ELM Patterns Templates with Remco Broekmans

Join Shane Gibson as he chats with Remco Broekmans about the pattern templates that are part of the Ensemble Logical Modeling (ELM) patterns.

Read along you will

Shane: Welcome to the Agile Data Podcast. I’m Shane Gibson. And I’m Remco. Hey Remco, thanks for coming on the podcast. Today. We’re gonna have a bit of a chat around Im, and probably start off talking about model storming ’cause it’s a shared love of ours. But before we do that, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience?

Remco: Yeah, thanks Shane. Looking forward to this podcast because it really focusing on two of the parts I am working on latest, but to introduce myself. I am living in the Netherlands, near Rotterdam. I work for Gen C Academy. Mainly I’m doing training on data vault and the LM approach. Do a lot of workshop with customers to help them out to go for what kind of information, what kind of models we need to come up with, what kind of data we need to come up with.

And that basically my job for the cost, I would say. Six, seven years that I’m really working with customers to say, what do we need to do? What do we need to capture? And I was just thinking there are some ways to do that. One, it is not just look at the data. Boom. Here it is. So I came up with, together with Hans, um, the Elm approach.

We do model storming. Of course we nick from. As others as your ideas, right? So we find some ideas, we find some similarities. This is something which is working for us, so I’m happy to talk about that one for sure, because it really is something I’m very fond of. By the way, my background, I’ve been a lab technician, I’ve been an environmental engineer, so I have completely different background and a whole bunch of people in the data world.

Which I think helps me having a different view on stuff than some other people have. So I know the importance of communication with non-IT people. For instance,

Shane: great fan of Lawrence’s work. And I think about it as innovation. We find patterns that are useful and then we innovate and, and iterate them to, to make them slightly better given our context.

But we always recognize the people’s work that we are leveraging, and I think that’s, that’s the, we should do it. Talks about the seven W’s, and for you, I think there’s actually like two bees, but maybe a third. Because you were a baker, I believe and you were a brewer. Yeah, so bread and beer, two of my favorites.

Now, if you happen to be a barista in your career, you would’ve nailed all three or a C Chocola tea, actually. But that’s a seed, not a bees. You, you, you were never a barista. Right? That’s the one that’s missing.

Remco: According to my wife, I drink so much coffee. I, I have a similar letter with a barista Now. I’ve never been a proper barista.

I’m just using a machine, which creates a coffee for me. But I think there might be a career change coming up. I. Maybe someday.

Shane: Yeah. And then C chocolatier, right? Because you’re in Europe, of course, without a

Remco: doubt.

Shane: So model storming. This idea of running interactive, collaborative workshops with our stakeholders, where we work together to use some patent templates to solve a problem, to either problem solve together or to elicit.

Some requirements or some shared understanding, and I call it pattern storming. I think you and Lawrence call it model storming. There’s brainstorming, I think Scott Ambler from memory was agile data modeling or model storming as well. So it’s this idea of word in front storming. Talk me through the process of how you model Storm was stakeholders.

Remco: Yeah, and I think you might recognize as well, Shane, it all starts with getting the right people in the room. Because what I found out is that, of course, when I did my modeling and in the past, and I, you need to get information, you want to talk to business people. And of course the first time you said, oh, I need to create a data model.

Dear business, would you please help me? And then you make an appointment and you’re the only one in the room. Because they don’t like the term data modeling. And then you try the different angles. Of course, I said the secret is in the donuts or soap rifles. Hey, I’m going to invite you for a workshop on data modeling, and I bring donuts.

So then physically they might be in a room, but mentally they’re still doing something different. So I’m just thinking I need to do something different. And I think the most important thing is before you can do pattern storming or storming, whatever you want to do is. To invite people into a workshop from the business, from the organization without using any technical terms.

And for me, it’s very easy because I’m always new in an organization, so I can just say, oh, I was hired or, uh, asked for by whatever the person is hiring me to do some work for your organization. But before I can do that work, could you please tell me what your organization all about? And since I’m new.

People, business people love to talk about what they’re doing, are most of the time perfectly willing to do. And I try to stay away from the terminology like conceptual model or logical model or physical model. They don’t care. So that’s why I need I the first time it really get the people in for an hour and a half, two hours, two and a half hours, whatever time you think it, it’s fit for that business function for that domain.

And when we have the people in. I don’t want people in with laptop. I don’t want it. People in often. You get people in. Yeah, I’m the business analyst. Okay. Are you the business person analyzing information or are you the IT person which has a little bit more understanding of business people or You can sit and are you then business analyst?

’cause the first one are the interesting one because the people from the business analyzing data and running the day-to-day business, those are the people you want to have in your workshop. And of course then the whole idea is not to chase them away. Don’t come up with, yeah, I’m going to create, here’s the whatever system it is and here’s the data and we need to model this and we need to do crows feet and they’re gone out of the way.

So that’s one thing. The other thing is use that terminology. If they are talking about clients and prospects and employees, don’t say, Hey, you mean person, because if they were what meant to talk about persons, they would say, yeah, we have persons in our organization use their terminology in, in every single bit and every single sense.

That’s where my what I think good workshops start with, get them into the room. Yes, of course. I always bring stove waffles or donuts or licorice or whatever to get them going. Uh, in the Netherlands, it also helps when you say, Ooh, lunch is on me. There’s no such thing as free lunch. They don’t know it, but I know, and that’s where we are starting off.

Shane: So there’s some good patterns in there. The first one is people. Can listen and interact for a period of time, and then they’re done. So these model storming workshops typically aren’t full day things, are they? They’re normally, I think you said between two, two and a half hours. There’s a natural window before they get burnt out.

