The hole-in-the-middle

by Philip Boxer
The challenge was the hole-in-the-middle. This was too expensive to satisfy on a bespoke basis, and too complex to run on a commoditised basis. The challenge was to find ways of managing the relationship with the customer differently – the enterprise had to develop an approach to managing infrastructure that could be dynamically customised from the edge of the business.

Pragmatics

by Bernie Cohen
As we move into a technological era in which socially critical systems are built around large and complex, locally universal ontologies, such as openEHR, the Semantic Web, e-government and Network Centric Warfare, we will need increasingly powerful tools and methods to mediate pragmatic and ontological negotiations among embodied individuals. One such set of tools and methods, built around BRL’s PAN (Projective ANalysis), is currently being deployed within the context of its associated methods of asymmetric design.

Our goal is to be able to meet the challenge of managing the dynamic adaptability of large complex systems-of-systems to evolving and disparate contexts-of-use.

Interoperability Landscapes

by Philip Boxer
This interoperability landscape describes a layer mediating between the demands of users within their contexts-of-use and the supply of services from APIs. We are interested in using this form of analysis from the point of view of particular new forms of demand to see where there are gaps in the resultant landscape. These gaps will identify risks that will need to be mitigated if those new forms of demand are to be satisfied. Asymmetric design is our name for the process for identifying and mitigating these gaps.