The Book
Synopsis of Agile Systems with Reusable Patterns of Business Knowledge: A Component-Based Approach
This book is about component technology and the automated synthesis of business knowledge from its components. The twenty first century will be like no other in history. The automated synthesis and coordination of business knowledge will have a profound impact on the way business will be done in the twenty first century. The forces it will unleash will have an equally fundamental impact on human enterprise and the competitive position of firms, and even nations in the century just begun. It will be a tumultuous, frenetic and chimerical world in search of customer value, driven by innovation, research and the need for global excellence.
More and more, the business benefits of low cost labor will be supplanted by the benefits of coordinated knowledge across vast global supply chains. More and more, coordinated knowledge and innovation will be supported by systems that provide quick access to new learning and unprecedented flexibility in bringing matching products to market in extremely short time frames. To prosper, to lead, and perhaps even to survive, the information systems industry must rise to the challenge.
Component Technology addresses this need. The wave is just beginning. It will soon permeate most software products and services, making them flexible, configurable and coordinated. Now is the time for information architects and business process designers to claim a stake in the future. This book will help do this.
The book addresses reuse & synthesis of knowledge in an automated environment. It is about building business processes, models and software from components of shared and common knowledge. Automated reuse of knowledge has been a long sought, but elusive goal. The focus of most work in this area has traditionally been on computer technology, interfacing mechanisms, the logistics of transporting and storing information and the technical standards for doing so. This book is different. The focus of the book is on automated synthesis of business knowledge from business meanings, patterns and rules. These after all, form the substance of a business process. It is this that is buried in, and is the real value of the computer code we write. Without the business layer, technological standards have little meaning. The return on investment from reusing business knowledge can complement, and be orders of magnitude larger than from adherence to technical standards alone. The book will introduce the readers to a theoretical and practical framework for the reuse of knowledge across diverse contexts.
The book also shares a vision of future business software, in which agile, autonomous, self-adaptive, self learning business processes and software emerge from the confluence of the patterns of information; a world in which, given a business process, the development of software will be automatic and automated.
The currency of these systems of the future will be business meanings and concepts, not software code. The book addresses the principles that drive this kind of information architecture and information sharing in the form of meanings, concepts and business behaviors. These principles will complement work that has been done in developing technology and interfacing standards for information systems. Their purpose is not to propose yet another technical standard. It is to describe the business intelligence, in component form, that these standards must support and be joined to. It is the next step.