Miscellaneous
Welcome to Just Clarity, a periodic podcast about Digital. Just Clarity is produced by the team at Digital Clarity Group. We help leaders transform the experience they deliver to customers, prospects, and their employees through the effective selection, integration, and adoption of customer experience management technology. Learn more at digitalclaritygroup.com Connie Moore (CM): Welcome to Just Clarity podcast sponsored my Digital Clarity Group. I’m Connie Moore; I’m the Senior Vice President of Research at Digital Clarity Group, and I’ll be moderating our call today. Our guest is a very good friend of mine and someone I rely upon when I want to brainstorm or think through issues around Business Process Management, Customer Engagement, or business transformation, and our guest is Derek Myers who is a Principle with a structured talent based in London. Prior to that, Derek and I worked together at Forrester Research for a number of years, supporting Business Process Management professionals on their journey to business and customer transformation, and before joining Forrester, Derek was the founder and Principle of Enix Consulting where he advised large organisations and software vendors on all aspects of Business Process Management. So, Derek I would like to welcome you. Derek Myers (DM): Thank you, Connie. CM: Today we’re going to be talking about Entity Modeling and its role in Business Process Modeling and Business Process Development. So Entity Modeling has been around for a long time and is a familiar term to anyone in the Information Management field, but it’s still relatively new to the Business Process Management Practitioners Lexicon. So could you take us through what Entity modeling is and why it's surfacing now in the BPM circles? DM: When you say it like that, workflow, I’m not sure it really is surfacing that well. There are some vendors who have got the hint around it and you could argue that it’s pretty central to what you would think of as Case Management that you know we will come onto that I’m sure, but let's go back to the information Management domain. You know in the 1980’s when relational databases first appeared, this whole idea that you would construct a pure model of the data that you needed and somehow rather that wonderful model would permeate all your systems and all the programmers would get down and bow down to it rather than creating local variables for their… you know some of the products talk about global variables for example that are available to the other processes as well and then, of course, you get to this point of saying, “Well Hold on, I’ve got all these global variables and they all sort of relate to each other”, but by looking at the structure of the data you could actually say that a person has an address, you know the address is held in an address table because you might have more than one address and a person, obviously salutation, first name, what have you, but the address table, you could then have three addresses, or five addresses and you wouldn’t be limited necessarily in your user interface, and ultimately that’s the core of Entity Modeling is that you’ve got relationships between the entities that are important to you and you can use that to act as the basis for your processes and what have you to work on, and in a way I’m segueing now to almost to modern day, but some products have had it since the get go. If I think back to the approach and the product that I killed off in 1992, we had a core central set of entities that were reused across all processes and that way you never had to map your local variables and process A to process B, they all just shared the same data space and therefore, when I needed to from the calling process to call a second process, you know I didn’t have to do any mapping, it was very, very simple because that all shared the same data space, and that data space was defined through a set of entities.