Specialised Courses

The short “Specialised” courses contain knowledge of particular modelling techniques. It is usually expected that attendants can attend several courses, starting with the “Introduction”.

Introduction to Sparx Enterprise Architect. This course is a prerequisite for people attending other specialised courses. It is also highly recommended to anyone who may come in contact with Enterprise Architect, or people using it, through their work. $640/person + GST, on:

• 6 May 2013
• 20 May 2013

BPMN Process Modelling with Sparx Enterprise Architect (1 day). Together with the introductory course, enables competent BPMN Modelling Covering the software, the notation and the practical modelling skills. $980/Person + GST, on:

• 21 May 2013

Use Case Modelling with Sparx Enterprise Architect (1 day). Learn to work with Use Cases and Requirements. $980/Person + GST, on: 

• 22 May 2013

Advanced BPMN2 with Sparx Enterprse Architect (2 days). Covering Collaboration and Orchestration Modelling, as well as more advanced elements of Process Modelling. $1880/Person + GST, on:

• 23-24 May 2013

Archimate with Sparx Enterprise Architect (1 day). Archimate is the Open Group standard for Enterprise Architecture Modelling, supplied by Sparx as part of TOGAF Add-in. $980/person + GST, on:

• 24 May 2013

Business Requirements Modelling with Sparx Enterprise Architect (1 day).  The course is focused on capturing high-level, Computation-Independent Requirements for a project using Business Use Cases and Requirement Statements. The effort results in producing a Business Requirements Document. $980/person + GST, on:

• 13 May 2013

Solution Modelling for Agile Development with TFS (2 days). This course covers a simplified process suitable for smaller projects, where detailed Use Cases are identified from Business Requirements by either Business Analysts with good knowledge of applications, or Architects/Developers with good business knowledge. $1880/Person + GST, on:

• 18-19 June 2013

Solution Architecture with Sparx Enterprise Architect (2 days). The course enables Solution Architects to produce Solution Architecture fully inside Enterprise Architect while re-using common models, Diagrams and specifications. $1880/Person + GST, on:

• 27-28 May 2013

Administration & Version Control of Sparx Enterprise Architect Models (1 day). The course teaches implementation of advanced and reliable Version Control of Sparx Enterprise Architect models, implementation of sophistication security, branching and merging the models. $950/person + GST, on:

• 3 June 2913

Implementing Effective Report Generation (1 day). The course teaches developing sophisticated templates for Sparx Enterprise Architect, and organizing modelling to ensure generation of documents from EA models. $950/person + GST, on:

• 10 June 2013

Business Motivation Modelling with Sparx Enterprise Architect (1 day). Captures high-level factors driving the project, usually agreed with higher-level executives. Also enables project validation, prioritisation and monitoring. $950/person + GST, on:

• 11 June 2013

Business Component Modelling with Sparx Enterprise Architect (2 days). The course delivers the capability to define Services conceptually, defining self-contained Business-level Services and provding a blue print for SOA implementation, $1880/person + GST, on:

• 6-7 June 2013

Comprehensive Courses

Our 3-4 day courses provide participants with all they need to start participating in or leading modelling effort within their function – no pre-requisites.

Advanced Business Analysis with Enterprise Architect, UML 2 and BPMN 2 (4 days). The course provides Business Analysis with the most advanced techniques to respond to the demands of 21^st Century ICT, to be relevant in the context of Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture, Cloud Technology, COTS and SaaS, re-use, optimisation and streamlining. $3750/person + GST, on:

• 7-10 May  2013
• 25-28 June 2013

Enterprise Solution Design with Sparx Enterprise Architect (4 days). The course teaches practical techniques that significantly improve solution development practices and establish effective flow of information from business requirements through to development and testing.Using Sparx Enterprise Architect increases productivity, transparency and control over the projects. $3750/person + GST, on:

• 14-17 May 2013

Semantic Integration Courses

Semantic Integration an exciting new technology allowing modelling and querying complex non-relational data originating from vastly diverse sources. Business Abstraction courses allow early adoption of the technology by providing practice-oriented courses.