Remco: Absolutely.

Shane: Yeah, no distractions. So it’s turn up, be present, let’s get through it. And if we’re done early, we’re done early, but we need to get through it. And you need to be engaged. And that’s a trick as a facilitator, do it. And no proxies. You actually need the people who understand the business processes, understand what the data’s gonna be used for to help do the work, not.

One of the people, they volunteered. So it’s the right people in the room is really important.

Remco: Yeah. But basically the people running the day-to-day business know what they’re doing, know what’s going on, and yes, of course, if there is a business analyst or a data steward or whatever, or an IT person want to come, they’ll welcome to sit in the back and I can make notes and help me scribing because my handwriting sucks, but it can help me on that one.

But they’re not one participating. And also the very simple reason. I don’t want to have data or laptops into the workshops because. Then they are going to, uh, be it focused instead of business focused. I think what you want to do from a modeling perspective, what you want to capture at all and how are we going to store it and where whatever, I don’t care that much at that moment in time, but we want to know what is going on in the business, not how the IT perspective of what’s going on in the business has been done.

Because the worst case you can do is that, oh, look what you have now, what’s in your source system and let’s model that one. It doesn’t work that way. Yeah. So we really need people running the day-to-day business and like I am now happy to talk about my work and what I’m doing. You want to do the same?

You love to talk about what you’re doing. Business people in your organization love to talk about what they’re doing and I can tell you what’s going on and I don’t wanna focus on what is your issue at the moment? What is your problem at the moment? Because it’s not about what the problem is now. It is how they run their business, what is going on.

If you say, what is your problem? This SAP system, uh, is not doing what I wanted it to do, I think, yeah, that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what your stuff is going and of course, if during the workshop says we are having an issue because it took, takes too much time to look up if we already know so we can, to reenter a customer, then we need to have some process.

I’m making a note out of it, but it is not going influence my model. I think that’s important

Shane: when we’re talking about data model. Yeah. You’re not talking about a physical data model. You’re not drawing table tables and columns. We’re probably not even talking about a logical data model because you’re not capturing all the attributes of the data.

That may or may not be important in this workshop. A conceptual data model is probably. The closest thing that we have in the data world, although what you are capturing for me is more starting at a business model and then going down to some of the conceptual modeling patterns, but it’s sitting between those two.

And I think that’s the important thing is you are not going in and actually drawing third normal form or star schemas or data vault models in this workshop. That’s not the purpose of the workshop.

Remco: No, it, it’s not the purpose of the workshop. And also, by the way, it, it is a series of workshop, right? I, I cannot do everything in one workshop.

Uh, what you say, you can get people in for a good two hours, a little bit more, a little bit less, whatever it takes. You can get people in, but you cannot create a model with a group within that span of time. So we need to have follow up quest stuff. My basic role in the first workshop is first capture their business terms, the core business concept, just write them down and maybe also.

We’ll talk about the artifacts later, but maybe also do some categorization. So get some first idea about what’s going on, and then we have a follow up workshop. And yes, the end result, after two or three workshops, we will go to whiteboard and draw boxes. And draw lines to see how things are going together.

Why? Because it will help us, guide us and the people. That’s the interesting part. The business people do know, although they said conceptual modeling data, logical data modeling is scary, but in the end result, they are the ones being able to the boxes and. And I think this is very interesting and very important, not talking about those terminology at the first of modeling.

I don’t care that much about the terms. Again, I have a different background. Yes, I’ve been a baker, I’ve been a brewer, lab technician. I did all the other fun stuff. I don’t wanna talk about conceptual modeling or a business process modeling or whatever. I like Steve Hoberman’s terminology. He’s talking about align, refine, and design.

And I think those are brilliant, and basically align is what we in it world would say, conceptual modeling, refined should be logical. Data modeling and design, of course a physical one, but by using those terms, align, refined design, it also makes it easy because that’s what you want to do, right? You want to be aligned with the business, you want to map their information to something else, and you need to use their terminology and don’t make it technical.

Shane: And I think that for me, that’s what you are doing is you are creating a map. The map has a series of boxes, and in those boxes is a series of business words, terminology from the organization. And that’s what you do at the beginning. And we know that people can look at those maps and very quickly tell you when you got the map wrong, tell you how to fix a map so you get that instantaneous review before you go into any detail.

Because people understand how to look at maps. And figure out whether they’re telling them the right story or the wrong one.

Remco: And one of the things we, we talk about getting ideas or improvement or using work from someone else to improve like Lawrence core stuff is his idea about how to already directly write down in examples what’s going together and just use it.

We have that kind of approach in this as well. Last couple of years I’m introducing more and more something I learned from Marco Weber from K talk about fact oriented modeling. To say basically if you have something which is related to each other, right? The lines between the boxes, instead of just drawing the line and maybe give some critical name, just write down a sentence.

I have a customer box and I have a, uh, a product box and just draw the line in between and say, oh, by the way, with this line, we mean customer has bought product. Whatever, but just put it in because then it helps people from the organization who doesn’t understand. What do you mean with grow foods? Many to many relationship or one to many cardinality.

They don’t know shit about it, but they know, Ooh, if a customer is related to a product and why? Because the customer bought a product. It’s been written down there, which is perfectly fine. So I know the reason of the relationship. And I think that’s very important. If you’ve got

Shane: a customer box and a product box and there’s a line saying customer bought product, it’s a very different line to customer submitted warranty claim for product.

Remco: Absolutely. And that will be two different lines and two different boxes in between. And I think this is something which we, in data vault world or ensemble world, because same for anchor and focal, we have the same kind of idea behind it. Relationship between two Box is unique and specific. So between a customer box and a product box, we can have multiple lines, multiple different relationships.

