The Conference:

Managing the Mobile Workforce

'Managing the Mobile Workforce' was the plenary theme for The Open Group Conference held at the Newport Bay Hotel, Paris, on April 8-12th, 2002.

The Mobile Workforce is now a reality that all enterprises must take into account when developing and deploying IT systems. Increasingly, users at all levels require access to information from wherever they are, rather than simply through an IT system at the workplace.

Mobility challenges many of the fundamental assumptions upon which traditional IT systems have been based, and introduces a host of new and conflicting requirements.

The Conference explored how enterprises are gaining competitive advantage through the use of mobile applications. It looked at how the 'vision' of mobility has become a business reality, considered the business imperatives that are driving the requirement, looked at mobility in practice through a variety of user case studies, and examined the technological hurdles and developments in mobile systems and applications. It covered:

• The Mobile Vision - A Business Imperative
• Mobility in Practice: the Pros and Cons - User Case Studies
• An Increasingly Mobile Workforce - The Way Ahead
• Mobile Future - Technology Directions
• Mobile Security - Challenges and Solutions
• Mobile & Directory

The Conference also included a number of open sessions covering Architecture and Active Loss Prevention, Real-time and Embedded Systems, Quality of Service, Security in Active Loss Prevention, Enterprise Management, and Mobile Management, as well as an Open Forum and a plenary feedback session reporting on the achievements of the week.  There were also closed meetings of The Open Group member forums.

Plenary Speakers:

The contribution from Plenary and Keynote speakers (in order of appearance) was highly valued.

• Professor Laurie Cuthbert, Queen Mary College, London - Future Business of Mobile
• Paul Barker & Jeremy Fry, CMG - Remote Working: New Opportunities through emerging technologies
• Chuck Stockton, Senior Program Manager for Mobile Computing, Enterprise Level, Boeing - Implementing Mobile Computing Solutions at the Boeing Company
• Pat Brans, Solution Business Manager, Hewlett-Packard - Mobile Field Sales and Services
• Per Hasvold, Research Scientist, University Hospital of North Norway: Mobility and Wireless Issues in Norwegian Hospitals
• Janet Laylor, National Library of Medicine, US National Institute of Health -  Keeping Mobile Executives Connected
• Michèle Rubenstein, solutions4networks
• Michael Krasner, Principal, Krasner Consulting - Value and Usability in a Mobile World
• Richard Bauly, VP, Strategy & Business Development, Psion Teklogix Inc. - Mobile work: trends and challenges

In their responses the conference attendees praised the speakers for their very high level of knowledge of the industry and the relevance of their presentations.

We must also thank the presenters at our Customer Council, Identity Management and the other sessions.  External contributors to these sessions through the week are too numerous to mention here (please see the individual reports). We extend thanks to all our speakers who gave such a breadth of information and insights in our Plenary and other Sessions.

Highlights and Meeting Reports:

Mobility - alive and well

A series of extremely informative plenary sessions examined the mobile market and the disciplines and approaches needed to support an increasingly mobile workforce.  A summary of the plenary sessions can be found here.

Integrated Information Infrastructure (In3)

This major Open Group Initiative arose when meetings with CIOs of major companies concluded that there is a common concern about the need to provide integrated information to an increasingly flexible and mobile workforce.  The Customer Council, and each Forum, received a presentation on the subject, and without exception the approach was enthusiastically adopted, and Forums each created plans to adapt their work programs in support of the initiative.

Major Collaborations

A common theme of the week's activities was the extent to which the Forums within The Open Group are working together - an approach which means that the work of The Open Group as a whole is much greater than the sum of its various parts.

Webcast

As has now become common practice at The Open Group Conference, we were able to Webcast many of the sessions across the Internet.  This enabled a significant number of people who could not travel to Paris to benefit from the Conference and Member Meeting. Access to the recorded webcasts are available to members.

A report of the Plenary Feedback is available here.  Summaries, slides, and other materials are available in the full Post Meeting Documentation which is only available to Members, and to non-members who attended the Conference.

Participation:

Forums & Work Groups:

Detailed reports on each of the Forum meetings are available to Members only.

Architecture Forum:

The Architecture Forum at Paris hosted a Joint Briefing in collaboration with the Active Loss Prevention Initiative, which was very well attended, and provided an update on the role of IT architecture for reducing the risk, and increasing the securability, reliability, and adaptability, of implemented IT systems. In their Workshop, Forum members received a case study from Ian McCall of IBM on the use of TOGAF in client engagements, and progressed a number of projects in the 2002 work program, including the migration of TOGAF from the Technical Architecture space into the Enterprise Architecture space.