Writing SPARQL queries (1 day). SPARQL is a new standard query language that excels where SQL falls short – in querying non-relational irregular data coming from sources ranging from Excel spreadsheets to Internet resources. It is also instrumental when developing complex information models using OWL. $880/person + GST, on

• 12 June 2013

OWL Modelling for Information Architects (2 days). Limitations of UML and especially ER information modelling can become too severe for complex projects dealing with data from multiple sources. OWL Modelling is offering out-of-the-box reasoning and querying. $1780/person + GST, on:

• 13-14 June 2013

We reserve the right to re-schedule some of the course, however offer 100% money back guarantee if the new dates are not suitable.

This phenomenon used to have only marginal impact on the performance of major enterprises for several reasons. When say a financial services enterprise is employing a lot of flesh-and-blood people sitting in brick-and-mortar branches, the cost of software they implement doesn’t make much difference. Similarly, superior software was hardly a factor in competition.

However, “for the times they are a-changin’”:

• More and more operations are moved to the Internet, reducing “brick-and-mortar” costs and making software projects visible.
• Industries are moving towards Enterprise-as-a-Platform model where competitors may source human effort from the same workforce providers or subcontractors, thus making processes and software that enables them the key differentiators.
• Responding to popular frustration, governments increase pressure on removing barriers for competition and breaking long-term holds on customers. At the same time, new entrants are trying to break in.
• Software plays more and more critical role in an enterprise. What was a data storage/retrieval tool replacing physical retrieval of folders from cabinets only 20 years ago, is now the skeleton of an enterprise. Business processes used to be in the heads of trained staff, they are now coded in the software.

To survive and prosper, enterprise should learn to implement innovative software quickly and on a budget.

The main problem is fear of failure. An enterprise project would not “fail forward fast”. It must succeed. There is no enterprise analogue of “validated learning” promoted by “The Lean Startup”. An enterprise IT project is not supposed to learn by trying and failing. Instead, the project should eliminate chances of failure by selecting reputable partners and vendors, building consensus among and whenever possible following the road well travelled.

However, these steps that do sounds reasonable are the major contributors to enterprise IT woes.

1. By trying to ensure that all necessary parties are consulted and signed on, the existing processes are preserved, as complicated processes are most effective defensive devices for middle level management, and they are all given seats at the table to protect them. Not surprising many processes still presume the files are made of cardboard.
2. They will engage top-tier consultancy to do the work, and chose for a solution that was done before. Big vendors’ business is about margins, and in such a protected market they naturally fluctuate to providing a lot of inexpensive (inexperienced or mediocre) developers.
3. Customization of a mature solution (as mandated by “2″) is much more expensive than developing that many features from the scratch and “1″ ensures a lot of customization requirements. This alone is enough to make a project hugely expensive
4. A large and mediocre team makes proper use of advanced tools and methods highly unlikely. Some teams are good against all odds, it’s a pleasure to train them. Some managers have enough will to impose discipline that makes following guidelines possible. Training and mentoring those teams is hard, but then they do stay course. In many cases it neither.
5. Getting more people involved and more people accommodated have disproportional impact on costs. If you doubled the size of a meeting, the cost of meeting is doubled, the productivity is halved, so you need twice more meetings. Then everyone has less time to execute on the outcome of the meetings. So you need more people. Some of them will be invited to join the meetings…
6. After you eliminated challenges by eliminating chances of failure and by settling on quantity, the chances to keep the best people are low. Anyone with brains is fast-tracked to Lead Architect role.
7. By that time, management bandwidth is exhausted, so some decisions will go wrong way. Some activities gets created that have no customers, people producing specifications that nobody will read.

What is the solution to this calamity? Embrace limited risk to avoid massive and very expensive mediocrity that fails often. Treat innovative projects as “Lean Startups”.

I’ll cover that in details in the next post.

What is the most distinctive feature of Asana? It’s fast. It is very basic in the way it can be configured, it expects the team members self-organize using the tags, the feature set is grossly inferior to almost any system on desktop. It is however remarkably fast, faster than typing in vi running from your local SSD. It is for people who won’t waste time to reach for the mouse, who use Mac OS from command line, whose typing speed makes Tetris players and machine-gun makers envious, and who think even faster. A Facebook co-founder and an their engineering lead created the system for themselves and a few people they know.

The main “Customer Hypothesis” of Asana is that the sufficient number of teams will find such remarkable speed a major advantage to the degree they will bother bombarding Asana with features suggestions. If that happen, they will have a unique advantage of receiving suggestions from the most efficient users – while others are implementing 250 features necessary to work relatively slow, Asana will be implementing 5 features necessary to work fast.

