It's not just semantics LO6618

Michael Erickson (sysengr@atc.boeing.com)
Thu, 11 Apr 1996 12:42:38 -0700

Replying to LO6429 --

Re: the comments about shared context and the difficulty of system
modelers (in this case IDEF) in building models that actually
communicate...

I worked two years with a team building a modeling language they called
"the BERM" It was a classification scheme of Entities and Relationship
types that were very specific-and the usage involves constructing drawings
that formed sentences that described very specific things. A subset of
this approach was then applied to a major project in our company-with good
success. While not all modelers could agree on the view of the business
situation modeled by this method, they were fairly comfortable with the
meaning they were able to derive from the models.

(The team discussed the IDEF approach and found it much too "loose" and
general to develop any kind of consistent meaning by anyone other than
those who created the model.)

The main point in mentioning this is that the level of specificity
required to correctly tell the story required a great deal of effort.
Everyone who sees it has an opinion for or against this way of presenting
information. I suspect that a lot of us are just a bit too "lazy?" to
work that hard to communicate- but then we pay the price anyway, and it is
so easy to be distracted by HOW information is presented instead of
working on  What is the message in the first place.

later....
Michael Erickson

-- 

sysengr@atc.boeing.com (Michael Erickson)

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>