Analyse or Execute

From Yusuf Pisan's website quote of the day.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute - Abelson and Sussman

So, applying this to process models, does this statement hold?

Ross

US Marine Simulation via Mixed Reality

Continuing our military theme for the past few weeks, here is a great video on the simulators used for Marine training. The system is mixed reality in nature, incorporating environments that simulate Iraq and Afghanistan based scenarios.

Interesting to note the emotional responses of the recruits during the exercises. A key factor in the use of these simulations is to immerse the participant in the feel of the whole environment. Using a mixed reality setting goes a long way to assisting this process.

This has its applications in business processes as well. Even in business, there is an emotional component to a business environment that needs to be experienced in order to have the correct idea about the processes being performed. This is especially required for training applications with people. The health sector realises this, and has sunk a lot of money into health worker training simulations. However, to model the feel of an environment takes a lots of work to get right.

Which should keep me busy in my research for some time yet.

Ross

War Room Processes

Was watching an old WII propaganda movie on Auntie (Australian ABC) the other night. Found the Command Centre system used by the British quite fascinating. The UK had an advanced warning system of people listening for bombers on the coast. This was then relayed to HQ, and a visualisation setup, with two screens. One for detection purposes, where the bombers were plotted at regular intervals, and another table for interception preparation.

This interested me due to the visualisation analogs from over 60 years ago. Tables displayed regular updates on bomber and interceptor movements, along with a division of visualisations into different tasks - interception planning and monitoring. All of this tied together with much human input, to provide interactive updates on information, but not in real time...that comes with computers and sensors.

Reminded me of the historical background to the development of real-time computer displays and visualisations. Everything we do now in Info. Vis. has had an analog in history, performed manually.

And I thought I was being original. :-)

Ross

BPMNexus Professional Network

Was just invited to join this professional group called BPMNexus. Seems to be garnering a lot of attention from BPM professionals. As we say in OZ, "Give it a burl!"

Ross

Visualisation by Story Telling

Have just finished watching Battlestar Galactica, Season 4. Loved it. Have a soft spot for melodrama, and a good twisted plotline.

What has it to do with process modelling? Well, it struck me that a process model is a story, just like those used in entertainment programs such as BSG. It is the storyline of work performed within an organisation by people. Stories are also often described as people making choices, this choice making is another aspect of workflow.

So, can a story approach be applied to process visualisation? Humans have a long oral tradition in many societies of using story tellers to communicate information. The question the occurs to me, is whether a story is an engaging and easy to remember form of communication for educational purposes about processes.

I guess any teacher will tell you that a good story engages children. Have not read any information about whether this form is useful for technical information communication, so am speaking off the top of my head here. But, it is worth a thought, and I think I will return to this topic later.

Ross

Second Life and Medical Processes

Interesting post at the Dr Yesha blog about medical training in Second Life. Seems that Health is now a big user of virtual environments, with a lot of research being performed into its benefits. Intersects with a lot of my research with the Smart Services CRC in Australia.

Back on a Positive Note

Has been a while since I posted on this blog. Have been very busy with various papers and research and other work. So, thought I would begin the return with a reference to the positive results from Second Life's economy in this article. Have noticed myself that the online numbers of people has actually been steadily rising each time I log into the virtual world.

As I have suggested before, once the Gartner hype cycle dies, we will see the real applications emerge for such virtual world technology. Seems the savings in cost for in-world meetings is becoming attractive now, with the GFC draining a lot of travel budgets.

Ross