Are there enough people like that? By betting their success on emergence of new enterprise culture that combines innovation, self-organisation and high intensity of work Asana became an indicator of such culture. Any serious traction they get with enterprise customers will be an indication of upcoming major disruptive changes.

I am an IT consultant working from Australia, I have no political opinion on the US healthcare debate. I also have no expertise in long-term viability of health insurance due to aging population and emergence of new expensive treatments, or in US healthcare in general to verify the numbers.

However as an expert in enterprise IT, I can state that administrative costs can be reduced significantly in any large enterprise. Within the space of two decades, Information Technology reduced the cost of sending a person message to zero, the cost of making an international phone call to virtually zero, and sent travel agents and second-hand shops owners to look for other business opportunities.

So far the level of cost reduction in the enterprises lags behind. The enterprise culture is not tuned for implementing dramatic changes. A project is usually instructed to talk to the users and learn what they want, while a real transformation will make majority of these users redundant. We map business processes that were created when files were made of cardboard.

That’s not malicious sabotage, nor does that happen out of intellectual deficiency. In fact, many of the CEOs and CIOs I know are highly intelligent people not shy of gutsy decisions. Yet this pattern of behaviour is common even for enterprises run by forward-thinking leaders with explicit innovation-supporting policies.

An Information Technology department has no mandate to disrupt the profitable enterprise. That results in highly conservative projects that cost too much, yet thread very carefully. The combination of massive budgets and demand for conformance with all entrenched interests produced vendors who deliver just that – massively expensive projects that include a lot of boring work and even more boring ineffective meetings. One common pattern of innovation is introducing new technology in form of hugely expensive products that are bolted on top of existing solutions after excruciating customisation effort, with promises of some benefits in distant future.

However, two factors combined can force some enterprises to transform their IT departments into engines of disruptive innovation.

On one hand, regulatory actions driven by public frustration, change of customer behaviour or emergence of new type of competition enabled by technology can create an existential threat to existing enterprises within a particular industry segment. However, as soon as several large enterprises in a particular industry are forced to drive their innovation without handbrake on, the ripple effect will reach other industries and other countries shortly after.

On another hand, several recently developed methods significantly reduced the risks associated with innovative internal IT projects:

• Fundamental research by Clayton M. Christensen, Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and others made innovation more predictable and facilitateable, thus ensuring that enterprises can generate significant pools of ideas to choose from;
• Abstraction Visual Modelling and high-level simulation tools made possible to assist creative process and early experimentation, thus not only reducing the cost of creative experimentation but also enabling a formal innovation framework that will drive innovation.
• The methods defined by the startup community to reduce the frequency and most significantly costs of startup failures reached the level of maturity suitable for enterprise IT. Business Abstraction customised some of these methods for internal enterprise use.
• The initiatives like Web-Oriented Architecture, Cloud Deployment and Enterprise-as-a-Platform make complex project easier.

We reached the paradoxical stage when running an innovative and highly transformative project under conditions of extreme uncertainty will take less time, require less funding and pose less risks than undertaking a highly conservative “me too” project from a global vendor.

Some early examples will include Palantir Technologies that sends unsleek yet competent “forward-deployed engineers” to do sales, then executes a $5-$100 million project delivering critical fraud-detection capabilities, that in turn rely on massive data integration, in 8 weeks, with software working full power immediately after that. Their competitors will take multiple of that time and money just get initial Requirements document approved.

These signs should not be ignored. It is possible that we will see rebirth of aggressive, proactive, innovative enterprise IT – and demise of the enterprises that fail that.

We enjoy creating and inventing things, that’s in our DNA. People plant their gardens, help their children with school projects.

I recently caught up with an executive who participated in one of my  Enterprise Service Transformation Draft exercise. I was delighted to hear a confirmation that our specifications were implemented and enabled rapid expansion into new markets and new services. However what really touched me was that he was referring to the exercise as “fun”, specifically mentioning the spirit of free thinking and innovation.

Service-Oriented enterprise re-thinking is a unique opportunity to evaluate what’s great and exciting about this particular enterprise, where is the value, what the people are good at. To produce the Draft we had to capture the motivation and directions at the higher level. Then we identified Business Components, and spend some time thinking the best way to productise the Business Components. Through the exercise, the participating executives and Architects were allowed absolute freedom of innovation, not constrained by political considerations. The ideas were instantly presented as visual models and were analyzed by other participants.

