New patent protects MooD's unique capabilities

MooD has conducted an active patenting process since 1999, aimed at protecting those unique mechanisms and methods that make MooD so distinctive. The process consumes a significant amount of effort: the process from patent application through pending to full grant can take 5-7 years, and can involve engaging in lengthy discussions with international patent examiners.

MooD International has submitted around a dozen patents into the process, several of which have now been fully granted. An interesting recent grant is the patent for Panel Technology, granted by the US Patent Authority.

Panel technology is an innovation introduced into the MooD software more than five years ago to provide a range of interesting ways for architectural content to be accessed, queried and displayed. Panels are distinctive in that they automatically update in response to changes in underlying data, and so provide a powerful exploitation mechanism to meet the needs of wider business user communities. Panels can be assembled into forms, or blended with diagrammatic content to enable arbitrarily complex information to be presented in a wide range of tabular and graphical forms.

This technology differentiates MooD from other enterprise architecture approaches, which tend to limit their display forms to diagrammatic formalisms.

The patent has extended incrementally to track the increasing sophistication of MooD solutions and their support for increasingly interactive decision and governance processes:

• The initial implementation of this technology focused on the extraction and display of primarily tabular information through Info Panels.
• Subsequently, MooD development extended the panel concept to include live graphic effects based on a wide range of dials, graphs, charts, maps and gauges, all controlled through the same underlying principles and technologies. These are referred to as Graph Panels.
• The current MooD 2010 release has further extended the concept through the introduction of Action Panels which additionally provide interactive graphic behaviour to users, available through web-enabled architecture views.

The screenshot here illustrates all three kinds of panels blended into a single view that presents a range of connected information, inviting the user to drill through into more detail (using Info Panels), giving visual insights into the current situation (using Graph Panels), and to modify the information presented, or change underlying assumptions (using Action Panels).

This latest innovation enables users to explore visually the implications of making a change to the business: an Action Panel enables the user to express and explore the implications of the potential change in a graphical way, while absorbing the complexities of the various computations and connections involved.

Using panel technology, architecturally-driven business solutions have been deployed by MooD International and their partners to support complex processes for business decision making, change, performance management and governance. Such solutions are distinctive in offering the unique combination of powerful graphical information presentation and manipulation, underpinned by coherent information structures managed and controlled through a flexible meta-model.

The granting of the US patent confirms the uniqueness of this technology, and establishes the distinctiveness of MooD's “architecture beyond diagrams”.