focused when portions of the detection and control / response activity is automated within a rules engine. The operator is freed to focus on critical information when low priority data is analyzed by business rules and when automated analysis is used against the vast unwashed data. Not only can these processes handle low risk detection and fully automated response but they also perform a first order analysis and escalate significant information to the operator’s attention.

IBM Federal has developed a demonstration of situational awareness with control & response (SACR) that encapsulated the three key attributes:

• discovery, normalization, and fusion of multiple disparate data sources
• display multiple layers of related data in a geospatial map aiding situational awareness and analysis
• applies business rules to detect situations; automate task procedures, and guide user interaction where dictated by procedure, best practices, or workflow

In Fig-1 a vessel has reported a propulsion system failure and the rules engine has determined that because the vessel is a tanker carrying hazardous materials, the correct course of action is to divert to the Port of Mobile. In Fig-2 the operator at the workstation brings up the ship’s track and establishes a 100 miles safety zone which indicates which ships need to be alerted. Following the incident, the operator realized additional data would have improved the situational awareness and in Fig-3 the operator adds the locations of all oil platforms in the gulf to the mashup.

To emphasize the value of mashups, this demonstration used publicly accessible real data which is normalized and then published with a combination IBM InfoSphere MashupHub and Kapow OnDemand.  The demonstrations go beyond simple situational awareness to show the next level with control and response capabilities within the real world scenario.

For the purposes of the demonstration, IBM has implemented a maritime domain awareness “workstation”. The scenario follows Lieutenant Briggs who is monitoring the gulf coast region from New Orleans, Louisiana to Mobile, Alabama. His primary tool for overseeing the are is a interactive computer based map where he can bring together multiple data sources to develop his situational awareness. The Lieutenant has complete control over the data he sees and can quickly cross reference vessel locations, weather buoy data, debris markers, and port and berth assignments. He also has the ability to pull up related information as needed on any sources. The workstation also interfaces with a rules processor which is used to process data and events. This results are quicker response and an optimized workload where the Lieutenant off-loads low priority and low risk tasks and stays focused on critical events.

In the course of the demonstration, we handle a variety of tasks:

• review shipping and weather conditions within the gulf region
• simulate a vessel reporting an engine failure and review the automated procedures surfaced from the rules processor
  • communicate with ship board personnel, port authorities, and harbor and tug masters for response tasking
• simulate a weather buoy failure
  • review a fully automated system response and reported action plan
• enhance the situational awareness by added another layer of data (oil platforms) to the workstation’s map

If you would like more information of IBM’s Situational Awareness with Control and Response capabilities or to see the above demonstration contact Seth Spergel or tweet to @lotusfederal.