The exercise not only unearthed the wealth of ideas and facilitated the better understanding of the enterprise, it also allowed the participants to reflect on what is positive and great about the company they work for, and made them genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Eventually an architecture has to be enacted. That brings long hours of not very exciting work, and also may require purchasing hugely expensive enterprise software, engaging large consulting outfits, documenting technical details and compromising with influential stakeholders. However there is no reason to reduce enterprise Architecture to that, at the expense of innovation and long-term strategic outcomes.

If there is no fun part in your quest for Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture, you have missed a very important step.

I do not copy the whole text, as the legality of that is not clear to me considering it has been removed from the author’s Google+ account. Please google “Steve Yegge rant” if interested, and choose from 100s of copies. I will however provide the key message, translated to to more traditional enterprise language:

At some time around 2002 Jeff Bezos, the founder, CEO & significant owner of Amazon, issued a following mandate:

1. All Business Units should expose their information and capabilities through service interfaces.
2. Business Units must communicate with each other through these service interfaces.
3. There will be no other form of communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of data stores, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. Steve’s text doesn’t mention low-tech methods like sending emails and submitting forms as this is something Amason sorted away from the very beginning.
4. The technology doesn’t matter, as soon the services are clearly defined.
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable.” Any capability that is provided via Services can potentially be offered as services to external customers if the CEO decides to do so.
6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

The possibility of externalization requirement (#5), as irrelevant as it can be seen to large banks and Government agencies, is the key to effective definition of services and achieving business agility. Please also note that refusal to mandate specific communication technology coming from such a technology-intensive company. Jeff Bezos realized that it is the definition and quality of services rather than platform that is required to deliver the business flexibility that he wanted.

In Amazon, the definition of services were done by developers themselves. That can hardly be reproduced in more conventional enterprises. Business Abstraction has been successfully teaching and delivering Business Service Analysis that provides definitions of services required to deliver to the enterprise capabilities.

Since their release 25 years ago, first on Mac, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel found their way to 500 million workstations, laptops and virtual PCs. Eventually some collaboration features were added to Word, with tracking and merging changes.

Now, Google is trying to dent Microsoft domination, and snatch some of their revenue, by providing similar functionality in a browser. Collaboration further improved, with several people being able to collaborate on the same document.

All this progress and competition distract our attention from the fact that writing a document is essentially a pre-computer activity, so while “Productivity Software” improved productivity of writing, writing a document may be not the most productive way to communicate required information.

In personal communication, “instantness” and “sharing” effectively eliminated letters. We do not write a long letter to an old friend, we provide them access to our facebooks. We don’t write long structured texts, we write and post individual paragraphs, or sentences if on Twitter. Will this in any way impact our centuries-long practices of writing long reports, submissions etc?

Perhaps that’s the right time to start a conversation.

By 1984 IBM PC AT effectively established the standard for personal computing that only now started to show signs of retreat. From that point on and till now, we’ve seen the evolution of Intel architecture and core Microsoft products. Yet in addition to still ubiquitous and ever improving spreadsheet software, the following 20 years saw development of enterprise systems for practically every role in the enterprise, with thick client software deployed to every desk in every office.

Similar by 1994 Internet was a done deal, and in 3 years the standards that are still ruling the Web were defined, like HTML 4.0 and Javascript. At the same time Internet went from email, Usenet news and occasional websites for IT professionals and academics to everyone’s source of any kind of information, world storefront, universal soapbox, as well as the dominant platform for enterprise software.

Well, there was nothing for me to abstract in 1986 for PC software, nothing on the Internet worthy of abstraction in mid-90s. PCs in mid-80s: a lot of young talented people hacking together numerous spreadsheet systems, text editors and form-based generators. Internet technologies in mid-90s: a lot of talented people quickly hack together websites. In both cases five years down the track we were developing complex business-critical applications that were radically transforming Enterprise IT landscape.

Social Graph is here to stay, and is likely to stay with existing players. However, quite similar to the early Internet projects, current Social projects reside purely in the domain of marketing. Like early PC usage, they have little connection with the core enterprise processes.

One should expect Social to become as important component of what an enterprise is and what an enterprise does. If the history is anything to go by, this revolution will be unravelling in the next 5 years. @socialbranch will be reporting on it progress.