And instead of what it worlds would say, Ooh, but there are different kind of relationships, let’s type that relationship. We just said no. Every relationship is unique and on its own, so we need to draw with one and probably also create it physically because it makes sense to have it physical as well, easier for data, and just have the names within.

Customer has, has bought product, customer has a warranty claim on a product, customer likes a product, whatever, as the same token, something like a, a seal line or a line item or an oral item. Those are terms from an IT department. Or an invoice line, right? And everybody said, Hey, invoice line, everybody in the organization know invoice line, but it’s an IT term.

We in IT world introduced a term because we need to have that in third. Number four, we say associated entity between the invoice and the actual products or the services. And it can be many of those, or there’s a many to many relationship. We need to have that associated entity. Ooh, we need to give the name, let’s call it an invoice item.

Everyone in your organization gold invoice items.

Shane: So I just wanna come back to, you used the term core business concept, which is a term I use a lot, and I dunno if I got it from you or somebody else, but it’s one that I use all the time and I have a description for it. But before I think about my description, how would you describe what a core business concept is?

Remco: For me, a core business concept is everything where a term where the organization said, for me this is important to know something about. I can define it and I can identify it, and I can describe it and have some context to it. That would be, for me, a core business concept. Some people say we have a customer.

Customer is a core based company because what’s a customer? It’s a natural person who is buying a service and or product from our store. So we can have a definition on it, we have a term for it. We can identify how to identify a customer. If you’re very lucky you have a customer, uh, code or a customer number.

If you’re not so lucky, you can identify a customer by coming in, say, oh, we have a whole wall of nice photograph all our customers and, uh, Shane coming in and we looking at, yeah, is Shane’s a customer? We go, we have to photograph of, of Shane as well. Whatever it takes for the business to identify this is someone we already know.

That’s important. Oh, by the way, what do we know about Disper? We know where the person is living. We know the first name, love, name, date of birth, all that kind of fun stuff, so we have some context for me. Then it’s a core concept. What definition, Shane?

Shane: So I tend to talk about, it’s something that the organization can identify and they wanna manage it or count it.

So it’s a thing typically. Yeah. Customer, employee, supplier product. And then the interesting one for me is I treat order and payment as a core business concept as well when I do it because we want to be able to manage our orders, we can identify an order, and we typically wanna be able to count. Number of orders.

So for me that’s what it is. And then we hold detail, but that relates to it. So your term of context, we wanna know customer’s name, date of birth, there’s all of information about a customer, about a supplier. So I think we’re pretty aligned on that.

Remco: You are aligned, by the way, the counting part. That one thing, if I’m looking at my training slide counting is also on that one.

And by the way, yes, payment or order or sale or whatever for us, and we come to talk about it, the templates later on for us. Those are events or transactions, our core business concepts as well. So they exist on their own. I agree. So

Shane: again, if we look at storming, remodel, storming, and pattern storming, it’s more than just a workshop.

What, for me it is. It is a workshop that is run in a semi-structured way using some templates or artifacts. Mm-hmm. So it’s not structured in that there’s a number of steps you’ve gotta do every minute, but there is a core structure to the workshop at beginning and end some stuff in the middle and some templates or artifacts that help you get from the beginning to the end.

With the stakeholders in the room, and typically they can see those artifacts being filled out as you are having a conversation, so, mm-hmm. It’s not like you are talking to them, making notes, going away and filling something out, and then sending it to them via email and watching them ignore it. You’re actually filling out the templates or artifacts as you run the workshop.

Is that your understanding of how you storm your

Remco: workshops? Yes and no. Uh, and a very simple. My, my when the workshop, and then I’m, I’m, I’m going to slowly introduce the artifacts. Yes, I completely agree. It is not a true structured one. There is of course, in your mind the ideal workshop. The ideal flow is we have six artifacts.

We start with artifact one, and we end with artifact six, and then we have the data model and there are just following up each other. But we also know that on every workshop when we do a workshop, we can jump ahead from even at the starting point to. Something at the end, or when we are almost think we’re the end, go back to the complete beginning because there’s new business term coming up and we need to put it on, et cetera.

I think where I make a small difference is that I give the business people homework in between workshops, and the interesting part is that if you engage them well enough, and luckily I. I’m happy to most of the time engage people well enough that can help me and that the thing that can help me with, remember we said about the core concept, what we are talking about, we need to be able to define it.

Definition for. Maybe some kind of what kind of attribute or context you wanna know, but creating the definition you have, the actual definition is something I tend to give to people from the business. Say after workshop one, oh, we have now this whole list of business terms, core business concepts. I put ’em in, I put ’em in templates, and one thing is that could you, you please fill in the definition.

It not my definition. It’s your definition, and I only want to have a couple of sentences just enough for the organization to know what it is, but I leave it normally as homework. In between, especially when you have 15, 20 terms on your board doing it within the workshop, it takes a lot of time to fill all the other stuff as well.

Shane: And also people can never agree. You spend one hour of your two hour workshop finally agreeing that there is no definition of customer and we can’t actually identify them easily because there’s five definitions of customer depending on which business unit you sit in.

Remco: Yeah. And and that’s, and I think that’s interesting because I’m using that same kind of idea, especially when people.

Have the same idea or disagreeing about what a term actually means, then it’s something I do within the workshop. I’ll give you an example. I work for a healthcare organization hospital, uh, and they were talking about a bat, and in one of my templates, basically it’s the first one. After having writing down terms what it is, I categorize each item.

