Modelling and its importance - JISC CETIS Conference Workshop November 11 2009
By balbirbarn. Filed in Content |Tags: UML BPMN Modelling CETIS09
The JISC CETIS conference 2009 held at Aston Business School hosted a workshop on the “Problems with Modelling”. The workshop was organised by Prof. Oleg Liber and participants were mainly from the BCE - CRM projects.
While the workshop was intended to be a more supporting activity on existing modelling practice it became clear that there was quite a chasm between those who wanted to produce models of their systems and those who were already expert practitioners. An introductory modelling activity around the InnovationBase artefacts was productive in helping people identify concepts but appeared less useful in helping delegates understand the relationships between concepts (from the IB perspective).
An earlier part of the workshop was more philosophical and simply pointed out the gulf of complexity in modelling.
In general, there was significant interest from the majority of the delegates that modelling was seen as an important activity but there was a real need for training and guidance of the sort that could be immediately useful. For example, people want to know: Should I use UML Activity Diagrams or BPMN? What about Archimate?
JISC has already done of a lot of work in supporting modelling activity particularly in the use of UML and BPMN so in many ways much existing material could packaged, re-organized and made more easily available. One piece could be a web flow chart that guides people to what models, what tools, what notations….
From a MUSKET perspective, we have an opportunity to be more visible in our modelling activity. We also need to find ways of capturing the modelling process (and not the end product) because that knowledge seems to be more useful then models themselves especially to people new to modelling.