PATTERN LANGUAGE

Modeling, Managing, Making it Right.

June 2007

IBM has announced its Metadata Workbench, a data visualization and management software designed to provide insight about data and speed deployment of SOA, compliance, business intelligence, and master data integration projects.

More specifically, Metadata Workbench is a metadata management tool that visually depicts the relationships among data sources and data users, and provides proof of data lineage required by many compliance regulations. The software can also be used to pinpoint the exact impact of any data change and show the relationships among business and technical information assets. For business intelligence projects, Metadata Workbench provides insight into the origins of information, linking fields in leading business intelligence reporting tools all the way back to the sources from which they came, showing exactly how the data was derived. This capability is also important for business intelligence projects that need to identify where business intelligence report elements originated.

The tool also lets you create new metadata objects within IBM Information Server, stitch together metadata relationships, and clean up issues in the metadata directly. With the ability to outline the complete lineage of fields from applications, reports or data warehouses all the way back to source systems, including what types of processing were performed on them along the way, it can also display the exact impact of any change to any information asset, including which reports, databases, or services would be affected if a changed is made. By depicting metadata relationships like data lineage and impact analysis, it also makes it easy to find and understand metadata relationships quickly and even allows non-IT users to understand relationships.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:50 PM  Permalink |

Software AG has released a new document for implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance. Entitled SOA Governance: Rule Your SOA, the freely-available whitepaper draws upon the experiences and best practices of numerous Global 2000 enterprises and other early adopters. It provides practical and actionable advice for implementing SOA governance and maximizing your return-on-investment.

Topics addressed in "SOA Governance: Rule Your SOA" include:

• The correlation between SOA governance and corporate governance.
• Building the business case.
• Defining a maturity model for SOA governance.
• Key components of the SOA service lifecycle.
• Use case scenarios demonstrating the business role of SOA governance.
• Best practices and other lessons learned from early adopters.
• A roadmap for implementation.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:14 PM  Permalink |

It was just the other day that I opportunity to talk to IBM researcher Dan Ford about Big Blue's announcement that it has made available a software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe to the open source community. The tool, known as Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler, or STEM for short, will help scientists and public health officials understand and plan more efficient responses to health crises. STEM is available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project (OHF), hosted at the Eclipse Foundation.

Not to be outdone in the overlapping arenas of healthcare and software frameworks, Microsoft has moved forward with its Connected Health Framework for Health Plans, a free, open and extensible reference architecture to help health plans drive out the costs and complexities of interconnecting core systems, service channels, new applications, consumers, devices and business partners and rapidly seize new business opportunities.

Officially launched this week at the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Annual Meeting, the blueprint is a "real-world" service-oriented reference architecture that enables health plans and industry solution partners to focus on immediate business problems and apply IT solutions in incremental steps to deliver near-term business results -- regardless of platform or original programming language.

As the first of several building blocks to be released under the Connected Health Framework for Health Plans, Microsoft is also releasing the Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture (CERA) as a stand-alone module. Unhealthy behaviors -- such as smoking, eating poorly and not exercising -- drive up the prevalence of chronic diseases that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, already affect 30 percent of the U.S. population and account for more than 75 percent of medical costs. The CERA provides health plans with an architecture to proactively and interactively engage consumers in their health within the context of their existing lifestyle at work, home and on the go, making it more natural for consumers to make better informed financial and clinical decisions and self-manage their risks and conditions and health risks.

"Continued IT heterogeneity, combined with healthcare payer market consolidation, has driven increased interest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) in 2007," said Janice Young, program director, Healthcare Payer Research, Health Industry Insights. "A service-oriented architecture strategy provides health plans with a more cost efficient and flexible solution to rationalize business processes across the legacy and heterogeneous platform environment. We believe SOA strategies will play a key role in personalizing and streamlining the external experience between payer, their customers and business partners."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:12 AM  Permalink |

Per usual, I'll be traveling this week -- this time to Chicago. Which reminded me that I'll be traveling to Chicago again in July to the upcoming Dr. Dobb's Architecture and Design World, which is just over a month away.

I'm looking forward to both trips to the Windy City, and you're probably thinking that my excitement has something to do with deep-dish pizza. Well, yes, but more than that. I'm also looking forward to seeing a number of Dr. Dobb's authors, as well as other readers, speakers, and attendees.

For starters, there's DDJ columnist Scott Ambler who will be talking about "Evolving Agile: Time to Address the Uncomfortable Issues We’d Prefer to Avoid." Of course, I just saw Scott last week in Florida, but it's always a pleasure.

Then there is Ivar Jacobson who will be speaking on "Next Generation Process with Essential Modeling" which I bet is related to the articles he recently wrote for DDJ on EssWork and related topics.

Hopefully, I'll get a chance to meet for the first time Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz, my sidekick in this department's blog. Arnon will be speaking on a favorite topic of his -- SOA Patterns and the SPAMMED architectual framework, which he wrote about in DDJ.

There will be lots of other great speakers and sessions as well. For instance, I always look forward to hearing what Robert Martin has to say, and he will have several sessions this year on topics ranging from Design Patterns to Unit Testing.

But most of all, I look forward to meeting some of you there. And if we're really lucky, we'll meet in a pizza parlor.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:50 PM  Permalink |

Who said that software is complex? Well, Grady Booch, Robert Maksimchuk, Michael Engel, Bobbi Young, Jim Conallen, and Kelli Houston, among others. But is that good or bad and can we do anything about it.

That's just a few of the issues that they bring up in their recently released Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, Third Edition.

But they do believe that we can bring order to the chaos of software development, thanks in part to object-oriented design and analysis.

To learn more about how you can go about this, see this article excerpted from the book.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:47 PM  Permalink |