RE: Syntax Free Models - was: [Fwd: Oracle Input for Core ComponentsWG]

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

Bob Haugen:
>> To me, that gets back to "what do you mean by 'process'"?
>>
>> If you mean sending a document, then they are different.
>>
>> If you mean what one party does in the context of a two-party
>> transaction, then they are different.
>>
>> But if you mean what is going on economically, then there
>> is only one process which is an exchange, where two parties
>> are involved, a buyer and a seller.
>>
>> Make sense?

Martin Bryan:
>Very much so. A message is always the interface between two processes, that
>of the message creator and the message receiver. When I say
>Order>>Response>>Despatch etc then the >> identifies the point at which a
>message needs to be sent between two or more processes. I would argue
>against trying to create models that try to indicate both sides, though this
>is probably what is required to describe a "business process" such as "to
>buy" or "to sell", which covers both of the processes that the message
>interfaces with.

Why would you argue against modeling the whole business process?
How do you have "buy" without "sell"?  

I guess one distinction is whether you were still trying to model
single-company internal systems that send messages to each other,
or whether you were trying to model multi-company systems
that operate on the Internet.
Or from a slightly different angle, whether the focus is single-company
internal processes or the processes of multi-company collaboration.
Or from yet a different angle, whether the focus is on the messages
or the process in which the messages are embedded.

I like the fact that you are looking the whole conversation - 
sequences of messages, not just isolated individual messages.
That is a step up from EDI.  

To me, the next steps up are to consider the whole collaborative
processes between two companies, and then to consider the
whole flow of processes.  In other words, the value system
perspective.

Business is not single isolated activities, but sequences or
networks of activities that transform and exchange resources
until they reach their ultimate consumers.
Each activity is linked to successors that are its reason for being,
and to predecessors for which it is the reason for being.
These activity networks almost always span multiple companies.

Eventually (actually I think later this year, but then I am an
optimist), whole value systems will run on the Internet.

It is a qualitatively different perspective than EDI (although
pieces of EDI will still be in the mix).

Optimistically,
Bob Haugen