“... the growing complexity of the I/T infrastructure threatens to undermine the very benefits information technology aims to provide ... The obstacle is complexity. Dealing with it is the single most important challenge facing the I/T industry. It is our next Grand Challenge.” – Dr. Paul Horn – IBM
Over the last decade, ThoughtExpress has conducted research into the complexity found in IT systems and enterprise architectures. To reduce this unnecessary complexity we have created a fresh vision for IT together with new forms of expression and infrastructure. As a by-product of this research we have also discovered exciting unexplored ideas such as the semantic human interface and automated enterprise semantics extraction. These can transform the way humans interact with computers.
Currently, there is a great resurgence of interest in semantics for IT, for example, Tim Berners-Lee’s advocacy of the Semantic Web and the various start-ups in semantic search. It is recognised that complexity can be tamed with the appropriate use of semantic technologies. At the same time there is a strong move towards employing a cloud computing model. However, there seems to be no major system that can run enterprises using a primarily semantic approach. Our research shows that the main reason for this is the absence of appropriate forms of expression. RDF/OWL etc. are inadequate for this purpose, in our opinion. Our most important achievement has been the development of a non-technical, human readable and machine processable form of expression that allows the extraction and expression of enterprise semantics.
ThoughtExpress is the world’s first semantically based online enterprise management system that can be applied to any type of enterprise. We provide the entire computing platform, tools, and a semantic computing cloud.
In order to deliver web-scale semantically based enterprise management it was necessary to create an entirely new infrastructure to support it. Research was conducted into database systems, semantics, user interfaces and web protocols amongst other things, over a period of 10 years. The objective of this exercise was to discover the best way of doing things regardless of prevailing fashions and trends.
Most web platforms simply provide a virtual environment for application development by programmers. In contrast, ThoughtExpress provides a high level abstract environment in which domain specific experts directly express enterprise semantics.
Even though our offerings are web based, we can also provide the equivalent in an onsite model if need be.
Database
Databases employing the traditional RDBMS paradigm suffer from inflexibility, lack of performance and are not web-scalable. This is documented in a recent paper by Stonebraker, Helland et al. In fact, this paper corroborates many of the guiding principles behind our database design. Together with semantic forms of expression, the whole information store is very efficient and scalable. For example, the online read/write database is separated from the batch-processing database and replicated in real time. Processing is not done in the traditional way, but rather by a conceptual processor that applies semantics to the database inputs. Consequently, the read/write database is often only 5% the size of the corresponding traditional relational database and the processing speed can reach millions of transactions per second. Finally, the database schema is so generic that there is no need to alter it, regardless of application domain.
Web Technology
We have developed a real time, low bandwidth protocol that allows for automated self-publishing of the system user interface. It runs in any browser and has built-in telephony control, imaging, printing and sound.
Conceptual Processor
The conceptual processor is where enterprise semantics are expressed, stored, managed and executed. It comes with a revolutionary new form of expression for knowledge. Processing of information by the conceptual processor is massively web-scalable and can run on thousands of CPUs concurrently and be managed in real time. This represents the heart of ThoughtExpress. A very large set of generic enterprise semantics is embedded in our knowledge repository and is available for instant use. The level of complexity that can be handled is nearly infinite and, most importantly, is readable and expressible by non-technical domain specific experts without the need to know how to program. A base of ready-made semantics is available for generic financial services enterprises. This includes our own theory of the generic financial contract which encapsulates all varieties of financial contracts within one structure. This includes life, employee benefits, short-term, medical aid, equities, derivatives as well as any other complex structured products.
Enterprise Processes
The platform comes pre-populated with a collection of generic processes that are found in enterprises. These can be tailored to specific needs.
ThoughtExpress Platform comes with the following software services:
- Business Process Management
- Fully client centric Customer Relationship Management
- Administration: e.g. billing, claims, ( with imaging, telephony, SMS, fax, email etc. )
- Reporting (operational, financial, actuarial etc.)
- Business Intelligence with machine learning
- Knowledge management
- Modelling (operational, financial, actuarial etc.)
It is important to note that these components are not separate integrated applications but rather manifestations of one infrastructure from a common semantic and process base.
ThoughtExpress is not only a software service. Often the root cause of an enterprise’s ineffectuality is not a poor IT system, but an inadequate enterprise architecture and nomenclature. We provide a service deriving well constructed enterprise architectures.
Applications
ThoughtExpress is designed to be generic so that it can run any type of enterprise; nevertheless our repository of specific semantics and processes is mostly focused on the financial services sector.
Our largest client is an insurance enterprise with 10 million unit accounts and 5 million insured lives. For this client, we do end-to-end enterprise management including contract acquisition, billing, claims, agent commission and reporting.
Among our other clients is a call centre with complete business process management including managing agents, intelligent leads management, controlling telephony, managing sales processes, commission calculations etc.
We also have clients in the health and social science sectors.
Choosing ThoughtExpress for your enterprise
An important consideration when choosing a software services vendor is whether the technologies offered are rooted in the past or in the future. If your enterprise is in need of an end-to-end online management solution, especially when extreme complexity and/or volumes (over 10 million contracts) need to be dealt with, then ThoughtExpress can offer the most technologically advanced platform available. For example, we can handle very large corporate, governmental and country-wide enterprises.
Refer to current research and development for more information on how we are pushing the boundaries of technology into the future.
Semantic Human Interface
The present need to constantly write code for systems implies that the way in which IT functions is going to remain laborious for a long time. Is there a different way of thinking about computing, information, semantics, processes etc. in order to remove this need? Can we operate without having to write programs and make the structure of knowledge automatically accessible to people and machines? This is the fundamental aim of our research and development into the semantic human interface. After having developed our semantically-based enterprise management system, we have created a large infrastructure and accumulated knowledge about the nature of the problem. With this infrastructure we have made some fundamental observations that allow complete reduction of the status quo to something very much simpler. We are working towards a system in which processes are constructed from knowledge and are embedded within a deep social graph reflecting each individual’s relation to services, friends, objects etc. Within this semantic/social space, individuals and enterprises will be able to express their knowledge directly using our forms of expression, and services will form naturally without the need for individual/enterprise IT infrastructures. The ability to search exists naturally in this space including semantically expressed privacy rules. This search is unlike traditional keyword search as it is aided by a conceptual processor that intelligently manages the search process in real time. Highly targeted marketing can be incorporated into this process. The semantic human interface has the potential to transform the internet as we know it.
Wisdom Technology
We view knowledge as the manner in which one piece of information is related to another and, analogously, wisdom as the manner in which one knowledge base is related to another –as in the well-known DIKW hierarchy. Wisdom technology could potentially answer questions such as, “Is Knowledge Base A analogous to Knowledge Base B” or “Is Knowledge Base A a simplification of Knowledge Base B?” We have realised that once people start to express themselves in our semantic form of expression there will be a lot that is too complicated, superfluous or clumsily expressed. Thus we need a mechanism for identifying analogies and similarities and performing the relevant simplifications. In other words, we aim to manage complexity in an automated fashion.
Automated Enterprise Semantics Extraction
There are many large enterprises that employ old mainframe systems. The developers of these systems have often retired or died and there is no longer a deposit of knowledge of their business rules and processes. So how does one migrate such systems to newer platforms with no specifications? This project will allow automatic parsing of old legacy programs, discovering their inner semantics, simplifying and expressing this in our semantic forms and finally attaching human nomenclature.