Overview

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Workshops

2007: NASA Ames, CA

2006: Univ. Nantes, France

2005: Touchstone Consulting, DC

2004: Verizon Philadelphia, PA

2002: Univ. Maryland, DC

2000: Center for Creative Leadership, NC

1999: CSCL Workshop Stanford University, CA & 1st Compendium Institute gathering, RIACS/NASA Ames

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Compendium for Business Process Analysis

Compendium makes a good base for a Business or Computer System modeling package. In order to support a computer system modeling requirement, I created a set of stencils in Compendium that makes it easy to capture and share process and database models. The stencil images were easy to create by using OpenOffice's drawing package. It includes flowchart symbols and arrows that are suitable for modeling. Compendium's stencil management tools are easy to use.

Sample 1 and Sample 2 show the stencils with the nodes that can be dragged onto the screen. "Content Window open" shows how the description of the node can be entered. "Mouse hovering..." shows how the description can be viewed without opening the node, if you just move the mouse over the * that indicates that text has been entered for this node.

The on-screen behaviour is all part of Compendium and all I had to do was create the graphic images and tell Compendium what type of node they represent.

The ones shown are all reference nodes but I do have 2 Map nodes. One is for databases and the other for processes. These can be opened to show a new map with details in another map. For example, a process shown as a single box on the top map can be opened up to see the flows that describe that process in more detail. A database can be opened up to show its table structure. This can be done down to any level so that very large and complex systems can be broken down to the detailed required.

Your own custom graphics can be mixed in with other stencils or the basic nodes that are part of the Compendium package (plus, minus, lightbulbs, web references, etc) so that you can enrich a process model with links to web sites or reference documents.

In my real application, the process model is just a subset of the project map which includes other maps on hardware requirements, references to technical and scientific papers, marketing ideas, pages on competitive approaches, contractual details, etc. Links to Word documents, spreadsheets, web pages all open in the appropriate software package when I double click on them. Having all of the information managed through a single interface makes it easy to manage the project. These other maps use the standard Compendium images so I had to do very little custom work to get a very complete project design tool.