Technology & Interface Challenges for the 21st Century

Came across this online conference run by Interdisciplines as part of their Brave new Interfaces series whilst trying to reduce a complex problem down into a simple representation that could be easily digested, and it got me thinking. One of the common challenges in representation of complex information is being able to take account of the respective silo/framework/perspective of your audiences, and writing beyond that boundary. Lack of interdisciplinary contributions means you focus a very narrow set of information, not easily re-interpreted once you move beyond the bounds of a known audience. The challenge in getting complex information represented simply, relies in part on finding ways that a person can draw a metaphor or relate to a life experience to.

I'm working through a business events model at present to summarise what the whole enterprise really does, in a way that can help to promote cross-team understanding, using diagrams that show repetitive business event lifecycles across differing cycle timelines, with customer life evetns right at the centre of the model. It's been useful as normal business process representation is typically linear, in swimlane form, but does not easily communicate recurrence. The paper title in itself sums up the challenge for me, and many of you. Getting complex information distilled into a simple, meaningful, representation that is as near to self descriptive as I can get. I'll be interested to watch the online symposia unfold over the next few days, as many minds from different paths converge onto common problems

AGIMO Business process interoperability for Government Agencies

Nice to see the recent release by AGIMO of their reference paper for business process interoperability across Australian Governmemt Agencies. I've been deep in some Business process management work recently, mapping out core and generic processes for one particular agency as part of a larger BP improvement exercise, and focusing on how generalisable many of those processes are. When you apply that same framework approach of identifying what is unique vs generalisable across agencies, there are certainly many constituent facing proceses that can be dramatically improved as part of e-government and business continuity management. Love to see how much take-up their new publication gets as I move towards thinking about how best to apply their approaches in Health Care delivery and e-government service delivery myself.