Monday, September 22, 2008

IBM on Visualization of complex IT systems

Today I attended a lecture from Dr. Wim De Pauw at the IBM Forum Belgium. His talk and demonstrations were extremely enthusiastic and interesting. He talked about the visualization of complex systems and presented some tools for this purpose.

Jinsight is a tool for visualizing and analyzing the execution of Java programs, as shown in the figure below. For example, developers can view threads running simultaneously to identify the source of problems. Since it is for complex systems, you see little colored lines that are difficult to understand by novices. But, as he said, developers learn quickly to be like doctors reading cardiograms.

The web services navigator,  an Eclipse/RAD plug-in for interactive visualization of web service transactions, called my attention because it can also be used to link business logic with technology. Business analysts can view a topology of services and identify what was wrong. For me, this is especially interesting because I want to know how business analysts adapt to the IT world. How do they understand IT-driven visualizations?

Streamsight is a tool for visualization of streaming data that provides dependency analysis in which by clicking on one element, it is possible to know the other elements that are directly connected to it. This is particularly important to analyze and track elements of complex systems. 

Visualization is an effective way to communicate a message and it is useful to transfer information between people and to create new knowledge. This is essential for the interaction of different groups in the analysis of constantly changing information. 

My work also needs visualization since I am analyzing how to visually track changes from business processes to UIs. His lecture was very insightful for me in the search for innovative forms of visualization.


Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Presentation in Hasselt University

In January, during an exchange day between UCL and Hasselt University with the participation of researchers working with different areas of HCI (e.g. multimodality, ), I was invited by Karin Coninx to give a talk for master students of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media at Hasselt University, who were attending the course “User Centered Design”.

In May, there I was talking for several Flemish students (in English) about my work that proposes an original solution on how to align business processes with user interfaces of extensive enterprise applications in the context or large organizations, such as banks, insurances, industries, telecommunications, etc.

What called her attention about my work was that this traceability solution also adopts a perspective of a user-centered design method, which can be presented as a set of activities to be performed by professionals both in the business and IT departments. Such approach is very suitable for these students who were learning different approach towards user-centered design. In addition, they also learned about my practical experience with this solution in a large Belgian bank.

You can see the slides of my presentation entitled "A Model-Driven Approach to Align Business Processes with User Interfaces" below, also available at SlideShare.