New approach for Enterprise Architecture

I have just read an interesting article from Gartner annoucing they have identified a new approach for enterprise architecture. The first sentence that called my attention says how the research VP at Gartner described the key characteristic of this new approach: "architect the lines, not the boxes".

That characteristic is in accordance with my research work on definining a new traceability methodology to bridge the gaps between business process management and the user perspective. And we do that by creating a chain of links between business processes and end users. Why is it so important to architect the lines? Once the lines are architected, you are able to control them and change them more efficiently as business possibilities evolve.

Another aspect that impressed me is that this new approach advocates for "decentralised decision-making" that recognizes a broader ecosystem, not limited to control by enterprise architects; now constituents within the organization demand more autonomy to be able to make decisions. This new style of enterprise architecture aims to drop broundaries to enable innovation from different sources (we could say even unexpected sources) and respond to the growing variety and complexity in markets and companies. Overall, every organization (I could say, everybody) wants to widen their point of view and collaborate with a larger range of people to be able to innovate.

Another interesting example reaching towards innovation is a project called IBM Extreme BlueTM that receives young talents for a summer intership in IBM's clients. The results of this project will be showcased next month (Sep 2009). If I'm able to attend it, I'll share some interesting discussions about innovation afterwards.

Multimodal interaction

I've been doing a lot of presentations about my PhD research in different contexts: doctoral consortium (as mentioned here), workshops, courses (mentioned here), projects, etc. And it gets more and more fun, as you talk about something you like to work on everyday.

But it could also be good to diverse a little bit... Interestingly enough, last week I was invited to represent my advisor, Jean Vanderdonckt, at the Workshop on the Challenges of Engineering Multimodal Interaction: Methods, Tools, Evaluation presenting a work about the development of multimodal user interfaces. Talk about diversity! Of course, it is indeed one of the main topics of interest of the BCHI lab where I work through UsiXML; but it is certainly different from my topic on bridging the gaps between business process management and the user perspective.



It was good to present this work, it is about a UsiXML tool called InterpiXML, which was evolved to consider different interaction modalities, so users could navigate through images either by sketching on a graphical tablet or by doing hand gestures.

It was complimented, especially in the aspect that the presented project had the goal to integrate InterpiXML with OpenInterface, an open source framework for multimodal interaction.

It was certainly good to participate, take a look at my picture during the presentation and at the workshop venue: pas mal hun?!

Louvain School of Management Doctoral Day

Last month, I presented my PhD research at the Louvain School of Management (LSM) doctoral day on January 12. This day was organized with a presentation for each scientific center of excellence and several posters from PhD students from these centers that range from marketing, asset management, supply chain management, innovative strategies and information engineering. There were around forty to fifty people in this event among professors and PhD students from UCL, FUNDP and FUCaM. 

I was invited to represent the center of excellence PRISME (Pole of Research on Information and Services Management and Engineering) with a team of nearly 80 researchers.  This is an honor for me to have my research recognized as a mature cross-disciplinary work and share it with people from other centers.

It has indeed been through interactions with other centers that I have developed interesting researches, such as the one I've done by integrating Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Operational Research (Chapter 7 of my Master dissertation) and with Knowledge Engineering (Tamodia 2004)  with professors from UNIFOR and UCL.

And now I am integrating HCI with Business Process Management and I am perfectly located in a HCI lab of a business school (LSM). There are several challenges to address and I'm currently applying this research in a large organization to analyze how our strategy can help systems' end users accomplish their day-to-day tasks according to business expectations. 

Going overseas

I'm a young researcher and I can admit that I'm already doing a good job. I've been publishing within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community since my under-graduate degree in Brazil. And now, as a PhD researcher in Belgium, I'm collaborating with yet other communities, such as Organization Engineering and Business Process Management that have been learning about the benefits of HCI.

But what makes my research valuable is to see it out there. What a small world! A friend of mine has just returned from a study period at the University of Texas and during one of her researches at the library, she found one of my articles there. This article was published at Tamodia 2007, which I mentioned in a previous post.

That work talks about a strategy to define user interface development methods tailored to the reality of software development organizations and their projects. Its main differential is the use of usability goals to drive the customization of such methods and thus adding a new perspective to software projects. As everything in life, if you don't know what you want beforehand, you will not get it. So, you need goals and usability goals give you what you need in terms of software usability.

It has been so long since Tamodia happened and then the book of this conference is available in the library of a foreign university. I know that this is a small thing, isn't it? But as a PhD researcher, this is very important for me. It means that my work has gone overseas and it is helping people with their researches, faraway.

Belgian Usability Day 2008

The Belgian Usability Day was a success, the auditorium was full of usability people interested in sharing knowledge.

The first talk was about traffic congestion by Joannes Vandermeulen, founder of Namahn.  He gave an entertaining talk about how traffic congestion makes our life more difficult and gave some examples of how technology allied with usability could solve some of these problems. Even though the solutions are a bit futuristic, everyone can already do something today to decrease the traffic around us. It was not so motivating to know that most of the participants went by car... but the message was given.

The second talk was a Brussels Airlines case study by Audrey Benoit from Brussels Airlines and Raphael de Robiano from Emakina. They presented the process applied by Emanika to conceive and design the new website for Brussels Airlines. The main differential is that they performed a global user experience mission by following all the steps of any usual customer, such as to look for information, compare prices, book flight, checkin, travel, etc. It was a great talk, all the issues that the mission revealed were surprising and significant to bring about major changes in their products and services.

The third talk was about social networks by Amandine Feix-Villain from Groupe Reflect. She presented a different point of view that each person manages different facets of themselves, depending in which social network they are. For instance, someone's facet on Facebook (a more friendly and loose profile) is different from his or her facet on LinkeIn (a more professional profile). But... what about transportation? Am I able to "travel" easily from a facet to another? Am I the "driver" of my own facet information?

Well, there was a fourth talk, but unfortunately I had to leave at this moment because it was getting late and I had to take the subway and the train, a one-hour trip to get back home from Brussels to Louvain-la-Neuve. But it was certainly worth it, I had fun, learned a lot and saved a bit of traffic congestion ;-)

World Usability Day

World Usability Day is an initiative that promotes usability all over the world. This year's theme is about transportation. I am curious to see how we can be more aware of usability in transportation. On this day, the Global Transport Challenge will be launched in order to help us see how our transportation choices and actions impact our environment.

I will attend the

Look for an event registered in your town in the World Usability Day website and don't miss it.

Process-UI Alignment

It's been over a year since I've started working on analyzing the situation of large corporations, like banks and insurances, that have difficulties in identifying the impact that changes on business processes have on their enterprise systems. The main difference in our strategy is that we take the user interface perspective. One of the questions we answer is: Which user interfaces of these enterprise systems should be updated after changes on their business processes? 

Why do we adopt this perspective, when there are already several solutions for Business-IT alignment? There has been a new wave in business models that value innovation as a driver for business growth, as I've seen in the book I'm reading: The New Age of Innovation. For that to be achieve, one of the pillars of innovation in business is to consider one consumer experience at a time. And where is most of that "consumer experience" taking place nowadays? It happens online, such as when we consult our account balance in our Internet banking.

So we sustain that user interaction represents a rich source for business value! That's why we support business alignment with user interfaces. There is a long way to go to make this perspective part of the executive agenda, but Pradeep Henry has already highlighted his experience in aligning UI with business process. 

To learn more about what we mean by that, you can access Wikipedia, which already has an entry on this new and exciting subject with a link to one of our major publications, as you can see on the print screen below related to the subject Process-centered design.