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  • Stefano Butti 07:44 on April 18, 2012 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: it equations, ratio,   

    Isn’t it time to change your IT equations? 

    Completely renewing your Web presence is not an easy task. If you need to do more than just graphic restyling and introduce new messages and a new payoff then the task is twice as difficult. However, one week from the publication of our new site, I can say that in our case it was worth it! A big thanks to all those who have so far passed us their compliments:-)

    How did we get to the point of such radical change?

    Software engineers, often enamored with their own creation, and completely tied to the product of their creative energies, are no longer in grade to step outside of his creation and see it from a different perspective. They take it for granted that their creation is useful, even indispensable, to its users, without asking themselves why. We are aware of having fallen prey a long time ago to this unconditional love. We have challenged ourselves in a difficult exercise of abstraction – and for us fanatics of abstraction in software development this seems like a joke of destiny – to see WebRatio from afar and, in a few seconds, explain to a business person what are the tangible benefits for his company.

    The “ratios” of WebRatio

    We began from an external point of view: what better place to begin than the voices of our clients?  The “ratios” of WebRatio come straight from them. They are the synthesis of all the testimonials we have gathered: the maintenance costs cut, the agile development cycles, the involvement of the business user in the development process, the space given to analysis.

    The final touch was to then express these concepts in the form of ratios, inspired by our own name.

    So, here are the results: four business-level messages, each one expressed by a ratio and supported by a testimonial from one of our clients.  This had to be our new homepage! And here it is!

    WebRatio | Changing the IT Equations

    A last nod to our brand promise, another recent creation: a paragraph of a few lines that express our vision and our “why”, a message that resists time and technological evolution. The brand promise is the true essence of ourselves and the reason why you should work with us:

    “Man has always desired to dedicate himself to creative activity and invented machines that do repetitive boring tasks in his place. Why should it be different for software development? For this we created WebRatio, an environment that changes the equations that govern the development process of  enterprise applications: our clients can dedicate themselves to analysis of their needs, to creative activity and to validation of results, because the repetitive tasks are followed by WebRatio! The clients become an integral part of the development process and see immediately a response to their requests. This efficient collaboration between stakeholders guarantees the best results that stand the test of time. Isn’t it time to change your IT equations?”

    We are anxious to know your opinions:  what do you think of our new site and of our ratios?

     

  • Marco Brambilla 10:31 on January 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , IFML, Interaction Flow Modeling Language, , RFP, Silicon Valley, standard, ,   

    Interaction Flow Modeling Language RFP: first cornerstone towards the standardization of WebML 

    We finally make it!
    After 9 months of participation to the OMG meetings, intensive interactions with stakeholders, and interesting feedback from big vendors and users (including IBM, Microsoft, Thales, NoMagic, SoftTeam, and others), OMG issued the official request for proposal (RFP) for IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language), a domain-specific modeling language for describing model-driven specification of user interaction. The RFP has been proposed for issuance by the ADTF (Analysis and Design Task Force), and then approved by the AB (Architecture Board) during the last technical meeting in Santa Clara, CA.

    WebRatio Cubes at the Golden Gate bridge, San Francisco, CA.

    WebRatio Cubes autonomously went to the Golden Gate at sunset, while I was engaged in the approval of the IFML RFP in Santa Clara, CA.

    You may say this is not the final result, but just an intermediate step (actually, the basic starting point for the real standardization work). Rest assured, we know this, but still we are happy about the goal we reached so far, because the interactions and the outcome demonstrated high interest in the topic and strong commitment from OMG in pursuing this standardization path.

    The IFML RFP will be the framework where we propose our contribution to OMG standardization based on the extensive 10-year experience on WebML and WebRatio. IFML’s scope is much broader than WebML though, so we expect some significant extensions and changes to our language. Indeed, the IFML RFP solicits proposals for a standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language for expressing the content, user interaction and control behaviour of the front-end of applications belonging to the following domains:

    •   Traditional, HTML+HTTP based Web applications. o Rich Internet Applications, as supported by the forthcoming HTML 5 standard. o Mobile applications. o Client-server applications.
    • Desktop applications.
    • Embedded Human Machine Interfaces for control applications.
    • Multichannel and context-aware applications.

    It’s worth noting that the IFML RFP does not cover the modeling of the presentation issues (e.g., layout, stlye and look&feel) of an application front-end and does not cater for the specification of bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional computer based graphics, videogames, and other highly interactive applications. This makes WebML well fit to the objective.

    For all the other interfaces, the IFML RFP covers the modeling of interaction objects and their properties that are subject to or that impact the interaction flow.

