Active Knowledge Modeling

About Frank Lillehagen

Frank has more than 40 years of industrial computing experience. He received his B.Sc. in Industrial Electronics at University of Strathclyde, UK, 1968, and a M.Sc. in Computer Graphics from University of Utah in 1973. During the 70s, he was involved
in research and development of Computer Aided Design software and workstations. In particular, he worked on the Autokon ship design tool, which was used for decades by yards in Scandinavia and across the world. Later, he was a co-founder of ICAN, which produced CAD workstations.

In 1986, he founded Metis, and in 1991 the first version of the Metis modeling tool was released.  The same year the Metis software won the Innovation of the Year Award from the Norwegian Computer Society (DnD). From the start, Metis was able to handle large visual models, presented in multiple views, in modeling languages that could be adapted and extended through metamodeling. METIS performed enterprise modeling projects for Volvo Cars, DEC, Boeing CA, Ericson, FORD Motor, MCI, and AT&T, and was acquired by AT&T in 1995.

Metis was originally developed to support product development in the automotive industry, but through collaboration with Digital during the 90s, business consulting became the primary usage area. During these years, Enterprise Architecture matured. After Metis was aquired by Computas from NCR in 2000, this became the main application area. Frank was Manager of R&D with Computas from 2000, and later with Troux Technologies, Norway, after they merged with Computas Technology.

In 2006, the company Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM) was founded by Frank, Håvard, and others. Frank served as the company’s CEO. The objective was to bring the visual modeling tools and methodologies back to its roots in industrial design and product development. We also sought to exploit results from the research performed over the previous decade into developing agile business applications without coding, solely driven by active models.

Some of these experiences are described in the book Active Knowledge Modeling of Enterprises by Frank Lillehagen and Prof. John Krogstie at the Norwegian University
of Science and Technology.  

About Håvard Jørgensen

During the two years at AKM, Håvard served as CTO. He was the principal architect of the modeling methodologies, languages, and tools that the company developed,
as well as the model execution services for task and process management, view management, role-based filtering and access control, and business rule support. Prior to that, he worked for three years in research and development at Computas and Troux, participating in several international research projects.

Håvard received a PhD degree in information systems engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2004. The thesis was entitled “Interactive Process Models”, and dealt with model-driven applications. He worked 8  years as research scientist at SINTEF (Oslo, Norway), in the areas of business process management, knowledge management, and groupware. There he was responsible for the development of the Workware emergent workflow prototype from 1997 to 2004. He has published several papers in diverse fields such as information systems CSCW, knowledge management, BPM, concurrent engineering, product lifecycle management, and human-computer interaction.

Frank and Håvard are now senior advisors at Commitment.

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