Australian Collaboration Situation
Collaborative Australian and Kiwi software application development has always benefitted from the nine to ten-hour time difference we share with the boys and girls down under when it comes to development projects built around a follow-the-sun approach. As soon as we go offline, they sit down to their cornflakes and vice versa. There’s the added benefit of the synergy between our culture and language that helps make this bond even stronger for development projects that need close tie in. So we shouldn’t be surprised if innovations in collaborative development originate from the grand shores of New South Wales and beyond.
NB: Having edited a magazine called Australian (and later re-named) International Developer for three years and having grown up as a child in North Sydney; the Aussie app space has always been dear to my heart.
Back in May of this year multi-dimensional organisational modelling tools company Holocentric (try saying that after a few too many tinnies) made a few waves at the CeBIT Australia conference with its Modelpedia product. Claimed to be the world's first Web 2.0 enterprise modelling solution, this Australian-developed software is said to break new ground in terms of allowing organisations to build holistic enterprise models within a collaborative environment and share those models within and outside the organisation.
Holocentric reckons that Modelpedia encourages all stakeholders to participate in improving how an organisation works. It does this by personalising the view of model information such as business processes so that people can see and comment on the way work is done.
It’s a fair argument I guess, organisational change can only be successfully implemented with the buy-in of the people it affects. What may be different about this product is that unlike other Wiki-style tools, Modelpedia's web 2.0 browser-based collaborative capabilities centre on structured content that is managed in an enterprise repository. I suppose this allows it to incorporate feedback and suggestions within the context of the enterprise model in hand. It just might work; modelling is supposed to be a collaborative after all. This process might make it less abstract too and so may elevate its perception among employees who are sceptical and have failed to feed-in to previous projects.
To add a little developer-style gloss to this story, I used my old Aussie contacts to speak to Derek Renouf, chief technology officer for Holocentric. Derek gave me some insight into how Modelpedia was developed using modelling and code generation tools.
“We used our own tools to develop our product,” said Renouf. “We used Holocentric Modeler to model Modelpedia and then we generated code for Modelpedia from that. We have a scripting language in the tool and you can create code templates in it. We were able to generate two different language implementations from the same model. It was implemented in .NET, it is predominately C# code we got out of it. We created a set of repository services and Modelpedia is based on that. By creating a set of services, the product can become a broker for working with other products. It becomes more of a knowledge base that can contain links rather than containing all of the data itself. Modelpedia is like an application of the repository services we have created. It is a framework that can have a much broader application than what we have revealed at this point. We are taking a modelling view to all this. We are being very liberal about our view of what a model is. They are objects that have relationships with other things.”
Trust the Aussie to know how to organise a get together then – from the beach to the development shop I guess.