As announced in my first post of this new blog, I want to sketch the idea of our (freshly open sourced) project Glasnost today:
The simple purpose we aimed for our web application Glasnost, was to record, organize and evaluate organizational information. On the one hand there are the organizational units, people, projects, processes and products. And on the other hand there is the organization’s “periphery”: its customers, suppliers, partners, competitors and authorities. For Glasnost we laid the focus on IT centric enterprises with a complex system and application landscape.
It was very important for us to express not only the official and hierarchical constitution of an organization, but also its informal structure. An organization`s structure is seldom only a strict hierarchy of departments. Rather it is usually organized multidimensional by business functions, products or domains and geographical sites. Additionally there are established networks of people across all departments – and these are not mentioned in any charts.
And of course: each company is different. It is nearly impossible to describe one meta-model or entity relationship diagram that is suitable for all organizations – from small companies and NPOs, to multinational enterprises and governmental institutions.
Instead Glasnost provides the means to define concrete entities and relate them to one another. Of course there are a lot of entities ready for use – e.g. person, organization, organizational units, projects, applications, hardware items, etc. – but all of them may be customized, extended or replaced if desired.
So what do you get if all people, things and concepts of your organization have been recorded and interlinked?
First of all you can navigate online through the “graph” of your organization. When you want to get an overview about a project – just fetch it, read the master data and then follow the links to the involved organizational units and people, the customers and suppliers and perhaps have a look which software artifacts have been created and on which machines they are deployed. If need be you can drill down to the concrete version of an integrated third party library or the server’s operating system and check who is the guy in charge for that machine.
The even more important usage of this data is the evaluation and visualization inside and outside of Glasnost. We have some first visualizations of the “information graph”, but these are currently more experimental. If the further processing of data shall take place outside Glasnost the whole graph can be exported in RDF format.
I hope with this post I could give a first overview about our project. It is probably still in its infancy but I hope that more and more people will find it useful and just try it out. Especially every kind of early feedback is helpful for us to continue the development in an effective way.
Ticesso 