| Additional Information | For Your Eyes Only: Understanding the reach of your models
Most modeling artefacts (data, process, technology) that are created by humans for a specific purpose, usually outlive this purpose to become more that what their intention was. This creates a lot of risks for people who use these models. I think it is time to standardize this aspect and formalize it to prevent accidents in modeling reuse. The suggestion is a simple classification scheme to help us understand the usefulness of model artefacts. I call it the Eye-counting classification. It assumes that if you can count the number of eyes that your artefact should support, you understand the quality and verboseness that your artefact needs to support. This in turn helps you assess the amount of work, how verbose your artefacts need to be, and the applied notations and approaches
1. For My Eyes Only (FMEO)
These artefacts only have immediate use for the creator, and have no long term usage. Ideal for classifying sketches or doodles. Any notation will do here.
2. For Your Eyes Only(FYEO)
These artefacts are there to communicate between 2 persons/specific parties, but are not useful outside these parties. These 2 persons can be the *same* person over time. Without the communication context and understanding the parties, these artefacts are not really useful.
3. For Our Eyes Only(FOEO)
These artefacts communicate inside a homogenous group, for example an application development group. The artefacts are maintained by and for the group. Outside the group these artefacts are not really useful. It is important to standardize on approaches well know to the target audience like UML or ER modeling.
4. For Those Eyes Only(FTEO)
These artefacts have a specific target group in mind such as all executives (in organization X), all developers or all business analist. The group needs to be well defined but can be quite large. De creators don't need to be part of this group (usually they aren't). Here verbose models like Fact Based Modeling work quite well.
5. For All Eyes To See(FAETS)
These artefacts are fully self describing, carry their own context/metadata and meta-metadata as to be understandable by arbitrary persons. That does not mean that will be *easy*, just that all knowledge to read the artefact is provided (or referenced) from the artefact itself. This level of quality is mandated for things like laws and regulations, and hence should apply to all model artefacts that represent such laws and regulations. Here only approaches like de #VDA of the dutch tax authority are valid candidates. In de #VDA we can be not only verbalize the assertions, but we assert the assertions themselves (and we can assert those as well), creating a intricate set of customizable interrelated speech acts |
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