Current Practice

Michael Silves is a principal of Datamorphosis, Inc. a training and consulting firm based in Bainbridge Island, Washington.  He provides short term ad-hoc consulting and long term project-based contract consulting to clients in a number of different kinds of business.  He has written and taught courses about information modeling, application modeling and various kinds of structured, object-oriented and real-time design.  His consulting assignments  have included data warehouse implementations and on-line data marts. His most recent project was the design and implementation of the information system to support an international supply chain management network. This included not only the design and management of trip planning and tracking information but also the procurement and cleansing of reasonable geographic reference data.
 

Brief Background

Michael Silves has been concerned with the social and business implications of computers since he graduated from Harvard in 1966.  He worked as a systems developer for telecommunications, manufacturing, aerospace and consulting companies before he co-founded Datamorphosis in 1983.  Since then he has alternated between teaching and practicing methods for understanding and developing modern information systems. 

Michael has specialized in methods for capturing business and technical requirements in the form of models that are accessible to business users as well as those who are responsible for implementing software systems.  This is an important issue.  With the advent of almost universal Internet access, technology issues can easily dominate what should be business concerns.  Keeping the business users actively involved in the scene is more important now than ever before. Business leaders need to be able to see behind the Internet glitz to be able to distinguish policy driven requirements from technology driven ones.  The technical staff likewise needs to be prepared to separate technical issues from business concerns so they can ensure that business requirements will be met.  Both need to be able to communicate and work together to develop information systems solutions and opportunities.

Michael addresses these issues both in his training courses and in his consulting practice.  Whether the client is building a globally integrated business around an enterprise-wide data warehouse or planning to migrate from existing legacy systems to the Internet or evaluating package solutions to their information needs, Michael focuses on pragmatic approaches that help the clients fulfill their business information requirements by a process of capturing, understanding, clarifying, and communicating those needs.

Training

As a principal of Datamorphosis, Michael has developed a number of training courses composed of workshops and seminars.  All of the courses involve integrating various formal disciplines with real-world experience including the use of several case tools and modeling tools.  The courses range from Information Modeling and Business Process Reengineering to Application Modeling, Structured Analysis, Structured Design and Maintenance.  The courses incorporate Real-Time and Object-Oriented approaches with the other disciplines for environments where they make sense.  The Information Modeling course has been adapted to support Chen, Bachman, and Information Engineering approaches and to help support various clients' usages of modeling tools.  Whenever possible, Datamorphosis focuses on pragmatic approaches that allow clients to integrate their existing development techniques and methodologies with the newer disciplines.