Is it an event, a person, a place, a thing, or something else? So I was just talking about the whole stuff, right? We had, uh, hospitalized, all that kind of fun stuff. And then we had bed said, okay, what’s the bed? Is it an event, a person, a plate, a thing or something else? And of course, my, my markers already on the, it’s a thing, I know what a bed is.

I sleep in it every night and uh, I know what it is and someone says, yeah, it’s a thing. And someone else says, no, it’s a place. So we’ve got a discussion because something cannot be two different categories at the same time. Cannot happen the same term. Cannot be. He said, okay. Why do you think it’s a place in the hospital world?

A bat is a place because it’s a place in hot, in, in a, uh, a hospital room and there’s oxygen attached to it, and there you can hook up monitors, et cetera, et cetera. And the fun part is a physical bat doesn’t need to be in place. It could also be a wheelchair or chair or nothing. It’s still a. We call it a bad, that’s our terminology.

And the other person said, yeah, I’m from maintenance, so the bad is the one with wheels underneath. We can roll it down and we need to repair it. We initially, we had the same term, but two different definitions. We got that argument in our workshop, small argument, but we got an argument and said, okay, the same term cannot be used for two different things, so we need to come up with some kind of idea.

And then we come up with, we have a bat, which is the hospital term and a physical bat. So then we made two different business concepts. So then I’m using that definition within the workshop. And then I gave, of course, oh, and please refine the definition next week because we are coming back next week for the next workshop or the week after.

So that’s how it rolls. Yes. Workshop are free format. We have some ideas about what we want to do. In my head, I know from start to end what I want to do, but the order might be different.

Shane: And I’m the same. It’s got a canvas. It’s got 12 areas. I typically start in one area for a reason. I typically go around in a certain order.

I will always end up bouncing between the areas as something comes up. You fill one out, you get to the next bit. They say some stuff and you’re like, hold on. It’s true. Then we should have put it in here and so you bounce all over. But the template, the artifact gives us a form structure because we know what the goal is.

The goal is to capture the information in that template because that template is trying to capture things that are useful for us next. So that’s probably a good time to move on to the six artifacts of Im, do you wanna talk us through those?

Remco: Yeah, of course. No problem. We have six artifacts and basically the first three are focused around the core base concept, and the first artifact is really the starting point is basically writing down all the terms just on the board.

Row by row. That’s my first starting point and I’m not really starting with a template, but I first writing down the words and then I’m going to have columns next to it. So swim lanes and every swim lane or column is either an event, a person, a place, a thing, or something else. If you cannot decide what it is, it’s something else.

Then. The other stuff, and that’s the template. Number one is just basically the list where you are having the words and you can tick the boxes which category belongs in. And the important here is that you need to have, within every business function, with every domain, you need to have events. Because without an event, nothing happening.

There is no relationship. Now we have customers, okay, with what our customers doing, but now we have customers. But how do you know they’re a customer? Yeah, we have customer. It doesn’t work that way. Even if you say we have customers in product, but there’s no event. Yeah. Then you have to list. There’s no relationship between, so we need to have those events.

So that’s one important thing. We need to have an event. All the other stuff is basically for us to help. And template number one. So basically it’s list with the category swim lanes to just say, let’s look in the swim lane. Do we see terms, which might mean the same, yes or no? Are we having synonyms or are we missing some or would need to add some stuff.

So that’s template number one. Those templates,

Shane: those artifacts are open source,

Remco: right? Yeah, they’re completely open source. If you go to elm standards.com, you have to register, but basically you can download them for free and to use them, and they are Excel based or Google sheet based or whatever you want to do it.

Not a fancy product. There are nice bit product which are similar. What we are having on the first template or.

I just wanted opensource, easy to use, and let’s be very honest, people in the organization love Excel, so it is a very simple one. And the template itself, if you download, is just one sheet. At this template, the CBC list as we call the first template. And the second one is CB, C form. They’re basically one sheet because if I click on a business term, it jumps to the page and that’s what I’m, as a facilitator by the way, creating.

But it jumps to a page, says for this term, this is my CBC form. And the CBC form basically says. This is the name. This is the category. This is the definition. You can find it in these domains. You can have these main attributes. The first thing pops in mind when I’m talking about a product. What are the first things you want to know about a product?

Probably price and weight and the dimension, whatever identifier is there. And identifier is not just the one could be multiple parts together, which are really identifying it. We have some relationships and then we have also a place for. It’s also known as different products or synonyms or hierarch.

Complete and all the other stuff and a whole list of what are all the attributes we need to know about it. Not only the first one pops in mind or the other one. That last bit is really something a data steward can fill in or the IT business analyst can fill in because they know all the single attributes that there is.

Not saying these all need to be on a report, but those are the one, uh, we can fill in. So that’s why it’s also some kind of homework. But there is TBC list. The wording and the categories is, is template number one. Template number two is what we call CB, C form, and they are on one sheet, so that’s fun stuff.

As a facilitator, after the workshop, number one and number two and three if needed, I’m creating that one for people, so that’s why I can give that homework. I can just click and fill in to help out discussing. If you have a very long list, I happen to have lists where we are writing on a flip over and then they’re still popping up new terms, flipping the page, next, flip over, et cetera.

Then it’s very hard to see, ooh, within the swim lane, what do we have is the same, yes or no. So we also come up with something we call the CC Canvas. CB, C canvas. Basically it has the five swim lanes, so for event person, plate thing. Other concept has the five swim lanes and we just use post-its to say, oh, uh, we found out in the category, uh, events, these are all the business concept, business terms, business concept we named.

So we put them in. Just as they come in, et cetera, et cetera. So we do all the other ones, and then we can easily say, now they’re nicely tied together. All the persons are nice together, all the, uh, place nice together. And then we can see we have a customer, we have a client, we have a k, ooh, it looks like the same term.