Directory Interoperability Forum:

The DIF members' meeting considered the current state of and future trends for directory development - in the broadest sense, not just LDAP. It looked at the role of directories in the Integrated Information Infrastructure (In3), and discussed ideas for the new-generation Directory brand. It received reports from standards bodies and the Secure Messaging Challenge, and reviewed the work of its working groups. In a joint meeting with the MMF, the DIF planned the completion of the Mobile and Directory Business Scenario, and considered issueing a Directory Mobility Challenge.

Enterprise Management Forum:

The Enterprise Management Forum met on Wednesday and focused on the Pegasus (WBEM/CIM) and XSLM (Software License Use Management) projects. Pegasus is fast approaching the Release 2.0 code freeze at the end of April, at which time an intensive debugging and performance tuning exercise will take place. The XSLM group has been busily implementing the specification over the last 2 years and will delivering a revised version in July. The EMF held a joint meeting with the QoS Task Force and the Real-Time and Embedded Systems Forum looking at issues of application management. The second half of the week consisted of a meeting of the Joint Open Group/DMTF Application Management Working Group, at which significant progress was made in the development of the CIM Applications Schema.

Mobile Management Forum:

This week’s Mobile Management Forum meeting in Paris saw the largest attendance since this time last year.  After hearing about an enterprise mobile infrastructure integration case study we re-examined objectives to energize MMF and in line with the Open Group’s In3 initiative discussed the MMF as the global integration point for mobility standards.  The MMF will establish liaison with consortia to gain broader industry acceptance of our work including Session Management. Specifically we will work with MWIF, TMF and a proposal for DMTF liaison is to be progressed with a MMF/DMTF mobility working group proposed for June DMTF meeting in San Jose.

During a meeting of the joint a joint MMF and Directory Interoperability Forum (MaD) Working Group we agreed milestones for finalizing the business scenario and initiated Identity Management discussions.  

The meeting voted to initiate an In3 Architecture Project which will define a Mobile architecture framework using existing Open Group disciplines. The Taxonomy of Standards produced in 1999 is to be refreshed as part of this work. The meeting also decided to establish an MMF Mobile Security Project and we have invited participation from the Security Forum

Finally we have began to assemble our forward work plan by reviewing work to date, relating these activities to industry advances in the last year and scheduled new activities based on recent member survey feedback. This will lead to structuring projects to focus on the priorities identified by the membership.

Quality of Service Task Force:

The Quality of Service (QoS) Task Force had their first meeting with the TeleManagement (TMF) Forum, where they started work on their new joint initiative for extending the TMF’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) Handbook. The extension (volume 4) will account for enterprise and application service level parameters. This project will map the Enterprise domain parameters to the SLA parameters already defined within the Telco and Service Provider domain. This is a very exciting step in moving the QoS Task Force closer to its vision of enabling end-to-end QoS assurance across all domains. 

There was also a joint QoS session with the Enterprise Management and Real-Time Forums at which issues and standards around managing and marking applications were explored. These discussions continued the Task Force’s ongoing investigation into the mapping of application priority to mission critical processes. There was also a joint session with the Mobile Management Forum, which offered discussion on customer and operational QoS requirements as they apply to the mobile environment and on what the two forums could do together to address them.

Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum:

The Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum continues to gather momentum. Attendance at this meeting was 108, making this one of the largest, and certainly the fastest growing group within The Open Group. Sessions held at Anaheim included the second annual Real-time Linux interest group covering issues surrounding Real-time Linux. Of major interest was the presentation on the "Next Generation POSIX Threading - Moving Linux to The Enterprise". Representatives from OMG, SAE, DoD RTAG, IEEE POSIX SSWG-RT and INCITS R-1 gave status reports. The sessions on Safety Critical, Hard Real-time Java, Security for Limited Resource Environments, POSIX Real-time Profiles and Real-time Access to Data where an overwhelming success. The Real-time and Embedded Forum concluded with a Buff on "Open Systems and Military Applications.

Security Forum:

The Security Forum held a highly productive meeting, not only on progressing existing work but also on planning new and interesting activities. Following on the success of the Managers Guide to Information Security, the Guide to Data Privacy will be published before July, and a Guide to Working with PKI is also in preparation. The technical guide on Security Data Patterns is also out for review. Plans are underway to analyze our best approach to support the In3 strategy, and to continue our beneficial joint working with other Forums and external consortia.

Next Conference: