Carl Bunje - Chairman of the Customer Council - introduced this session, explaining it
was intended to stimulate member dialog on business agility and the role that an IT
Standards Framework may play in promoting this agility.
In several slides (available to members
only) he summarized the work on this to date:
- October 2003: Presentations on various architectural visions of IT.
- January 2004: Board of Directors raised commonality among visions and standards roadmaps
for business agility as important issues to members.
- April 2004: Board of Directors White Paper on business agility published, and reproduced
in May 2004 Members Newsletter.
- July 2004: Members Meeting discussed how to progress business agility ideas.
- September 2004: Introduction to TOGAF tutorial given as a Webinar.
- October 2004: TOGAF tutorial repeated on Sunday evening in New Orleans.
Carl summarized the objective as the ability to rapidly, effectively, and efficiently
adapt IT systems to meet the changing needs in today's competitive business environment.
This is a critical enabler (or inhibitor) of business agility. The vision is that
standards provide the foundation for this agility; which ones is an issue we should
address. Carl recalled earlier conference plenary presentations on IBM's
"on-demand", on Fujitsu's TRIOLE, and on HP's Darwin framework for their
adaptive enterprise.
Existing collateral in The Open Group includes the Boundaryless Information Flow,
vision, TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM), and our Standards Information Base
(SIB).
He then opened the meeting for member discussion on what are the critical elements of
business agility, and what are the enabling and inhibiting characteristics for it in the
context of business processes/value, technical architectures, and work in The Open Group
Forums. He suggested some characteristics to initiate discussion - information,
applications and data, platform, security, management, safety-critical, real-time - and
called for member support on action to translate agility characteristics into common
requirements that we can capture in an IT Standards Framework for agile IT systems.
In discussion, the following enablers and inhibitors were captured:
| Enablers |
Inhibitors |
| Capability Maturity Model: technology; processes; people;
information Grade as levels 1-5 from min-max agility/flexibility. |
|
| NIST e-Business Standards Convergence Forum - taxonomy of
standards Open to all. |
|
| Agility is a Business Driver, enabling rapid change when the
business demands. Ability to change
We would benefit by gathering feedback from individual members on the value of agility
in our respective perspectives. |
Is optimization in conflict with agility? Agility is
business by business-specific; its value depends on your business.
Businesses prefer stability and naturally resist change and minimize the costs and
disruption this involves. |
| There are some IT artifacts and mechanisms that assist
agility. |
Diversity can reduce agility. |
| Understanding what kinds of flexibilities we need will focus
our attention on the real business requirements; e.g., mergers, acquisitions ... |
Poor processes can inhibit agility. |
| The longer it takes to change our IT to meet business needs
the less effective we will be. How to achieve agility? How much agility does your
business need? This will vary between organizations. Maybe we can devise a scale to
measure this level of requirement. |
Legislation
Organization that allows quick decision-making. |
| Understanding costs of not having a system architecture that
enables change. |
Systems where processes and data are not separated. |
| Run a Workshop.An inevitable progression from Boundaryless
Information Flow. |
|
Five members expressed willingness to contribute to a workshop to take this
proposal forward. All were invited to send in further input on this to either Carl Bunje
or Ian Dobson. Ian and Carl will set up a teleconference workshop to follow up on the
outputs from this meeting.
