This week Bill Gates noted that we need better modeling tools for software in order to solve some of the persistent and hardest problems facing the planet. I agree, but I would suggest to him that we not only need better tools. We also need better concepts and techniques for modeling. Some research on modeling human-machine systems by my friend Andrew has indicated that modeling techniques still lack meaningful representation in complex systems [1].
I have reviewed a number of papers this year analyzing Gantt charts and their capacity to improve project management. In each case, Gantt charts tend to get used as eye candy with no impact on improving project outcomes. The idea is to have a representation a group can use to jointly visualize complex data and understand it [2], but these current representations are still inadequate. So, simply making software that add digitizations of current concepts will not be enough. We need new concepts.
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