I like storytelling, I like Spielberg and JK Rowling. The conflicts, the suspense, the events and transactions enhanced with what people think and feel. All tweaked and bent so the story flows better.
Just like accounting - summarised reports of events and transactions, all tweaked so the intended story is easier to follow.
That's the beauty of using events to paint a picture, lots of freedom but alas little reality.
If you're working in an enterprise, when you order a widget you describe the first event with an "order sheet", then the shipping event with "shipping papers" and so forth. To understand the widget, or understand Harry Potter, you have to study the events and put them all together, a whole stack of reports and sheets in the enterprise world, or a book in Rowling's world. But just as for Harry Potter one event might throw you off and conflict ensues. In accounting that's called reconciliation.
And of course, add SOX and other regulation rules to keep a lid on things.
This is how enterprise software is designed, event documentation, or as some would call it, storytelling. Even the enterprise tools like word-processors and spreadsheets are support tools for the storytelling, and worse, made for story manipulation.
This because event documentation, or story telling, was the only way to capture the essence of the enterprise when we only had pen and papers. Event-driven and event-documentation. Or transaction-driven - same concept but for stuff with value.
But there is another way. It's called object-driven and object-representation.
If I'm at a football game my eyes follows the ball and registers it's every move, the spin, the direction, the goals. The game is object-driven. If the ball looses speed and stops up I can deduce nobody has kicked it, the object represents what happens. Obviously I'll also keep an eye on the other "objects"; the ball-kicking-assignees - the players.
The plants in my garden "tells" me if they get too little water or sun by signs of dry leaves. The plant-object captures all that happens to it and I can deduce what happened. I'm using "rules" and "mapping templates" in my studies of the object - dry leaves, short of water - then I'll increase watering by changing the "aperture" property of the "sprinkler" object.
When I'm driving, my eyes are peeled on other objects; cars, people and cyclist - objects with telling signs of what's going to happen is "told" by the objects themselves. No doubt also a object-driven environment.
The assembly line used to be like that, the car arrived without doors - I have doors at the ready and tools to fasten them. No need for a "work order" I can deduce from the objects themselves what my task is, and when. After that the object itself have captured what has happened to it, no need for an event report as the doors are visibly in place. If they were not the object itself would have "told" that I fell short of my task.
This is possible to attain using IT: Let any real-world object be represented by one data-object, punt those data-objects letting the real objects follow along the sequence of work that shall happen in lieu of work-orders. Then let the data-objects capture what happens and use templates with rules to produce any report with immediate effect.
What about virtual objects? No problem, replace the "car" object with a data object representing say an "issue" or a "medical condition" and add details as properties of such data-objects and punt it to an expert or the doctor who then decides where to punt it onwards. X-ray perhaps? Another expert? The work-order or appointment comes as a fully displayed data-object just like the car on the assembly line, no doubt what to do, no need to tell "please fix this patient" and data capture happens through the object properties being filled out or changed as well through capture of who and when did it all.
That way an object-driven model of the enterprise will open for far easier modelling of barely repeatable processes as well as the classic linear ones, have much built in run-flexibility and deliver reports real-time in any format with no need to worry about reconciliation. SOX and other rules all covered by design too.
Boring perhaps, storytelling being so much fun - but your shareholders will thank you and the CPA will have less to do.
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