I caught up with some ex-colleagues for a few fat yaks the other day and it turns out they have founded their own company jodoro. Based on their experience as Software Architects working in anger with large enterprises trying to sort out their data models, they've put together a collaborative data modelling tool and service "graft" which provides a new way of attacking the data model collaboration problem.
Graft is hosted in the cloud and provides organisations with a collaborative data modelling environment within which models can be developed, extended, communicated, and published completely on-line. It's in early release stage at the moment, but it has a great user experience and I can see how such a tool could be used to assist in many problem areas including:
- efficient development, communication, collaboration, and implementation of data models on development projects.
- organisations looking to adopt and collaborate on industry standard models
Delivery projects
Graft makes sense on several recent projects I've worked on. On these projects a large delivery team (50+) has had to design, develop, share, communicate and collaborate, on a data model in a tool with a circa 1990's collaboration vibe (thick desktop client interacting with a model repository file. Whilst it was designed for multi user operation, it still has one foot firmly entrenched in single user world). The project essentially used the tool as diagraming software - taking screenshots of the model, pasting into a word document and then emailing to the client for review. The graft tool would move this process to a completely online world where all users interacted with the actual data model, and I can see a future where organisations could configure their own governance workflow process in the tool to keep the Enterprise Architects happy. It's only early days, but the collaboration experience will only get better as new features are added.
Adopting industry standards
Graft could also help organisations in adopting industry standard models and collaborating with other organisations in the same domain (assuming they would play nice). For example, graft allows organisations to take a standard model, select the parts of the model that are relevant to them, and leave all other model elements as 'passive' (they still exist but are not implemented). Over time the organisation can choose to include these model elements and along the way can publish their model publicly so that other players can extend the model and in turn republish their own customisations. This feature makes it very attractive to organisations that want to move to an industry standard model, but roll it out in bite size chunks rather than scoffing the entire thing. This suits the project funded world that we live in where the first passenger never wants to pay for the entire bus.
Check out the graft tool here http://www.jodoro.com and if you want to have a crack at developing your own model, I recommend watching the 3 minute video first.
