In a blog post, Rik Coeckelbergs, founder of the financial services company, The Banking Scene, explores the role of ontologists in semantic banking.
According to Rik, semantic banking introduces a standard language for everything - for products, processes, business units, business logic, business rules, data classification, software, and IT systems. The advantages of having a standard language can be enormous. Typically when combined with an organizational change the standard language puts the business back in control of their business rules.
The standard language enables banks to translate IT components into something that can be understood, interpreted and managed by the business. It becomes a layer on top of the current infrastructure. This capability is significant because continuous change has forced banks to rethink the way they adapt to it. More so because most business change requests have become technical and this exerts too much pressure on IT. Not only are they blamed when things go wrong, but they are also forced to shoulder more work because of continuous change requests. This result in an imbalance of ownership and responsibilities within the bank.
To overcome this imbalance, semantic banking can rely on ontologists. An ontologist is the nextgen business analyst, who can model a business program, in the language of the business as ontology. The ontologist can further define the domain concepts and their relations, as well as rules.
How does it translate with respect to adapting to change? In the instance of a change request, the ontologist models the problem in partnership with business, which provides the requirements and the test data. Only after an iterative process of testing, explaining, improving, and testing, the ontology goes to IT. The IT department subsequently adds the technical code to create a fully functional API. This approach helps both humans and machines to arrive at a common understanding of the information system. Thereby making change management effective.
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