    The technical requirements of the RFP can be found directly on the RFP document, which is publicly available on OMG servers at the url:

    http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ad/11-12-06

    Basically, the RFP asks for the semantics, an abstract syntax, and a concrete syntax with stylistics (in terms of a visual notation plus a companion textual notation) for an interaction flow specification language. Concretely, submitters shall develop a MOF-compliant metamodel, a UML profile aligned to the metamodel, grant interchange between tools via XMI, and a concrete syntax for the language.

    The official schedule of the standardization process is as follows:

    • RFP Issued: December 16, 2011
    • Letter of Intent (LOI) Deadline: May 20, 2012
    • Initial Submission Deadline: August 13, 2012
    • Voting List Deadline: September 3, 2012
    • Revised Submission Deadline: February 18, 2013

    If you are an OMG memberyou can see the updated status of the process on the OMG servers. If you want to join our submission effort (either as an author or as a supporter), feel free to contact me and we will see how to merge your contribution. we are already scheduling a regular reporting on the status of the submission at all the upcoming OMG meetings and we will host a private workshop at every meeting for the submitters. We are already in touch with several interested parties, but we are more than happy to enlarge the partnership!

     

  • WebRatio 11:10 on December 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags:   

    Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from WebRatio! 

    Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from WebRatio

     

  • Marco Brambilla 08:42 on December 12, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , , bpmn validator, bruce silver,   

    WebRatio meets Bruce Silver (and vice versa) 

    It’s always a pleasure when someone speaks positively about WebRatio spontaneously.  It’s even better if that person is someone of noted significance in the market.

    I am speaking of Bruce Silver, an independent professional, considered to be one of the best experts in the BPM sector and in particular, expert on BPMN and author of the famous book BPMN Method and Style. His fame was already noted quite some time ago.  We ourselves studied his book to implement BPMN editor and the corresponding application generator in WebRatio.

    In the recent BPMN workshop in Lucerne, I met Bruce Silver in the hallways. Bruce had just finished his lecture in which, among other things, he demonstrated his ”BPMN Validation Tool”, created with the idea of validating BPMN diagrams with respect to the rules of standard notation and to his rules “of style”. These tools were also available online but Bruce wasn’t 100% satisfied with the robustness of that solution which he himself had adopted until that moment.  For this reason, I proposed to Bruce to deliver his validators online using WebRatio.

     

    As you can imagine we were excited to put ourselves to the test and anxious to know how it came out.  I am reporting to you the words of Bruce Silver taken directly from his blog.

    “At the Lucerne workshop, Marco Brambilla of Politecnico di Milano and founder of a company called WebRatio made a presentation on WebRatio’s rapid model-driven approach to generating web applications integrated with BPMN.  After the meeting, Marco contacted me and offered to replace my creaky web app with one generated by WebRatio.  While I was thinking about it, he emailed me to say, “We’ve already done it, and here is the URL.”  I don’t know how WebRatio did it exactly – I provided no information about either my XSLT or the web app surrounding it -but it works great!”"

    Thanks for the compliment Bruce, we are very pleased.  This is our way of doing things!

     

  • Piero Fraternali 08:22 on December 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , bpm4people, European Project, , ,   

    The Social Side of BPM 

    The success of Social Networks has demonstrated the centrality of communities of practice, whereby users can interact with the service providers and among themselves, to be informed, share experience, and express their opinion on the quality of a service. This “socialization” of the users’ online experience, for customers, citizens, or employees, will carry over to the business processes of organizations, changing the paradigm of Business Process Management, from “closed” to “open and social”.

    At WebRatio, we are ready to face the challenge of Social BPM, defined as the convergences of BPM and Social Software to create a novel class of business practices that leverage the social interaction of stakeholders to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational processes.  On the methodological side, the paradigm of Social BPM requires novel business analysis methods, to determine how the communities of practice that exist within and outside the organization can contribute to its business goals and processes. On the technical side, solutions need to be deployed that connect the enterprise applications to the social software where the relevant stakeholders communities operate, without compromising the business security and continuity and, at the same time, offering to the social users a natural interface for interacting.  This scenario fits quite nicely with the WebRatio approach (Figure 1), which is based on the capacity of automatically transforming complex business process models  into composite applications mashing-up a variety of services.

    Roles in Social BPM

    Figure 1: Social BPM is a good fit to the Model-Driven approach of WebRatio

    The creation of a novel method to Social BPM rapid application development is the ultimate goal of the BPM4People Project (http://www.bpm4people.org), which aims at designing and bringing to the market innovative methodologies, software tools, and vertical applications for the implementation processes “collaboratively defined” and “collaboratively executed” by organizations and their stakeholders (employees, customers, citizens).

    The Project, started in September 2011, is now in full progress. A video of the what one can do with the code generation power of WebRatio is already online (http://www.bpm4people.org/cms/content/en/demos). Now, we are working with partners and end-user organizations to deploy Social Business Processes in real scenarios, both in the industry and in the public administration. More to come.. in the next few months.

     

  • WebRatio 16:35 on October 19, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: anniversary,   

    WebRatio 10 years: the pics of the day 

    Here you are some pics taken during the celebration of our 10th anniversary! A special thanks to the customers that celebrated with us and shared their experience…

    Happy Birthday, WebRatio!

    Ingrid and Norma

    View the full album on Flickr!

     

  • Marco Brambilla 11:06 on October 14, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: 10 years, Event, , ,   

    10 years of WebRatio: thinking about our path to industrialization 

    Today we celebrate 10 years of WebRatio: this is a good occasion for thinking about the path that led from a university research project to a recognized modeling language (WebML) and a solid, industrialized version of a toolsuite (WebRatio).

    The main ingredient of our history are basically:

    • a substrate for cross-fertilization coming from European Research projects (W3I3, WebSI, Cooper, BPM4People, …)
    • valuable inputs and requirements from customers (both final customers and software integrators)
    • a strong research team that continuously worked on innovating the approach
    • the teaching activities within the university
    • and the professional developers and analysts at Web Models that work hard for making a good product out of the rough ideas and experiments produced in the university.

    These ingredients allowed more than 10 years of evolution of the language and the tool. I tried to summarized the virtuous cycle of our experience in the following picture:

    While research provides innovation to both teaching and industrialization, and finally produces the upto date version of the language and methodology.

    The tool vendor provides the tool itself and also requirements coming from real industrial customers. The tool is extremely useful for teaching and research purposes not only within our group, but throughout the world (thanks to an academic program that allows education institutions to get free licenses of the tool).

    The role of customer is crucial in this picture, because it’s from their input (business, technical and UI requirements) that we extract the actual needs of the industry. The whole innovation cycle start there.

    Furthermore, customers provide feedback and feasibility/acceptability check upon our findings and solutions.

    This virtuous cycle has been able to carry the core idea of the WebML language through 10 years of history in the product (and 15 years of history of the language). The lesson learned is that, if you have a core concept which is flexible and innovable, a good strategy can lead to continuous evolution, improvement and expansion of the idea. In these years the language underwent a huge number of incremental additions:

    • support of web services
    • support of business processes
    • support of semantic web features
    • support of RIA – AJAX features

    If you want to get a flavour of the experience, you may check out this paper, published in John Mylopoulos Festschrift by Springer (you can contact me on twitter @marcobrambi if you need a copy of the article):

    S. Ceri, M. Brambilla, P. Fraternali: “The History of WebML Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Model-Driven Development of Web Applications“. In book: Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications, Essays in honor of John Mylopoulos, Springer LNCS, Festschrift series, vol. 5600, 2009, pp. 273-292.

    This is the presentation I gave today at the WebRatio event in the beautiful location of Villa Grumello, in Como (Italy):

    The WebML innovation cycle

    [This post has been cross-posted here from my personal blog because of the obvious relevance within this context too]

     

  • WebRatio 11:10 on October 5, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: agile development, , business agility, custom enterprise applications, it standars, model-driven,   

    Business Agility and IT Standards: The new WebRatio Video! 

     

  • Stefano Butti 07:03 on September 22, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: application development, , pace layering   

    Model-Driven Development and Pace Layering 

    I recently encountered the concept of “pace layering” and I found it to be very interesting and useful to explain possible fields of application of Model-Driven Development.

    Let’s begin with a brief definition. The concept of “pace layering” is a model of reality that can be summarized as follows: each system can be subdivided into layers, each one of which has a different speed of evolution. The concept can be applied in very heterogeneous contexts, from natural ecosystems to civilizations, from buildings to software systems. The idea originated with Steward Brand and was presented for the first time at the IA Summit 2003 (click here to read a summary).

    This model lends itself to multiple uses: identifying the parts of a system that evolve more or less rapidly can help in the maintenance phase to choose the best maintenance techniques or in the projection phase to make choices that will favor future maintenance.

    Gartner also recently introduced a model based on this concept applied to “Application Strategy” (Gartner, Inc., How to Use Pace Layering to Develop a Modern Application Strategy Jim Shepherd et al, December 8, 2010). According to Gartner, “Pace layering is a new methodology for categorizing applications and developing a differentiated management and governance process that reflects how the applications are used and their rate of change.” In particular, 3 groups are identified:

    • Systems of Record — Established packaged applications or legacy homegrown systems that support core transaction processing and manage the organization’s critical master data. The rate of change is low, because the processes are well-established and common to most organizations, and often are subject to regulatory requirements.
    • Systems of Differentiation — Applications that enable unique company processes or industry-specific capabilities. They have a medium life cycle (one to three years), but need to be reconfigured frequently to accommodate changing business practices or customer requirements.
    • Systems of Innovation — New applications that are built on an ad hoc basis to address new business requirements or opportunities. These are typically short life cycle projects (zero to 12 months) using departmental or outside resources and consumer-grade technologies.