So they are synonyms. So we need to pick one. What is the term we are going to use? Going back one step on the CBC list, as a facilitator, you need to know the mistake. If people are using the term, yeah, we have a customer and they’re coming into store buying product, and uh, later on we can have a client on a call for warranty on a product.

If they’re using those terms and you hear them as a facilitator, write them down as they coming. Don’t make the mistake at moment in time. At least that’s my opinion. Don’t make mistakes. Oh, but you talked to a customer before. Now you’re talking about client. Is it the same yes or no? Because the template will guide you to the moment in time where it’s the right time for saying, oh, we all categorize this person and now we see customer, client, and Kunt.

Is it the same? Yes or no?

Shane: Yeah, I agree. I think when you’ve got the stakeholders in the room and you ask them a question. You can watch them think about it briefly, and then they’ll start talking and then they will naturally run out of words and they will stop and think some more, and they will go to start talking again.

And that’s because they’re trying to give you everything and there’s this natural break where you go, I’ve got the most important things at the moment, I can get more later. Now’s the time to figure out what to do next. Bye. I’m with you. If they go customer and client, and as they’re talking to you about their business, about the business processes, you go, oh, is customer and client the same?

You now interrupted their flow and you’re gonna find it hard to go back and get that flow again. So let them talk, capture it down, and then go back and deal with the next bit that you need to deal with, which in your cases, grouping and duping, that’s effectively what the CBC canvas is there to do.

Basically

Remco: that’s what it’s doing. I, I, I experienced doing training, but also my workshop. But when I’m doing training, I have other people, uh, trying to run workshops kind of thing that, because I’m learning it. And we have in one of our cases and it’s about, uh, a bookshop with a coffee corner and some pastries, et cetera.

And the business case is just something very simple. Customers comes into our books, they buy books and newspapers, and they can get a coffee and pastry. What I see happening that people writing down on the CBC list, they’re starting off with with book and then, oh, but wait a minute, it’s also see newspaper and coffee.

Oh, product. Mm-hmm. I said, as soon as you make that general idea about product, instead of using the terminology they’re using, you can almost literally see the business people standing up and walk outta the room because what you’re telling them, I know better how to what is going on than you are, and I’m not taking you serious.

And those are really two mistakes you don’t want to do as a facilitator. Just write them down. And that’s the cool thing about the CBC canvas where we have everything, all the terms together. Then you see, oh, I see a book, I see newspaper, I see coffee, I see pastry, I see tea. They’re all things, right?

They’re all categorizing as things. Do you really want to see them on that level or can we do some grouping? Can we call it a product or can we have it a edible products and non-edible products or whatever terminology we are going to use. Is that the term we want to go, or do you want to use the terms you just used?

On that level, yes. We see, of course, if we call it product, we still see it was a flat white or a cappuccino or double espresso, and we see that it’s a, a New York Times or it’s the whatever you want to do. We still see the names. We can still make the distinction and we can have a, this is a newspaper, this is a book, whatever.

We can still see that on your report. It will show, but it’s more like, how do you calling it? How are you treating it? Do you treat a book different than a coffee? Of course, because the book is printed up front and a copy is created on the spot. Hopefully.

Shane: I agree. Alright, so C, B, C list. C, B. C. Form C. B. C.

Canvas. Take me home with the other three.

Remco: And then yeah, the, and then I think. From my perspective in when looking at modeling, the hardest part is all about relationship. Let be very honest, getting the core business concept is easy. It’s, even if you go technical, it’s pretty easy. But getting the relationship right and getting that one going, it’s way harder and that way.

On the CB, C list, we have our category of events and our first. Idea about going into the, the relationship going, so the MBR parts based relationships, we say, let’s take one event. Sale is an event. Okay. What are the business concept directly involved with that sale? We have a canvas for that one. It’s almost looking like the CBC canvas, but instead of swim lanes, it only has a place for one event, one event only For this event.

What are the CBCs, which business concepts which are directly involved? Oh, we see that in the person line. We have a customer employee in the place we have store, and in the thing we have, let’s say, product. Very simple. Someone says, yeah, we also have a supplier for the product. Yeah, but is a supplier for a product directly involved with actual sale?

Because let’s be very honest, if it’s not on the shelf, if it’s not being supplied, you cannot sell it. So a supplier, yes, it might be important, but not for the sales event. And then what we say out of this canvas, the event canvas, we say there should come a relationship between all five business cons, we all just named.

Then we need to find out is that the correct relationship and, and then the grain comes in or cardinality or we said, you know what, let’s use, and there’s not a template, a very fun one. It’s just basically a table. There’s some more to it. We can have some metadata to it, but basically it’s a table. Say, let’s fill in some example records, and I do it with business people, right?

Let’s give me some examples of a sale and just using a sales. Id identify most times number, but for instance, for a customer, I don’t wanna see. Customer one or a technical number. Just fill in. Who’s the customer? Customer is Shane. Who’s, well Aramco, what’s the product? Flat, wide. Can Shane buy within the same seal?

Multiple products? Yeah, on the same. So let’s, okay. 5 0 1 Customer, Shane mco, double espresso, et cetera, et cetera. And there you see, we are repeating for every single product, we are repeating all the other parts. Basically out of the event, we said it’s all one. And then we know from what we’re looking for in our ensemble mold patterns, we need to get that product out of the equation and have its own relationship to the event.

And then we do with our, uh, MBR form artifact and the MBR form artifact is basically example records. And we have a complete breakdown and it can be 3, 4, 5 iteration before you have all the correct relationships going. Again in a workshop, and most of the time it’s a second or third workshop. We get that one going and we get the information and then we, we have the information.

