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Company Profilehla associates is a loose confederation of consultants who help information technology organizations work more effectively with their business partners. Over the past forty years, Henry Apfelbaum, founder of hla associates, has followed an evolving career path which has led him from computer system design to organizational development, with waypoints at operating system architecture, technology planning, computer-integrated manufacturing, and distributed system development. If this seems eclectic, it is because he has always sought the underlying causes of complex problems, wherever they might lie. His keen problem-solving skills have brought fresh insights to each encounter.
BackgroundRole-based business practices have evolved from work done by Henry Apfelbaum over more than ten years. While leading a task force which was trying to develop architectural convergence for automation efforts within Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organizations, he realized that the models they were building had to include people as well as systems, and that models developed by analysts or architects in a centralized organization could not hope to keep up with the realities of a vast enterprise; the responsibility for modeling had to be distributed throughout the organizations being modeled. The notion that organizations, groups, virtual teams, and individuals are all instances of responsibility domains led to using role models as a basis for understanding an organization and its work processes. These concepts provided the structure for team-based cross-organizational initiatives at Digital, first for computer-integrated manufacturing and then for enterprise-wide information architecture. Apfelbaum recognized the similarities between responsibility domains and the concepts of object-oriented software design, where responsibility modeling was evolving as an effective way to anthropomorphize and design the interactions among inanimate system components. Beck and Cunningham had developed the CRC card technique (Class, Responsibility, Collaborators) at Apple as a way to teach the concepts of object orientation. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and her colleagues at Tektronix developed the notion of responsibility modeling as a basis for achieving good object-oriented design. More recently, Nancy Wilkinson's book, Using CRC Cards, has provided excellent guidance in the technique and its facilitation. Back-fitting these concepts to human and human/system domains via RM proved to be straightforward and highly effective. At Xerox Corporation, Apfelbaum joined with Norman Kashdan of Computer Methods Corporation to put role modeling (called Organizational Responsibility Modeling there) to its first test in an environment where the eventual design of a software system was not its principle focus. The test proved very successful. Two teams that had spent a great deal of effort analyzing their interdependencies had not been able to break through an atmosphere of we/they animosity. Role modeling led the participants to a deep understanding and mutual respect and produced a "pragmatic, near-term solution" to their problem. Those participants have gone on to become strong advocates for the technique and have propagated it in their organizations. Apfelbaum has since created hla associates to develop Roleware tools, evolve the practice of Role Modeling, and build widespread understanding and support for it.
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For further information send mail to info@rolemodeling.com
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| Copyright © 2001 hla associates | RoleModeling is a trademark of hla associates |
Roleware is a trademark of Computer Methods Corp |
