Who We Are
Founded in 2000, Semantic Arts assists clients who have allowed their software systems to deteriorate to the point that improving business systems has become an exercise in frustration. We don’t sell hardware or software, and we don’t represent vendors. As a result, we are free to start with two inputs: your existing situation and your aspirations.
We are well-informed, completely objective, and have our clients’ needs absolutely foremost in our minds.
Our objectivity is one of our key values. We do not represent any software or hardware products or companies, nor are we a front for software developers or implementers. What we do is strategic consulting, helping people determine their requirements, planning architectural options, making selections and guiding their execution.
Principal Consultants
Dave McComb, president of Semantic Arts, Inc., has 30 years of experience in designing, building, and managing enterprise-level applications. He is the author of Semantics in Business Systems, a frequent lecturer and magazine contributor, and has instructed a multitude of trainings and courses on Enterprise Architecture, Semantics, and SOA.
Simon Robe, Director, specializes in enterprise data management and modeling, semantics, ERP, and SOA information architecture design for Semantic Arts. He has 25 years of experience consulting with the government and private industry, and in presenting trainings and educational talks on Semantics and SOA.
What it is like working with us
We think you’ll like working with us. You’ll find us to be highly engaged in your situation and at the same time we will respectfully challenge current thinking. We have a reputation for speaking straight without being offensive.
There are a few things you won’t get from us that you may get from others:
No Bait and Switch – We’re not recruiting new consultants for this project, nor pitching senior consultants with impressive resumes, then delivering junior staff to do the work.
No Hidden Agendas – While we have in our collective past designed and built ERP systems and many client/server, n-Tier and web-based applications and architectures, we are not angling for an implementation project. What Semantic Arts does is help enterprises define and migrate to their ideal software architecture.
No Ponderous Reports – We don’t find long final reports to be terribly productive, if that is defined as helping a client transform their infrastructure. We prefer to have worked toward broad agreement and consensus before the final report is delivered.
Guiding Principles
These are the four guiding principles that we use in our architectural design work:
Human Scale – Monolithic applications are disproportionately hard to change and very hard to replace. Small apps can consume many times their weight in interfaces. One of the cornerstones of our practice is helping clients reallocate functionality appropriately to human-scale applications.
Loose Coupling – A tightly coupled system is one in which changes in one area affect many other areas. Modern technology can help a great deal, but achieving loose coupling is primarily a matter of design discipline that starts at the architectural level.
Reuse Through Shared Services – In most mature organizations, we’ve found that over 50% of the functionality implemented in the traditional siloed systems consists of capabilities that could be implemented once and then shared, for a great saving in cost and increase in consistency.
Incremental Deployment – We’ve found that most successful projects migrate to the future through a series of measured steps. Avoiding “big bang” implementations and “bet the farm” conversions is one of the best ways to move forward without undue risk.
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