We know what the actual relationships are going to be. Then we can just put ’em on the board, and of course we are. Trying to communicate with business people would also trying to communicate with people who need to, in the end, create the data marks and the dashboards and the reports. So what we do, we summarize that the information we got from event Canvas, from the uh, MBR forms, we put ’em on the MBR matrix, which in the end looks really similar, like a burst matrix or bi matrix from Kimball.

And it gives you the idea about, I probably need to create for reporting perspective because this is my transaction, it has a name and this is everything involved. I probably need to create that one for my data much as well, for to be able to have a dashboard because let’s be very honest, if you’re looking at Kimball’s idea about fact and dimension, which I think from a reporting perspective is still the way people are thinking.

And even if you are not really creating a fact table, a dimensional table, but do everything in one big table as Rick from the launch used to say one attribute set interface. You still want to, to do that one, you still need to know what are the metrics, so what you want to measure, which basically what’s coming out of your event, out of your transaction, right?

That’s why you have your measures going and what angles, one, do you want to look at that one? Uh, but basically what we are doing as well.

Shane: Yeah, I use slightly different language now. So when I’m coaching people or teaching them, I talk about facts, measures, and metrics. So for me, facts are the numbers that are generated in the source system.

It’s the system captures that fact order quantity 20, that is a fact. It’s indisputable ’cause it was typed in. And then I talk about measures or effectively calculations we do on it in terms of sums, averages, those kind of things. And then metrics, calculations we would normally do in Excel as a formula.

So this divided by this time, this right. Supposed to get really. Grumpy about people couldn’t describe what the differences were. So when that happens and I can’t find anybody else’s, I effectively go. And if I might, Shane, I’m gonna connect that one from you. Yeah, that’s fine. And I think we both use data by example.

We use it a lot. So people should experiment with the power of that pattern by asking for real world records. Our stakeholders can give it back to us really simply. And then we get so much insight. Around what’s happening. So yeah, it’s a very powerful pattern. Okay, so let me just play it back to you. Six artifacts, six templates.

So the first one is C, B, C list, where we are basically listing terms and categorizing them. Number two C, B, C form, where we’re effectively providing detail or context about each of those terms. And then you’ve pulled out all the standard context and details we typically wanna need, and that’s what’s on the form number three, C, B.

C canvas, A way of taking those core business concepts and grouping them, and then understanding when we need to dedupe them. Number four event canvas. Effectively, we are now understanding the events that happen in the organization and how they relate to the core business concepts. So which core business concepts are involved in this event?

Number five, we then start doing data by example. So we start getting examples of data to fit that event and C, b, C model, because we’re looking for a understanding of, of some terms, we’re looking for confirmation, we’ve got it right. And then if there’s anything that turns up, like you said, can I order more than one product?

Can I order more than just a flat white when I’m in the store? Those data by examples, give us context. So as data people, we can go, ah, okay, I can see the pattern. It’s now here to detail parent, child, unbalanced hierarchy, all those things we know, but they don’t and they don’t care. And then the last one is NBR Matrix.

We’re effectively summarizing everything we’ve got into a simple map so people can actually understand what we’ve done. Is

Remco: that right? That’s absolutely right and and that’s also where the MBR matrix comes in place. But what I was talking about, we have our events data by example, records, but for instance, that supplier on the products, if you do the MBR matrix where everything coming together, we all have the c, the terms already in the column headers, and then you see I have a supplier column because it’s very important supplier.

It’s important. We did not involve in any of the other part where we are discussing it, so it’s a loose some there and then we can say, wait a minute, supplier is important, but how is supplier related to what we discussed before, supplier related to the product because they are delivering, basically delivering the product.

Okay. One delivery. Is that a new event we need to discuss or it’s just a relationship? I have supplier product relationship. That’s such it. So it, that’s why the MBR matrix is not only the handover point to the dashboarding and like the BI matrix, but also gives me idea I have terms which I ne didn’t use or never have related to any of the events I talked about before.

And with that information, I can come up with all the other relationship, which are. In place and are important. And I have one other thing during the workshops, and I think you might experience the same. Sometimes you are hearing some stuff and they’re explaining it and you don’t know, do I hear this correctly?

Yes or no? Am I understanding it? What I do is I am. Making a drawing on the board and my drawing is, is hideous, I think. Uh, but it’s fun enough for people to understand. I start drawing and originally I draw small people and I draw a desk and a computer on it, and I draw a form or a truck or whatever I need to do to draw the business process as how I see.

Just to have people say, oh, you’re wrong, or This is going to happen, or whatever. And the first thing in mind when people say, yeah, that’s not correct, it’s different. I give them the marker. Do it yourself.

Shane: It’s a great idea. For an LLM, you can actually take a photo of the words you wrote in one of the templates, artifacts, and get it to draw a diagram of the business process.

And we’re gonna come onto that next. But before we do. So I use the term core business events and core business process interchangeably, and it is the relationship between those core business concepts for the customers product. Customer pays for order. Store ships product or do they ship an order, customer returns product, or do they return an order?

So that’s how you see it. Events typically being quite closely related to core business processes, not administration processes, not accounts, clerk approves invoice, but actual core business processes like back in the old days of BPM business process mapping. These are the kind of things that we are treating as events.

Is that the same as you?

Remco: That’s the same. The only thing for me, it it that it is, I’m still calling it a core base concept because it’s a term, but it’s categorized or identified as an event. Right. And I don’t want to introduce another term, what you’re saying. Right. I have core business events and core business process and that kind of interchangeable.

So basically you’re gonna say, I’m introducing two terms for basically the same. And effectively what you’re saying as well, right? It is something which is very important. So in your terms, it’s for you, it’s also a business concept, but because it’s an event or a process kind of thing, I’m going to call it differently now.

Yeah, and we try, I think if I understand, I think I understand correctly, we just going, it’s a core based concept. It’s something where the business says, for me, this is important. I want to know more about, I can define it, I can identify it, I can relate all the kind of fun stuff. And it happens to be of the category event.

Fine.

Shane: Yeah, I think we, we do it the same way because for me, the driver of the event, the order, the payment, yeah. Is the core business concept. And I do flip in between core business process and core business event. And I know I shouldn’t, but I haven’t got outta that habit yet. Before we get onto lms. Those matrixes very valuable for scoping iterative development.

And what I mean by that is in the example you used, if I can see in the matrix that for the order event, there is a bunch of core business concepts that are really important and supplier is not one of them. That means I can deliver the data for order and that event and the core business concepts without having to bring supplier in supply is valuable.

But it may not be valuable right now. But if I had a look at a delivery event. Then, okay, I’m gonna focus on supplier and probably not customer. So when we’re looking at those matrix, they’re really good for being able to put. Circles around things and say, we can deliver that bit first and it has value and then we can extend it out.

And that’s part of the reason that we do it, because it gives us a map and we can then use the map to tell a story. Is that how you do it?

Remco: That exactly the same. And of course, because I’m using, when I’m going to a physical model, I’m going to data vault or anchor or focal any of the ensemble patterns.

That’s basically how it working because there, there’s also a very agile mulling approach, right? I can start a very small and I just. Ball on top of that one without changing what I already have. And I think that’s very important and that’s the matrix will help on that one as well. Say, okay, this other thing, we got out of this first workshop or the first for business process.

Business function. This what we’re getting, where are we going to start? What’s the first step? Number one we need to do. Interestingly enough, by the way, because we now talking about starting off from a starting point, right? There’s nothing we greenfield, we just go in and starting to realize and think more and more and it, it’s working.

When I’m coming into another part of the organization, another business function. What are you going to do? And my approach at the moment is I start from a blank slate again, completely blank, but if I hear the same terms, I just write them down and categorize them to make sure. And then in the next workshop or maybe the end of the first workshop, I will definitely discuss, oh, you are talking about a customer, but the best function before has that customer.

Do we have the same? Idea. Do we have the same definition? Is your customer and their customer, is it the same kind of customer? Yes or no? So I try to start off with blank slate always instead of just giving, oh, I already have these terms. Are we missing something for your business function? Yeah, because that’s very scary and especially because people in the organization you probably, your experience well right, they in different part of the organization.

We’re using the same term for different things. And that’s scary.

Shane: Yeah, and I think it’s also about buy-in. So why it takes, in theory, more time for you to run the workshop from start with a stakeholder in a different domain compared to just giving them a list. What we know is when we give people the answer, they don’t engage.

They look for a couple of spelling mistakes. They may look at it and. Pick out something that you’ve missed, but they’re not engaging, you’re not learning from them. And you certainly, like you said, you don’t pick up the differences, which is the important part of data. ’cause we know that customer is never customer as soon as we cross domains.

Alright. Just to finish out, I know that you’ve been experimenting with LMS in this space as much as I have. So do you wanna talk a little bit about what have you been doing? How’s it work? How have you found it? What’s the point?

Remco: What I found out, and I’m, yes, I’m experimenting that every time and I, I have some resting balls in between because I have some different stuff to do as well.

And then I’m picking up again, and I’m surprised that there’s, there’s so much going on in the world. There’s new tools coming in and there’s new ideas coming in, and the models itself are improved. There’s so much going on with what I have now. Or we have our own data modeling, GPT, and what I found out is that the approach we just discussed, right, with all the templates, basically because this is how we humans work best, we can just organize small steps and they are very small steps with very small, structured, organized steps.

That’s basically how the LLMs works as well. Best. And so I created my own. I’m using chatt PT at the moment, but I also looked into complexity, which is a very interesting one. By the way. Claude will do the same kind of stuff. It’s basically saying, this is my bias because I’m introducing bias. I’m gonna, this is my knowledge, and they are all about the ELM process.

There are the templates. There are some examples about my mold process. Only use my bias, only use my information and go from there and say, here’s a business case. Find out what are my core business concept, categorize them, give a small definition and give me the event canvas. Basically that’s what we’re doing and that is just there enough to help, to assist out of your, the first workshops, to assist the model, the facilitator to say, we miss something, or do I need to ask more questions on this one or, because that’s also what I did.

Oh, and by the way, what question do I need to ask the business next time? So I. To seven questions back from the LM said, oh, you need to this one or this one. So just give the idea about how it’s working at the moment. It will be publicly available. Open source free to use for everybody somewhere the next couple of months we’re gonna deliver it free on chatt pt.

Not sure how it works on the other sets as well, like indeed propensity or uh, clo, but I hope if it’s available, we use the same kind of pattern because they’re all the same and I think really interesting what’s happening. It’s, I think it’s doing interesting stuff. I’m not an expert. I know maybe a little bit more than, uh, a whole bunch of people.

I know way less than a whole bunch of people, so I’m not an expert. I’m doing what I’m doing, and I found out that the ELM approach for data molding on an LLM works pretty well. So what is your experience on the lm, because I know you are doing fun stuff

Shane: It. It’s the same that where we have a set of patterns and templates that have been proven and they do one thing really well and they have a language and you have examples effectively, that bundle of knowledge can be given to an LLM and it can use it to act like you.

