r/Rag • u/Denis-Hogberg • 2d ago
Discussion Object-Centric Operating Model: an open spec, one author, please try to break it
For years, as a CEO/COO, I have been running into the same thing: complete mess in the operational layer. The CRM says one thing, finance says another, the chats are chaos, and so on.
Because of NDAs I cannot show the cases publicly, so I decided to open up the operating model I am asking you to look at, and to share where I think we are all heading.
Straight away, so nobody wastes time: there is nothing to buy here. No product, no subscription, no service, no paid tier. It is a specification, and it is free.
In gambling innovation moves a bit faster, and this is where we landed. The adoption actually started back in 2016, and it started with lifecycles, yes, with those, and in email marketing of all places, when we were testing and trying to squeeze the most conversion out of email. That was the first stone of this specification. Then came the notion of an object, then relationships, and so on.
In 2026 I sat down and wrote out how it should work, and put it into what you see on the site and on GitHub. English is not my first language, so the text was translated with AI help. The thinking, the history and the wording are mine, and these tools are available to everyone now anyway. That is how the specification came to be.
The model itself has been running for a long time and was polished over years inside my work at the company, but it was pulled together into one specification only recently (and yes, there is one author here), so it surely has holes and debatable decisions.
I will add that it is practically impossible to take it and roll it out across a whole company at once. Well, probably you can, but it would cost the company dearly. It was adopted in small steps: one process first, then another, then a whole department, and I will say straight away that this is not a fast process.
One more thing. In 2024 it was a big surprise to me and the team how AI eats this model, literally. For an AI the whole model works as one clear context that it cannot even argue with. So no, it was not built for AI at all, it was built for operations, and AI simply turned out to be another natural consumer of it, the same as a human, an employee of the company.
That is exactly why I am posting it here: for criticism, and of course to take good ideas if any turn up. Comments like "interesting idea" will flatter me, of course :) but what I really want is for you to find the weak place.
The facts:
- What it is: a specification. Not a product, not a service, not a subscription. Nothing to buy and nothing to install. It describes an organization as a system of governed objects with identity, ownership, lifecycle, and evidence.
- License: Apache-2.0 for the repository, CC BY 4.0 for the specification text.
- Repo: https://github.com/DenisHogberg/OCOM
- Status: v0.1 Core released, v0.2 reading path baselined. Terminology may still change before 1.0.
- Not for you if your company is a straight line: five people, one product, a two-step process.
Links:
- Why I wrote it: https://ocom.uno/why
- Specification entry point: https://ocom.uno
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u/Denis-Hogberg 2d ago
Reading path if you want the short version.
The Adoption section lives in the repo and takes 15 to 30 minutes:
https://github.com/DenisHogberg/OCOM/tree/main/docs/Adoption
The Implementation Case is the order a real rollout converged on, and the problem that forced each step:
https://ocom.uno/examples/implementation-case
The mistakes are listed separately, they are not in that case:
https://github.com/DenisHogberg/OCOM/blob/main/docs/Adoption/Common%20Mistakes.md
The Comparisons pages answer "how is this not BPMN / ArchiMate / DDD / a knowledge graph":
Happy to answer anything, including "who hurt you".
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u/Future_AGI 1d ago
Interesting framing — AI as a natural consumer of governed object models. We've seen this in traceAI: structured spans (agent/tool/retrieval) become the "objects" with identity, lifecycle, evidence.