News Round-Up and Report
Carl Bunje introduced the Governing Board member representatives, then in a set of slides he presented the agenda followed by the News Round-Up
items. These were:
- A summary of the outcomes of the membership survey conducted with attendees in the
previous Member Meeting in Washington (October 2003) and subsequently via email, inviting
feedback on their preferred locations for Conferences, how often they should be held (2,
3, 4 times per year?), and what themes are of greatest interest to our members at the
present time. Carl showed the survey results, and correlated these to the future
Conference locations and themes that The Open Group Conference management have scheduled
through to the end of 2005. A further Councils Survey questionnaire has been handed out at
this Conference, requesting additional suggestions from members on the hot topic
issues and favored speakers on these themes. Members were encouraged to complete this
questionnaire, which will help The Open Group plan future Conferences which will be most
relevant to members' interests.
- Presented our new leaflet on Governance of The Open Group, on what is involved in
serving as a Member-Director, and the procedure and timeline for the upcoming election in
the first half of 2004 for three customer members and one supplier member to serve on the
Governing Board. Carl declared that in line with the election schedule in this Governance
leaflet, The Open Group is now open for nominations of member representatives.
- Noted there is another new leaflet, on How to Start New Activities in The Open Group,
and went through the three-step process that is illustrated in the leaflet.
- Noted that an updated version of the leaflet on Open Standards and Certified Products,
first issued at the Washington DC Conference in October 2003, is now available.
Benefits of Open Standards and Certification
Elaine Babcock introduced and moderated this interactive panel session. She noted that
the Customer Council's new Open Standards and Certified Products leaflet sets out reasons
why all members of The Open Group - customer-side and supplier-side - benefit from support
of open standards and certification, and how they can do things to support this approach
to procurement.
Elaine began with a brief review of the most relevant points that came out of the
Plenary meeting the previous day. Running throughout was the self-interest that is
associated with supporting certified products. From the supply-side there was business
motivation and growth of new markets. From the customer-side there is the assurance of
conformance, reliability, cost-effectiveness, ease-of-use, reducing the cost of change,
and facilitating change in a business world where agility and adaptability is increasingly
important.
Elaine then introduced the panel members:
- Walter Stahlecker - Hewlett Packard (supplier-side)
- Judith Jones - Architecting the Enterprise, and Architecture Forum (neutral-side)
- John Schmidt - Enterprise Application Integration Industry Consortium (EAIIC)
(customer-side)
who each gave a short presentation outlining their views on this topic.
John handed out a leaflet explaining the EAIIC's support for open standards. He noted
that Enterprise Application Integration is a priority theme in The Open Group survey,
which pleases him. He heads the Systems Integration and Middleware group in Best Buy - a
major retail company. He noted RoI is also an acronym for Risk of Incarceration when one
thinks of the Sarbanes-Oxley punitive measures for non-compliance. He listed the OMG
standards on metadata, and the OASIS standards on common formats and on UML, which are
important to his area of business.
Walter said that from the suppliers' point of view, certification is a huge cost so
needs to be carefully balanced against the increased revenue it brings. ISO 9000 is a
major success but what value does it really add to those organizations who merely store
unused copies of it on their shelves? UNIX is an excellent example of high-value
certification. For Linux, much test technology was contributed by The Open Group to
promote the Linux Standards Base (LSB). The real value has to be judged by market take-up
in procurements. We must take very carefully considered decisions on what products we
select for certification.
Judith (see slides) noted that TOGAF is becoming very
popular, and is now being taken up as a certified product in the marketplace. There is
clear growth in this market. Why? Because the TOGAF management are doing something very
different in certification - certification for people, skills development training,
professional services, and tools. A key user of TOGAF is HP, and Judith presented a slide
summarizing their view of the value of TOGAF certification. We now have IT Architect
certification - in the global space - providing further value. It merits note that Judith
used some very recent Sea World experience with a dolphin to illustrate the points she
made.
Elaine then opened the meeting for members' questions, comments, and answers from the
panelists.
Carl Bunje (Boeing) asked how the three panelists view the problems of certification as
we move towards increasingly complex systems and specifications which address only part of
the overall solution. John suggested that we should not rely too much on specifications -
rather we should use product descriptions to help understand the scope of a system. Walter
agreed that as we move into business processes we do need a common language to describe
them. Judith claimed that architects are good at dealing with complexity, and realize we
need tools to handle the complexity; if you have thought through your
architecture/structure properly then managing the problem of complexity is greatly eased.
Barry Myburgh (Insight) noted that TOGAF-8 has moved into a new dimension - what about
providing an enterprise model for TOGAF? Judith noted that The Open Group's Terry Blevins
has done some work on the enterprise reference model, and agreed we need to move into this
reference model space. John added that Best Buy has developed reference models and finds
them valuable, especially for demonstrating the value of a reference architecture.
Jack Fujieda (Regis) noted that the Japanese Government has adopted an Enterprise
Architecture approach - how can we help the Japanese Government move in the right
direction with TOGAF rather than them take a possibly different direction? Walter felt
that we should always take a business perspective approach; this is difficult, but we need
to grow beyond the IT to understand and address the real business administration problems.
Judith noted that a federal enterprise architecture is part of TOGAF - this is used in the
UK Government so she saw no reason why it can't similarly be used in Japan.
Members should use the Customer Council leaflets to leverage better value from their
membership of The Open Group.
We hope members will be encouraged by the information and discussion on Governance to
take a more active role in the governance of The Open Group, through the Customer and
Supplier Councils, and through considering nomination for the upcoming elections to serve
as member-representatives on the Governing Board.
Encourage members to provide feedback on plans and themes for future Open Group
Conferences, for the guidance of The Open Group Conference management team.
