How Not to Serve When Asked for Data
Why Business Users Are Drowning in Zeros and Ones — And How FCO-IM Can Help
There’s a moment in every business meeting where someone asks for data — and what lands on their desk (or screen) looks less like insight and more like a high-speed serve of raw bits. It’s a common mismatch: the business asks a question, and IT returns a flood of disconnected numbers, wrapped in technical jargon, dashboards, or databases nobody asked for.
But the real issue goes deeper. It’s not just that there's too much data. It's that we’ve forgotten the point of data in the first place: to communicate.
The Illusion of 'Data-Driven'
Why Grit, Grounded Vision, and FCO-IM Are the Real Game Changers
In the modern push for digital transformation, countless organizations have embraced the rallying cries of "data-driven decision-making" and the "AI revolution." Buzzwords echo in boardrooms. Pilot projects flourish. Consultants profit. Yet, somewhere between the vision decks and the dashboards, the people on the work floor—the ones who keep operations moving—are forgotten. And so is the fundamental truth: sustainable change starts with clarity, communication, and commitment.
Population on a Map
Whenever we post updates of CaseTalk on social media, some experts take these a step further. I love seeing those kinds of responses, for they are making me think outside the box, and add unique new features I never dreamed about. One of these comments was placed at a post about integrating the webbrowser in CaseTalk to integrate the web into the modeling workbench.
This specific comment suggested integrating Google Maps or OpenStreetMap into the model. It would allow example population, to be plotted onto a map, or have custom attribute annotations to indicate where the model element occurred.
After having given this idea enough time to ripen, I decided to combine the so-called complex type and Maps into one. Let me explain.
SIG 2024
On the 2nd of December, I organized another Special Interest Group gathering for FCOIM fans and CaseTalk users in Utrecht. After I briefly showed the feature list of the last 20+ years, we quickly moved over to presenting and discussing GenAI, Sortals, Hapsah, use cases at ProRail and RVO, and intriguing research on EnterpriseOntology by modeling in CaseTalk.
Pilot FOM in Rotterdam
"As a centrally positioned Data Services team in Rotterdam, we wanted to explore the possibilities of Fact-Oriented Modeling (FOM) for several reasons:
- We see a gap between legislation and regulations, and operational systems, which is something Ronald Damhof also discusses.
- Due to digitalization (a computer is relatively simple), it has become clear that we need to be very specific in our definitions and regulations.
- Can FOM help identify ambiguity in, for example, the regulations applied to a municipality?
We wanted to investigate this in a pilot related to Rotterdam’s policies. We carried out the pilot internally by modeling a GLO (Data Delivery Agreement) process. The pilot was conducted in Casetalk with support from Marco Wobben."
Robert Jansen and Victor van der Kloet
Municipality of Rotterdam
Modeling Entities
When confronted with fact oriented modeling, it can be a little overwhelming. Especially for professionals who have spent years on modeling entities. These people miss the possibility to enter an entity, their attributes and the relationships. For those, we have added a wizard to get started.
CaseTalk Bookmarks
CaseTalk supports bookmarks by simply selecting anything in the Modeler, and go to the Bookmark menu in the main window. There the selected item can be added to the existing bookmarks, or can simply be copied. By copying the bookmark, the bookmark can be pasted outside of CaseTalk and functions as a URL. Similar to the protocol http:// or https://, now the casetalk:// will work.
