Introducing Themis
Dale: SDO is the next major phase. ALM doesn't answer the question "why am I building this?" because technology guys don't ask it.
Tim: There's CaliberRM I suppose.
Dale: No, Caliber tells me what I'm building, but it doesn't answer the question: "Why is this the right thing for the business?" So we've created products that are going to come out at the beginning of next year, called Themis. Themis gives business managers, CEOs and CFOs a role-based view of what's going on within their asset called Information Technology. I can look at a host of projects, and I can say "This one is extremely profitable, the company is going to make things happen. This one actually here we're losing money on, why are we doing that?"
Tim: I assume Themis going to talk to your ALM tools?
Dale: Absolutely. So from a management perspective I can look at a project and say, "This project is on track, but we need to change this."
We did this 20 years ago in manufacturing. My business was the Apple PowerBook division. [Dale Fuller is a former vice president and general manager at Apple Computer - Ed.] We started doing this thing called ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning]. All of a sudden there was a level of intelligence, of just-in-time manufacturing. When orders came in, I had the line set up, my throughput of materials was really quick. So that gave me profit. We're now talking about the same kind of process within software delivery, for a major improvement in profitability and predictability.
Tim: One of the difficulties with software is the uncertainty element. Developers might estimate how long some new feature will take, but in fact find that it takes much longer.
Dale: There's a big reason for that. When you're designing your laptop on the assembly line, you have a lot of problems. You can't do it then. That's called research. So in management you want to say, what's research, and what's really stuff that can be done. It's all about communication and collaboration. We need to have the tools say "we've never done this before."
Tim: But surely software isn't like manufacturing because there are new tasks emerging all the time, and a changing environment.
Dale: Yes, there are new tasks coming up, but I believe the new tasks coming up are actually very small in number. Most of the things coming up are repetitive things to drive the business value.
Tim: To make sure I'm understanding correctly, I'm picturing Themis as something which is going to hook into things like StarTeam and CaliberRM and Together, and it's going to present something which might look like what a manager has seen before in Excel or Project, rather than something that looks development-oriented. And it's going to have hooks so that if you make a change anywhere in the system then it appears everywhere.
Dale: Yes, that's the goal. Because everyone is a stakeholder in this at one level or another. So everyone has to be aware. We call it role-based awareness.
Nigel: It's all about integrating the whole development process so you see more of the business perspective. And yes, it means companies have to change their ways, they don't just throw in some coding and hope. It also means the company itself probably has to change the way it does software development. Companies at the moment believe in outsourcing to save them money. We think there are greater benefits by putting this process in place. You could save more by changing the way you do the software, in the sense that you're going to get an application that works, it's going to be on time, on budget, and give what the business needs.
Tim: Will Themis be hooked to a particular platform, is it a Java thing or a .NET thing or a C++ thing?
Dale: We're talking about all those. It's all-encompassing, just like our ALM strategy is all-encompassing. For example, we have to integrate into Micrsosoft's Team Server solution, certain people that are going to use that. There's also going to be people that will use the J2EE platform. What we hope to do, working with the team at Microsoft, is to build the integration hooks that hook the things together. We think that companies that are going to be multi-platform can then use one whole solution set and get to all the platforms they need to.
Nigel: It also means you market and sell the product differently. We're not going to go in and say, "Do you want a copy of Caliber, do you want a copy of JBuilder?" It's easier to say "Here's the solution set for a business person, here's the solution set for an architect, here's the solution set for a developer." And they may be different combinations. We're saying, "What are the components of Themis you need to achieve your goals." It's a fundamentally different way of selling and positioning in the market place.
Tim: Does that mean you're going to be licensing in a different way?
Nigel: Eventually, yes. We'll be licensing per user rather than per product. Different people use different products, there's no point in giving a business person a copy of JBuilder. What's important is the underlying software has this underlying common architecture so it knows what's happening.
Dale: The output will be in the applications that are visible today. A project management guy will want to see it in Microsoft Project. A PowerPoint guy will want to look at things in PowerPoint.
Tim: So you're going to be working on these connecting pieces?
Dale: Absolutely. There's a user base out there. We're not going to create a project management tool. We're going to create the hooks into a project management tool with all these status monitoring things that are real-time and real-life.
Not just MDA
Tim: You refer to MOA, model-oriented architecture, in one of your white papers on SDO. What does this new buzz-word mean?
Dale: MDA is a defined spec from the OMG, which I’m on the board of. There are going to be other platform vendors out there, which I can’t mention but are based in Redmond, Washington, that are not going to do MDA. They’re going to have their own platform for model design frameworks. We need to maintain a flexibility that says we’re going to be all-encompassing, and on all the different platforms. We want to have model-oriented architecture as opposed to just MDA.
Tim: So you are saying you will work with MDA, and you will also work with Microsoft?
Dale: Yes, and with anything else that comes out of the woodwork as well. Because we want to make sure that our customer base can make decisions without being restricted. If all you do is MDA, that’s going to cut you out of what others are doing. MOA is inclusive of all model-oriented type architectures.
Click here for part 3 of this interview
Copyright Tim Anderson October 15th 2004