CTOs Blog

Our second user conference will be run this week - 25th and 26th of October. There will be be a number of excellent customer speakers, as well as our CEO and key Holocentric staff. We hope this year will be even better than the the previous one.

We've recently shipped Modeler 6.3 and Modelpedia 1.3, both significant enhancement releases that have a large number of additional features. The Modeler is faster and even more stable than previous releases and the Modelpedia also has some significant performance improvements - in particular, it can handle over five times the number of concurrent users over the previous release. We'll be covering this and other exciting features, including enhancements to the Solution Framework, in more detail at the conference.

I will be presenting the Holocentric Future Roadmap, as well as a workshops on Modeler and Modelpedia. I hope you can make it to the conference!

The Holocentric Inaugural User Conference went off with a bang last week; that’s really the only way to describe it. In my first post I mentioned that I would follow by talking about how customers have benefited from using Modeler and Modelpedia. The conference certainly provided the best examples of this. I’ve never before been involved with a conference that had the kind of buzz and quality of both customer and partner talks.

Customers, including Qantas Engineering, Western Power, ATO and Defence did a great job explaining where they were able to achieve benefits, whether this was a greater engagement with the business, achieving a return on investment in the order of 20 times, or putting in place the foundation of a Business Management System, these talks focused on results.

What struck me most was seeing straight-talking customers cover details about the benefits they were getting, as well as swapping notes on approaches and goals they had, and not just talking product. The magnitude of customer success really has changed over the past 2 years, not only because of the maturity of the product set, but also because customers are demanding greater results and have been prepared to learn from each other.

I enjoyed getting back into doing presentations and running workshops, having been locked up running agile development projects of late. I covered the essential milestones for the Future Roadmap presentation and the conference also gave me an opportunity to put together some long overdue “tips and tricks” workshops for Modeler and Modelpedia. I have to remind myself at times that some features are taken for granted and these are not always known by others – so it’s our job to let people know!

Of course the star workshop of the conference was the metamodelling talk given by our Product Manager Aaron Davison, to a packed audience. Given the increasing success on projects and obvious customer and partner interest in the feature, it’s certainly an area that will be getting more attention in the future.

Well done Charles, Bruce, Geoff, Keith, Jo, Michael, Tanya and others for making the conference happen. I can’t wait for the next one now!

Most large organisations have either heard about, or are interested in implementing ITIL. Earlier this year one of our customers had their hearts set on using the superb models created by IT Process Maps, so we investigated the potential to work with them to bring this capability to the Modeler and Modelpedia environment.

Before we go any further, what is ITIL? The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management, Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations. Published as a series of books (each covering an IT management topic), ITIL details a number of important IT practices, along with comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to suit its needs.  The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

Supporting ITIL is important for us because it provides another aspect of the Solution Framework that we have been working on here; with a view to providing reference models for Holistic solutions. Having partners that are the best in the business always helps a great deal and as a team we been able to build a first-class Accelerator for Modeler.

As part of this project we wrote an ARIS to Modeler conversion, because most of the model content had originated in this product. We developed options to convert the model content into BPMN or Role-Based Process Modelling (RBPM) metamodels. As it has turned out, the semantics of Process Areas in the RBPM have turned out to be extremely useful in the port, and the ability to use existing System Requirement & Fulfilment (SR&F) metamodel concepts, as well as custom notation node styles.

A number of feedback requests from our partners challenged us to enhance Modeler, which we agreed to do as part of the project. We also added some specific support to the metamodel in order to represent better the intention around some of the relationships in the process model, along with boundary processes and normal courses of operation. The scripting engine of Modeler certainly helped to make changes post import and it allowed large sets of data to be transformed quickly and easily. These changes along with the base Modeler 6.2 platform have allowed us to enrich the original content.

As a result of this effort, the Modeler ITIL Accelerator is not just a set of pictures (as it is in Visio for instance), but a complete modelling environment. With these maps you can build real model extensions, perform cost-benefit analysis of implemented processes, as well as Service catalogs. Using the Modelpedia environment, not only can the processes be made available to the right people in an organisation effortlessly, but people can help to improve them without having modelling experience themselves.

Special thanks to our customers for having the foresight to help kick-start the project, Simon for his tireless efforts, Stefan and Andrea at IT Process Maps (Pfronten, Germany), and Allen of ESP ITIL (Sydney, Australia) for all helping to make this Accelerator come to life!  (See here for product information)

The team here has been working diligently on the next enhancement release of Modeler and Modelpedia since Christmas 2009. Typically, we create an enhancement release 6 months after the last one. In the case of Modeler 6.2, this makes the next Generally Available (GA) product just on the outer band of these estimates. However, during this time frame we also had the added challenge of creating three supported releases, two of which were not pre-release and not GA, but made specifically to address requested features for key customers. We also created an important maintenance release for Modeler 6.1 in February of this year.

There has been a lot of work done by the development and testing teams, and we have had the support of a select number of customers and partners, who have all contributed to the new features and stability of this release. The Modelpedia Web 2.0 interface in particular feels like a major release itself and the Modeler has many enhancements and is becoming increasingly polished to use. It’s difficult not being able to talk about new releases until they are GA because of the time and effort that gets put into the product, and of course the new features.

Stay tuned for the official announcement!