Carl Bunje - Chairman of the Customer Council - introduced the agenda
for this session:
- Business agility and the role that an IT Standards Framework can
play in facilitating it
- Invitation to Forums Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Tuesday
evening (18:00-19:30)
- Request for feedback on proposed future meeting dates and locations,
particularly through 2006
Business Agility
Chris Greenslade - Chairman of the Supplier Council - gave a
presentation (slides
available to members and attendees) on the existing background in The Open
Group on the business agility issue. While other terms - adaptive,
on-demand - are also used, "agile" seems to have become the
generic term for the ability of an IT system to change in step with
changing business needs. This stretched back to the October 2003
conference, with coverage continuing in each of our four conferences
through 2004. While the issue has been important, so far we have not got
beyond discussing it. Now we intend to take positive action to take it
forward. Chris reviewed the ingredients that affect change in a business,
what "agile" means in a business, alternative approaches,
metrics for evaluating change in a business, and the penalties of not
having "agile" IT systems. As an IT architect, he followed with
his view of an appropriate architected approach to agile computing -
Boundaryless Information Flow™ aligns with the principles of an agile
enterprise, and the Integrated Information Infrastructure (I3)
architectural model is therefore a good starting point for any
organization wanting to achieve agility.
An architecture for business agility has to be supported by agile
business processes, which in turn need supporting by agile applications
and agile information flow - both of these requiring an agile
infrastructure, in turn requiring agile networks. Interestingly, in this
architecture the items at the top are customer-oriented while those at the
bottom are supplier-oriented. TOGAF says the ability to deal with changes
in requirements is crucial, so architecture requirements are invariably
subject to change in practice.
Chris asserted that we need to take an architectural approach to this
problem space - as an IT systems architect, he made no apology for doing
so - to develop an architectural model for an agile business.
So what can we do to identify standards that will apply to support
agile computing? Carl and Chris opened the meeting up for discussion by
the members.
Andreas Szakal (IBM) totally agreed on the need for agility. It is from
the customer view that we need to be agile. In this context he questioned
whether one can really develop a reference architecture, and if so where
do you position it?
Ed Harrington (Data Access Technologies) believed we have already started
to address the agile computing issues through our collaboration with the
OMG on merging the complimentary strengths of TOGAF and MDA. Andreas
responded that while IBM supports MDA, it does not support every
specification that OMG's MDA is producing. Agile computing is a way for
vendors to show customers what their vendor strategy is, and this approach
has been relatively successful. His view is that a single reference
architecture is unlikely to meet the goal as expressed here. However, he
would welcome a customer member expressing their views on this.
Ed Hong (VISA) agreed that a single reference architecture is unlikely to
meet everyone's requirements, so what we need is a set of architectural
views from which we can select appropriate subsets to match the needs of
different businesses.
Carl asked the general question - from a business perspective, can we
drive it down to measure the agility of our infrastructures? Ram
Rangarajan (Sprint) replied that it would be helpful to populate patterns
and building blocks.
Skip Slone (Lockheed Martin) suggested we might look at
"agility" from another viewpoint - we want agility in order to
reduce latency and inertia. An example is how long it takes a new employee
to get all the facilities they need. In terms of standardizing this beast,
it cuts across multiple layers and disciplines, so it seems best handled
by a cross-Forum program, along similar lines to the Identity Management
program.
Carl asked members to consider two key questions:
- Can we do mapping of functions and agility criteria?
- Who within your organization are the right people to engage in this
agility work; i.e., we need the people whose job it is to make your IT
systems respond to changing business needs.
Lack of time to press these two questions forced closure of discussion.
It was agreed that Chris and Carl will take the feedback from this
meeting, and will arrange to hold a teleconference in 2-3 weeks' time to
enable interested members to give further feedback and decide on next
steps to take this agile computing requirement forward. Chris and Carl
advised that they will be in the conference for the remainder of the week
and will welcome further comments and feedback.
BoF Session (Tuesday PM)
Carl explained that the objective of this BoF session was to explore
how Forum members might improve the value of their memberships, through
considering collaborative ways of working:
- Perhaps through working in cross-Forum work programs (like the
Identity Management program)
- By sharing and contributing to the TOGAF development work
(contributions to the Standards Information Base, or new design
patterns)
- Starting new activities that members want to work on
- Addressing top-down enterprise requirements that will contribute
towards IT systems becoming more agile.
He encouraged all members to attend.
The BoF session is reported separately.
Proposed Future Meeting Schedule
Carl displayed dates and locations for the three remaining conferences
of The Open Group in 2005, and for our four conferences in 2006. While the
dates and locations for 2005 are already contracted, and the dates for
2006 are already well researched to avoid clashes with other events that
members are likely to want to attend, we are interested in members'
feedback, particularly on the preferred locations for 2006 conferences.
2005
- April 25-29 - Dublin
- July 18-22 - New York
- October 17-21 - Houston
2006
- January 23-26, US West (San Diego, LA, Seattle, Miami, Orlando)
- April 24-27, US East (Washington DC, Chicago)
- July 17-20, Europe (London, Rome, Barcelona, Milan, Paris)
- October 23-26, US/Europe/SE Asia/China
Feedback
- Clash - 17 July is IEEE meeting - 24-29 July works except for
vacations
- Moderate risk of hurricane in Houston in October
