About UsA Tale of Three Models
LSV grew out of the proposal-writing activities of the small but innovative health care data integration company Care Data Systems. CDS for fifteen years had been illustrating software component protocols separately and redundantly for two different audiences.
- For technical buyers, we presented formal models in ERD and UML notation. They were rich and precise but boring.
- For executive buyers, we presented Maya scenes. They were gorgeous but canned, and were not easy to build
- As a middle ground, we used Visio but it of course lacked the clarity that a true 3D visual could provide.
Increased Pressure on Impact and Turnaround Time
At the OMG in the mid-90s Care Data took a leadership role in creating an important SOA component interface standard. We needed to communicate the significance of SOA in general and of this component in particular to CTOs at industry events (HIMSS, TEPR), typically in about 20 minutes! We were frustrated because we knew that CAD designers had great immersive and dynamic display environments, but no such facility existed for SOA solution presenters.
As usual, we had the models in UML and Viso but they were hopelessly boring; Maya was impactful and beautiful but prohibitively time consuming to prepare. Neither form had the needed level of linkability for drill-downs or the filtering flexibility to accommodate the time-frame and audience at hand.
What we needed was still not quite feasible to make or buy.
Convergence
In about 2005, however, we could taste it. We realized that by synthesizing the right combination of tools and methods, and with our own CAD experience we could produce a 3D immersive virtual world that balanced of precision and impact to serve both the CTO and technical audiences. We prototyped for two solid years to attain adequate richness in both precision and aesthetics so that we could create and link up a useful Supermodel of a complex system in about a month.
The Architectural Prototype
In 2007 we were tasked to produce a very large body of documentation for a Care Data SOA site having a distributed support staff with extremely limited time available for training. It was in our interest to equip the support staff to be maximally effective in level-two support, not only in how to use our tools and troubleshoot their configurations, but in how to make effective call-routing decisions in a 20-vendor mix. We accomplished this by adding capabilities to
- illustrate both call-dependencies and data-flow dependencies in the same scene (world)
- link all types of resources - including staff contacts - into the model, in a way that the site could maintain themsevles afterwards
- generate webs for the site topology as a whole and for each major component and for all environments
- generate model content from site-specific component configurations
- depict sequential generations of the system topology to show SOA maturation.
SOA Revolutions and Standards Bodies
From 2006 to 2008, SOA electronic health records in particular saw huge growth in demand. The growth has continued and with ever increasing urgency to differentiate by manifest technological excellence and openness. Vendors and solution providers in this space constantly need to show components as implementations, web services as their interfaces, and also manifest the brokering and timing dependencies or their solutions.
In response, we rapidly iterated our facilities to capture these competitive distinguishing features in the animated models. We were deeply immersed in two Healthcare SOA implementation projects that had to integrate with monolithic legacy apps and get physicians off of fat-clients and block-mode terminals. There could be no better proving ground for managing architectural transformations, so we strived to capture and depict these transformations in ways relevant to management.
Signs of Readiness in Healthcare Standards
In 2007 and 2008 Health Level Seven (HL7) - the messaging people, and the Object Management Group (OMG)- the service components people - "had learned to work together very, very effectively", with HL7 producing Service Functional Descriptions (use cases,etc), throwing them over the wall to the OMG for service interface design. We had known by our prior work in both camps that the two organizations were extremely complementary, because we had spent a decade connecting the HL7 lines with the OMG circles to great effect in the real world trenches.
In 2009 we attended several technical conferences of the OMG Analysis and Design Task Force (ADTF) and Architecture-Driven Modernization Task Force (ADMTF). We discovered that the ADTF was formally defining "views, viewpoints, and perspectives" from a UMLstandpoint and the ADMTF had recently completed the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) - for capturing and abstracting legacy system constructs.
We knew then that, not only were the right ingredient technologies ripe for this application but also the key standards bodies were ready to map their multidimensional system modeling ontologies to 3-space dimensions so that technology executives could make confident high-stakes decisions regarding investments.
Ready for Business
After four years of prototyping we are ready to equip executive technology buyers and sellers with immersive technology presentatiions that they can easily control. We hope to partner with a limited number of technology buyers and sellers to produce a level of clarity and impact in technology presentations and proposals that is absolutely unprecedented.
Jon Farmer,
Principal, Level Seven Visualizations