And then the trigger is what’s the use case? So, what do you want to achieve? What do you want a person who doesn’t have your knowledge to actually be able to do as if they have your knowledge? And so for me it’s guidance. I, I talk about three things. I talk about ask ai, assisted AI and automated ai. And for me, this sits in the ask or assisted, it doesn’t sit in the automated.

So I’m not a fan of the idea that, uh, a person with no knowledge can put something into an LLEM and get back a data model. That matches the business organization’s processes and events, and somehow we will take data out of SAP and Oracle E-Business Suite and Salesforce and transform it. I don’t think it can do that yet, but it is very good at taking our knowledge and making it available to somebody else when we are not, and I think for me that is a proven use case.

And the more people that can do that, it’s great.

Remco: Yeah. By the way, maybe your experience is same. Right? I gave a business model to, to cloud, to chat, to co-pilot and just say, create a data model without any extra information. Here’s a business case. Create a data model. It’s coming back perfectly fine with, with a PR diagram.

You say, oh, and I want a visual. Of course. And even if I say, oh, by the way, uh, make a data vault out of it, it’s nicely, is going to take basically the ER diagram and says, oh, every entity should be blue and yellow for a hub and a satellite. And all the lines should have a green box on top of, for the relationship, for the links.

It’s doing that work. Basically the scary part is that indeed people are doing it and think, Ooh, this is correct, and this is because it’s looking great and it’s correct, and I just push the button and go into full blown production and that’s what’s happening with two vendors at the moment. They are doing, introducing AI as a assistant for data modeling and they basically say, gimme the information and we’ll create a data model and all the script and all the loading patterns and we do everything for you.

Just push the button and say, if it looks right, just go into production. And that’s scary because let’s be very honest, data modeling is hard. It is not just a technical thing because then you get a technical transformation from source system to another, from one modeling pattern to another modeling pattern, and just a technical transformation and doesn’t have to do anything with real data modeling.

Shane: I think for me, data modeling’s not hard until we say model and organization. In a way that’s fit for purpose and then make the data systems that capture the data, fit that model, and that’s where the effort is because. Those sort systems are being designed to run in a way that works with the system, the transactional system.

They have not been designed to capture data that matches the way the organization works, and that’s why data modeling’s hard because that’s actually a hard process. I think I might get there. I think once the knowledge of how to model a business organization and the process is a little bit more refined and how the systems are.

Relatively templated, then potentially can do it, but right now it should just be an assisted process.

Remco: I think what’s interesting, and I think that’s something I’m looking at with our data and GPT, right, giving input from a business case and with tools like Firefly or whatever, automatic note taking, you can just have it run during a workshop.

Normal works as we normally would do, just run it and just after that one, let the firefly or the other, uh, tooling, just capture the information, capture the essence, and create a written. Report out of what has been said, including sentiment, push it into my data model, GPT, and it will come back with, these are the business terms, these are the event, whatever.

This is event canvas and it might even come up with a data model or it now not doing it. And I still think I just want to have that. Own drawing myself because I want to get in my fingers. But it also would be interesting because then you have the business view on the data, on the information, right?

This is how we are modeling the data. And then of course you have, I know that you are working that one as well, right? Look at all the legacy system we’re having all the system in my organization find out what is the metadata, what’s going on in that information. So you have basically a map of the sources, how they actually are.

Generated by AI and lm, we have the one. Generated by AI and LM outta the workshops. So how the business sees them and then we should make the connection. And I think that’s one of the hard parts we need to come up with, but I think that’s doable as well. Just one push button, go. I think there always been it right process, just like we are doing real life right now.

Shane: The example I always use is you go look at Stripe subscription management payment system and you go, good. So it’s fairly obvious what a subscription if. If you’re a software as a service company and you use Stripe, it’s pretty easy to count that core concept of a subscription until you work with three organizations, three different companies, and they always have a slightly different rule for what is a subscription.

And, and that’s the term and the number that we have to give is their definition of what a subscription is. Now we can argue whether that’s good or bad that they do that, but that’s what they do. That’s where the complexity comes in. So small steps, if it adds value, if it assists you, if it helps you review your work, if it gives you ideas, if it gives you feedback, if it makes you think about something you haven’t thought about, if it reinforces you’re doing the right thing.

That is all good and that’s what we should use them for and they will get better over time and we’ll be amazed as we were a couple years ago when chat GPT turned up at what the machine can do that we used to do. So an exciting time. Alright, so just to close it out, if people wanna find you, if they wanna find the templates, they ims standards.com.

Remco: Now standards comes to one where you can find the template. Yeah. Another very, very large moment excitement thing. And they can also buy my book where everything is being written on.

Shane: Excellent. And they go to Amazon for that.

Remco: No doubt. They can go to Amazon or Technic publication and it’s called from Storage to solution.

And ping me on LinkedIn if they want to get more information on that one as well. But it describing the whole process on how workshops need to be set up and what you need to invite, how the workshop run. It’s all about today, the templates, including, uh, an example case completely written out and ontology in there.

So all the fun stuff.

Shane: And because we are data people and we are the masters of temporal data, there’s a high chance that this podcast would just happen to go out when the book hits Amazon.

Remco: Scary enough, it’s already out on Amazon and on technical publication at the moment. I wasn’t anticipating it going that fast at last bit.

I was writing a book of hard work. I’m thinking working for it four, five years now in a. I now have my document ready now that all the other stuff is going to happen for a long time and then it was rooms there. Excellent.

Shane: Alright. Hey, thanks for coming on the show and I hope everybody has a simply magical day.

Yep, Jane, have a great time. Cheers.