    In this way, if you have to construct a new application or maintain an existing one, it will be possible to apply diverse strategies according to the group to which the application belongs and thus make more appropriate choices.

    It is exactly in the arena of these choices that Model-Driven Development is making its entrance. Very often, when MDD is introduced in a company for the first time someone invariably poses the question: “What can I build with an MDD tool?” Rather than listing a series of possible applications, you can respond by referring to pace layering.

    In my opinion MDD should be considered every time the application enters  group with  higher evolutionary speed (systems of innovation). It’s in that environment that MDD offers the most benefits to companies: high productivity, maximum flexibility, agile development and rapid response to business needs.

    But I wouldn’t like to see that MDD was limited to applications with very short lifespans. Frankly, I am convinced that the challenge of MDD is just that, to go beyond.

    In fact, as you progress towards the levels with slower evolution speeds (systems of differentiation and systems of record) the priority given to response time and evolution flexibility leaves room for other considerations, such as security, stability, reliability, standardization, etc. In that case companies might avoid the use of MDD tools altogether viewing them as weak, or not robust enough, or even too new or too experimental and instead will rely on a well-known platform that seems stronger, more stable and less problematic.

    To accomplish this challenge will require that an MDD tool has the ability to offer not only speed and agility, but also the capacity to respond appropriately to the needs presented in the lower levels. This approach offers speed and agility to businesses but at the same time retains IT security, reliability, robustness, standardization, etc.

    My dream is to provide companies with a financial accounting system built entirely by the means of an MDD tool! Naturally this goal is still just a distant reality …but in the meantime I would be truly pleased to receive your feedback on this topic!

     

    • vhanniet 13:13 on September 22, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hi Stefano,
      Pace layering is a nice idea. But I would say that MDD is very good at adressing IT security, reliability robustness and standardization matters as MDD is very good for adressing architectural matters. Speed and agility are also well adressed by MDD but there is more challenge with others development life-cycles here.

    • Igor Lobanov 23:58 on September 26, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Stefano, nice metaphor, thanks! I’ll definitely use it as I often need to talk about different rates of changes.

      Other thing is the strategy based on various paces. To be honest, I find it confusing. From my experience, there are pockets of both slow and high changes rates in every application. Of course you could classify applications based on the dominant pace. However it could be a bit problematic ground for decision on whether to adopt MDD or not.

    • Gianni Foietta (@whatcoow) 15:05 on December 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Model-Driven Development and Pace Layering http://t.co/1Go6eB3C via @AddThis

    • Pathfinder Solutions (@PathfinderMDD) 17:47 on December 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      RT @derekgardiner: Very interesting article on Model-Driven Development and Pace Layering http://t.co/ZYtWRzAq – @AddThis #businessDrivenDevelopment #appStrat

  • Piero Fraternali 13:46 on September 14, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
    Tags: , future BPM systems, , ,   

    Reflections from the BPM and Social Software Workshop @ the BPM2011 Conference 

    I’m just back from the Business Process Management and Social Software workshop , held in Clermond-Ferrant in conjunction with the annual BPM Conference. The workshop is a lively place where people meet to exchange ideas on the future of BPM. And the future is mostly “social”, that is, about the influence that the impressive spread of social software will have on current BPM practices.

    Three positions have emerged that reflect a progression in time (present, mid-term, long-term) and in innovation (evolution, expansion, disruptive creation or revolution). The present already sees a wealth of initiative aiming at opening the definition of process models to more voices (I call this participatory design). Most tool vendors are already on it. When presenting our BPM4People project, I advocated a step forward: opening process enactment to the social interaction of more people. This implies the very difficult task of blending the command & control paradigm typical of today’s  BPM systems and the free-format, unstructured activity that takes place in social networks. The problems are manifold:  from the technical challenges of mastering unstructured user generated content and events so to make them usable in the decision making that drives process advancement, to trust & privacy, and (most notably) to the organizational change that companies need to put in place to harmonize their internal procedures and the contribution of a broader community of stakeholders.  But the rewards of Social BPM can compensate these challenges. Processes could be improved in so many ways: thanks to more participation, early customer feedback, better transparency, controlled activity outsourcing, and more.

    The most futuristic vision was expressed by Michael Rosemanm of Queensland University of Technology, who sees a future where processes are defined so to take advantage of the full stream of stimuli and events that our social digital life is continuously producing. The problem according to Michael will be to bring process management inside people’s life, rather than harnessing people’s contribution in traditional process management. As you see, food for thought was not missing.

     

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