Washington State Department of Labor and Industries – In our first engagement, we evaluated their current applications architecture, designed their long-term service-based architecture, and planned the migration to that architecture. In a follow-up engagement, we designed the enterprise message model that will be the lingua franca for all application messaging interfaces and specified the common services to be shared across the architecture.

Shelagh Taylor, Deputy Director [CIO]

Sallie Mae – We were retained by Sallie Mae to design and build an OWL-based Enterprise Ontology. They had successfully been implementing an SOA strategy, and recognized that their ability to continue evolving that platform rested with the ability to more economically define the payload of the SOA messages. They subsequently asked us to return and automate the creation of their application messages using the enterprise ontology. That project was completed in April 2010.

Procter and Gamble – P&G faces a problem common to many companies: many of their senior work force are approaching retirement age, and there is a risk that their knowledge will leave the company with them. We have been retained by their R&D division to build an ontology of research work to form the basis for knowledge extraction and search. In addition to creating the enterprise-wide R&D ontology, we also performed in-depth interviews with a number of their exiting researchers and have organized the core of their knowledge into the ontology.

Washington State Employment Security Department – We were retained by ESD to conduct a feasibility study on integration of various applications currently being used to help job seekers find work. We were selected because they felt our approach would provide them a number of creative options not otherwise available.

The end result was a plan that avoided what would likely have been a $30+ million big bang implementation in favor of a series of manageable (1/4 - $2 million projects) that would get them to a long term SOA based architecture. Senior management were so bought into the plan, that when recent budget cuts cancelled the capital spending, they opted to continue out of their operating budget.

Colorado Dept. of Human Services/ Child Support Enforcement – We conducted a series of proejcts starting with an SOA Jumpstart project, in the course of which the Department was able to construct an “as-is” application architecture and a high level SOA target architecture as well as learn about a wide range of architecturally related topics.

Curtis Rose, ACSES Technical Manager

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care – This Boston-based medical insurance company is looking to take the next step in advancing their SOA architectural initiative. Upon completion of an evaluation of their information systems architecture, we presented our findings on how the company could best leverage their existing system investment through the used of semantically- and message-based integration strategies.

Washington State Department of Transportation In our initial engagement, we did a rapid but detailed review of 200 applications, interfaces, current initiatives, long range plan and a new system being proposed. We found several areas where they could leverage work in progress to speed up their new project initiative, and several areas where, with a slight change in scope and priority, the new initiatives would actually reduce the amount of redundancy and inconsistency. We helped them build a high fidelity depiction of their current "as-is" state (what was previously in a 400 page report that no one read, has been rendered, and massively updated, to a very large graphic of the as-is condintion). We then worked with them to define their long term SOA architecture with shared services.

We were retained by the CIA to help with high level strategic planning for their SOA environment. We'd love to tell you more about this engagement, but many of the key operatives are still at large.

Dave Roberts, CTO, Application Services, CIA

Mississippi Department of Transportation – We were retained by MDOT to assess their current architectural state and propose new ways for their future systems to converge on a more elegant target architecture. We found that they had independently adopted many of the best practices we espouse: they have very few jumbo applications that people were afraid to touch, and they were almost entirely off the mainframe. We provided some high-level planning for incorporating shared services and canonical messaging in their SOA.

World Minerals – We helped World Minerals with a number of projects including their long range systems planning, design of their architecture and evaluation of the feasibility of porting their custom ERP system to a modern platform.

The predecessor company to Semantic Arts (First Principles, Inc.) did a major project for World Minerals (the Celite Division of Johns Manville at the time). The project involved designing and building a very broad-scale custom ERP system (everything from QC and LIMS to production scheduling, lot-based inventory, multimodal distribution, etc.). One of the hallmarks of the system was that 97% of the 2 million lines of code were autogenerated, resulting in very high level of quality and consistency. The system was in use for 10 years when the platform became obsolete and was then ported to a newer platform.

-Bob Blewis, General Manager, Information Technology

Stone River (formerly a division of Fiserv) – This provider of technology solutions to the financial world has opted to build their future offerings using Ontological Model Driven Architecture. We trained them in Semantics and built their Enterprise Ontology based on gist.

Washington State Office of Financial Management – We were retained by the State of Washington as part of their Financial Roadmap Project. We documented their as-is architecture and provided them two alternative target architectures for implementing future statewide financial and shared services, one based on an integrated ERP package and one not.