Dennis E. Wisnosky (born 1943) is an American consultant, writer and former chief architect and chief technical officer of the US DoD Business Mission Area (BMA) within the Office of Business Transformation. He is known as one of the creators and initiators of the Integrated Definition (IDEFs) language, a standard for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement efforts. [1]
Dennis E. Wisnosky was born in Washington, Pennsylvania. and received his bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from California University of Pennsylvania, a master's in management science from the University of Dayton, and a master's in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. [2]
Wisnosky joined the US Air Force Materials Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio in 1971, where he headed the computer and information services. In 1976 he became manager of its ICAM program. [3] In 1986 he founded Wizdom Systems and became its chief executive officer. [4] In August 2006 he was appointed chief technical officer (CTO) of the Department of Defense (DoD) Business Mission Area within the office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation (OUSD (BT)).
As of 2013 he left DoD to lead the standards implementation process for FIBO, the financial industry business ontology that is a joint effort of The Enterprise Data Management Council in conjunction with the Object Management Group. [5]
He has received numerous honors for his work, including in May 1997, Fortune magazine recognized Wisnosky as "one of the five heroes of manufacturing", [4] the Federal 100 Award in 2007, the Award for Excellence in Government Leadership in 2012 and more.
Wisnosky has made contributions in the fields of information technology (IT) consulting and training, including business process reengineering and enterprise architecture. His specialty has been deriving solutions to effectively move organizations from their "As-Is" state of inefficiency to their "To-Be" state of achieving strategic and tactical objectives. [2]
Dennis E. Wisnosky and Dan L. Shunk are recognized as co-founders of the ICAM program, which they founded in 1976. [6] This program started as U.S. Air Force funded program for Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing, and was brought about by the "needs and pressures in state-of-the-art technologies, economics, increasing human limitations, aerospace design and manufacturing complexity, computer developments, and competition from abroad." [7]
In the 1980s Joseph Harrington focusses CIM on the manufacturing company as a whole. Harrington considered manufacturing a "monolithic function". This book discussed how the functions could interact as a seamless whole. Harrington was helpful to Wisnosky and Shunk in designing the USAF's ICAM program in the mid-1970s, and their work, in turn, influenced Harrington's second book". [6]
Beginning in 1980, until asked to join the DoD, Wisnosky was a director and then an officer in public companies, [8] and then founded and successfully exited, a series of his own companies – the Wizdom companies. These organizations specialized in delivering the products and services to manufacturing industries in the areas of robotics, factory control systems and business process reengineering.
As chief technical officer, Wisnosky was responsible for providing expert guidance and oversight in the design, development, and modification of the federated architectures supporting the Department's Business Mission Area. This role incorporates oversight of the DoD Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA) – the corporate level systems, processes, and data standards that are common across the DoD, in addition to the business architectures of the services and defense agencies.
As chief architect, Wisnosky ensured that the federated architectures of the BMA fully support the department's vision, mission, strategy and priorities for business transformation, and that each tier of the overall architecture is clearly defined with appropriate focused accountability aligned to the management structure of the DoD. He verifies that the BEA and component architectures remain consistent and compliant with the federal enterprise architecture (FEA), and will support and collaborate with the DoD components to unify architecture planning, development, and maintenance through a federated approach. Wisnosky also serves as an advisor on the development of requirements and extension of DoD net-centric enterprise services in collaboration with the office of the DoD chief information officer. He was the first to introduce service-oriented architecture (SOA) and to the business mission area (BMA) and has established and led an enterprise approach to delivering BI based upon semantic technologies.
Wisnosky has published books and papers in the fields of BPR, semiconductor processing, information technology, robotics and factory controls, management, SOA and semantic technology. He is the originator of the funnel visualization of enterprise control networks. [4] He authored or co-authored 7 books. His book, "Overcoming Funnel Vision", published in 1996, won critical acclaim [ citation needed ]. His book, "DoDAF Wizdom", written in 2004, remains the definitive how to guide for successfully building enterprise architectures using the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF).
Regarded to be a technology visionary and an entrepreneur who can engineer and deliver products, he is a frequent speaker on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and semantic technologies. As a private citizen, he has testified before subcommittees of both the U.S. House and Senate on U.S. productivity issues and the quality of American work life.
Wisnosky has published over 100 papers, and Wisnosky has authored or co-authored 7 books, in the fields of management, computer science, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Architecture, Knowledge Management, computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM), electronics, computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) and the Semantic Technologies/Web. Books:
Articles, a selection:
IDEF, initially an abbreviation of ICAM Definition and renamed in 1999 as Integration Definition, is a family of modeling languages in the field of systems and software engineering. They cover a wide range of uses from functional modeling to data, simulation, object-oriented analysis and design, and knowledge acquisition. These definition languages were developed under funding from U.S. Air Force and, although still most commonly used by them and other military and United States Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, are in the public domain.
Business process modeling (BPM) in business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current business processes may be analyzed, improved, and automated. BPM is typically performed by business analysts, who provide expertise in the modeling discipline; by subject matter experts, who have specialized knowledge of the processes being modeled; or more commonly by a team comprising both. Alternatively, the process model can be derived directly from events' logs using process mining tools.
Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) is a US Air Force program that develops tools, techniques, and processes to support manufacturing integration. It influenced the computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) project efforts of many companies. The ICAM program was founded in 1976 and initiative managed by the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson as a part of their technology modernization efforts. The program initiated the development a series of standards for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement, called Integrated Definitions, short IDEFs.
A functional software architecture (FSA) is an architectural model that identifies enterprise functions, interactions and corresponding IT needs. These functions can be used as a reference by different domain experts to develop IT-systems as part of a co-operative information-driven enterprise. In this way, both software engineers and enterprise architects can create an information-driven, integrated organizational environment.
Enterprise integration is a technical field of enterprise architecture, which is focused on the study of topics such as system interconnection, electronic data interchange, product data exchange and distributed computing environments.
Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) is the manufacturing approach of using computers to control the entire production process. This integration allows individual processes to exchange information with each part. Manufacturing can be faster and less error-prone by the integration of computers. Typically CIM relies on closed-loop control processes based on real-time input from sensors. It is also known as flexible design and manufacturing.
The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is an architecture framework for the United States Department of Defense (DoD) that provides visualization infrastructure for specific stakeholders concerns through viewpoints organized by various views. These views are artifacts for visualizing, understanding, and assimilating the broad scope and complexities of an architecture description through tabular, structural, behavioral, ontological, pictorial, temporal, graphical, probabilistic, or alternative conceptual means. The current release is DoDAF 2.02.
IDEF0, a compound acronym, is a function modeling methodology for describing manufacturing functions, which offers a functional modeling language for the analysis, development, reengineering and integration of information systems, business processes or software engineering analysis.
Technology strategy is the overall plan which consists of objectives, principles and tactics relating to use of technologies within a particular organization. Such strategies primarily focus on the technologies themselves and in some cases the people who directly manage those technologies. The strategy can be implied from the organization's behaviors towards technology decisions, and may be written down in a document. The strategy includes the formal vision that guide the acquisition, allocation, and management of IT resources so it can help fulfill the organizational objectives.
Integration DEFinition for information modeling (IDEF1X) is a data modeling language for the development of semantic data models. IDEF1X is used to produce a graphical information model which represents the structure and semantics of information within an environment or system.
An enterprise architecture framework defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models – typically matrices and diagrams – for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.
The Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1996 is a United States federal law, designed to improve the way the federal government acquires, uses and disposes information technology (IT). It was passed as Division E of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996. Together with the Federal Acquisition Reform Act of 1996, it is known as the Clinger–Cohen Act.
Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization.
A semantic data model (SDM) is a high-level semantics-based database description and structuring formalism for databases. This database model is designed to capture more of the meaning of an application environment than is possible with contemporary database models. An SDM specification describes a database in terms of the kinds of entities that exist in the application environment, the classifications and groupings of those entities, and the structural interconnections among them. SDM provides a collection of high-level modeling primitives to capture the semantics of an application environment. By accommodating derived information in a database structural specification, SDM allows the same information to be viewed in several ways; this makes it possible to directly accommodate the variety of needs and processing requirements typically present in database applications. The design of the present SDM is based on our experience in using a preliminary version of it. SDM is designed to enhance the effectiveness and usability of database systems. An SDM database description can serve as a formal specification and documentation tool for a database; it can provide a basis for supporting a variety of powerful user interface facilities, it can serve as a conceptual database model in the database design process; and, it can be used as the database model for a new kind of database management system.
Business reference model (BRM) is a reference model, concentrating on the functional and organizational aspects of the core business of an enterprise, service organization or government agency.
NIST Enterprise Architecture Model is a late-1980s reference model for enterprise architecture. It defines an enterprise architecture by the interrelationship between an enterprise's business, information, and technology environments.
James G. "Jim" Nell is an American engineer. He was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and is known for his work on enterprise integration.
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.
Saffron Technology, Inc., was a technology company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, that developed cognitive computing systems. Their systems use incremental learning to understand and unify by entity the connections between an entity and other “things” in data, along with the context of their connections and their raw frequency counts. Saffron learns from all sources of data including structured and unstructured data to support knowledge-based decision making. Its patented technology captures the connections between data points at the entity level and stores these connections in an associative memory. Similarity algorithms and predictive analytics are then combined with the associative index to identify patterns in the data. Saffron’s Natural Intelligence platform was utilized across industries including manufacturing, energy, defense and healthcare, to help decision-makers manage risks, identify opportunities and anticipate future outcomes, thus reducing cost and increasing productivity. Its competitors include IBM Watson and Grok. Intel purchased the company in 2015, then shuttered it less than 3 years later.
The history of business architecture has its origins in the 1980s. In the next decades business architecture has developed into a discipline of "cross-organizational design of the business as a whole" closely related to enterprise architecture. The concept of business architecture has been proposed as a blueprint of the enterprise, as a business strategy, and also as the representation of a business design.