Today @jonesde, @pandor (guru), and I are launching Coarchy.
Coarchy is how you design your organization. Coarchy is an application that helps you organize and write down your process stories, share them with your organization, and enable collaboration about what your organization actually does.
The process story and other methodologies come from more than a decade of experience building software for organizations of all shapes and sizes that culminate in HEMP (holistic, enterprise, mechanization, process). This is the next step in taking the valuable concepts in HEMP and applying them in an easily accessible format for your organization.
This launch is a preview of the software to get feedback and allow people to try it out, share it with your organization, and provide feedback.
Yeah itâs a different kind of process management system that uses text instead of UML to make it easier to read and write for everyone in an organization.
Yeah I have seen many like it, and I donât see how a diagram that most people in the organization canât read much less write actually facilitate change. For change in an organization to happen information needs to be communicated clearly, and adopted. I think text is a much better because the all the people in an organization can read and write it instead of this cryptic language that only experts understand.
Do you think thatâs true?
JBPM could be added, but I just donât think itâs that useful because it doesnât separate design from requirements. When you do that, you can change your technology without changing your business, and change your business without changing the technology you use. It allows for more flexible change and efficiency.
Does that make sense?
Do you use Aris? If so, what do you like about it, and what do you not like about it?
Moqui and JBPM, or any workflow engine, is not exactly relevant to this topic or what Coarchy is about. Even setting aside Coarchy for a moment, in Moqui workflow management for a combination of human tasks and automated tasks is generally managed in other and better ways. A workflow engine can be quite useful for certain types of work management, but compared to alternatives like queuing and project/task/WorkEffort sorts of management it adds a lot of overhead. I used to be a lot more fascinated by such tools, but in over 20 years of consulting with hundreds of clients on small and large enterprise systems Iâve only seen a handful of cases where it made sense to use that sort of tool versus other options, and never once has there been a case where it made sense to use instead of alternatives that are already in Moqui.
A BPML or other sort of workflow management system is not the only way to manage workflows, and 99% of the time it is not the best way, far more cumbersome and limiting than beneficial and streamlining.
In my discussions with Michael about Coarchy, which is not part of Moqui by the way, it is software built on Moqui by a company that Michael is running, there is some potential using Coarchy for process-based task management like automatically generating and assigning tasks based on a process story.
Coarchy is much more related to my HEMP book and work on analysis and design than it is on Moqui, so only somewhat related to Moqui. To get a better idea of what that is all about there are some excerpts from HEMP that I contributed to Coarchy to make available on that website, which you can see here:
Not sure whether I understand accurately: Coarchy is a means of requirements analysis tool, through which the system can quickly and accurately identify the needs of the customer, so as to better provide the corresponding software system solutions?
Iâve only skimmed a bit of HEMP, I havenât read it carefully yet, and my initial understanding is that itâs a requirements analysis methodology , practical and worth learning.
I have used different methods to analyze the requirements of many systems, and I have also used Aris to sort out the business processes of some enterprises. I now realize that the current analysis method can effectively solve the static and existing requirements, but cannot solve the requirements that the customers have not seen, or even think of the unexpected requirements.
The biggest problem with tools like Aris is post maintenance. As you said, the business processes of an organization are constantly changing, and the requirements documents modeled through the tool are static and cannot be changed automatically. But how does Coarchy address this pain point?
HEMP is a requirement analysis and design creation process. Which allows more clear communication about the needs of the customer to provide software system solutions. Coarchy is built on top of HEMP using similar processes that makes it easy to document (and soon to be understand) what processes go on in a business.
HEMP is basically how Moqui was made. Itâs certainly worth learning for designing complex systems with many people involved.
Coarchy uses text instead of diagrams to model process stories. Diagrams are basically impossible to maintain for any period of time with change, and require special knowledge to read and update. Text is easily maintainable and performs the point of the documentation better: to clearly communicate what people are doing, who should be doing what, and who is responsible for making sure what gets done.
The Text have advantages as you say, but there are also some disadvantages:
1ăAmbiguity, the same words will be understood differently by different people in different contexts
2ăVerbose ,maybe add to the burden of understanding
I wonder if itâs possible to solve this problem through AI, i.e. throw all the documents of the target company into the system and analyze and distill the business objects and processes through algorithms?