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Customer CouncilSummaryThe meeting was chaired by Elaine Babcock, and attended by approximately 35 people. After a short introduction on the objectives and functions of the Customer Council, Elaine noted that elections are due before the next Open Group meeting in Boston (July 2002) and she encouraged anyone interested in the Customer Council's work to get involved and perhaps offer themselves for election. The first half of the meeting was devoted to In3. Terry Blevins first gave a presentation explaining what The Open Group means by an integrated information infrastructure. Then 2 customers gave their perspectives on what and integrated information infrastructure means to them. First, Nick Mansfield (Shell International) explained how Shell gains competitive edge from knowledge and resources, and that their ability to make information available is critical. Then Eliot Solomon gave his view from Wall Street, explaining their information business is really a real-time global collaboration in which they share information effectively, and describing barriers he has experienced in this environment to achieving effective integration. In the second half of the meeting, Bill Estrem led 2 discussion topics that are of major current interest - on engaging the Open Source community, and on Web Services. After defining the nature of open source, and listing its benefits to customers and suppliers, he concluded that getting closer to the open source community would give The Open Group better engagement to the very active software developer’s community, provide enhanced ROI for Open Group stakeholders, and expand our influence and ties within the IT community. In discussion, no-one disagreed, and Mike Lambert pointed out The Open Groups already significant open source contributions in the Linux area over the past 2 years, and more recently with Pegasus. On Web Services, Bill noted this is now the plenary theme for the next conference in Boston, so this was effectively a primer for the next Open Group conference in Boston in July. Again, after defining what he means by Web Services, Bill outlined the benefits, the current known problem areas, and the opportunities he saw for The Open Group - in articulating sound requirements and sponsoring test and certification activities. The meeting closed with a brief presentation of the current Requirements Journal index and linked reports on each requirement. 1. Welcome and IntroductionsElaine Babcock chaired the meeting. In her presentation slides, Elaine noted that all members are customers so should consider themselves members of the CC. She explained that the Chairman (Carl Bunje) and Vice-Chairman (Alan Doniger) were both unable to be at this meeting, so she was chairing it as Customer Council Board representative. Elaine described the Customer Council as an association of those members of The Open Group that are customers of Open Systems-based products and services. Its mission is to identify customer issues and promote their resolution, to facilitate active customer involvement in Open Group technical and business activities, and to promote the Open Group within the general customer community Customer Council functions are to raise, discuss and initiate action on items of general interest, by working with the Supplier Council to:
The Customer Council has Forum liaison representatives to the Open Group's Forums. These representatives ensure effective two-way communication flows between their Forum & the Customer Council. Elaine noted that there are currently 3 vacancies for Forum liaison representatives, and also that we have elections coming up for Chair, Vice-Chair and Board representatives before our next meeting in July 2002. She invited anyone who is interested in volunteering or standing for election to let her or any other Customer Council representative know. Elaine then outlined the meeting agenda topics, before introducing each item and speaker. 2. What In3 Means2.1 In3 PresentationTerry Blevins, CIO of The Open Group, gave a presentation on what In3 is. The objectives are to making companies integrated and more flexible, to gain operational efficiencies, and to improve the business processes. Business processes must include those internal and in the extended enterprise, including with business partners, customers and suppliers. Integrated access to integrated information is the key statement. Huge amounts of money are being spent in translating and duplicating information so it can be shared. Not only is there huge financial costs but also costs in lives lost when information is not readily available. These conclusions are backed by industry analysts – including Gartner and IDC. A recent CIO Magazine survey says 35% of IT budgets is spent overcoming problems with integrating information. This is a shared problem across industries – including manufacturing, finance, and petrochemicals. The need is to integrate and optimize business processes across any business – between departments (along the pipe) and within departments (across the pipe), embracing data held in a wade range of computing systems. Success of every business is nowadays measured not by the technology it uses but by the business process it uses and how efficiently they operate together. Many people must get engaged as part of those business processes, and operations involve access to much information that requires integration. Behind these processes is the technology, which is highly complex, heterogeneous, and with information in every part of it. So In3 is a desired state for an enterprise’s infrastructure specific to the needs of the organization. It has standard components that provide services in a customer's extended enterprise that combine multiple sources of information, deliver information to the places where that information is needed and in the right context for the people or computer components using that information Terry went on the explain that we need to communicate to CEOs and CIOs and CTOs the importance of this issue, and muster support from customers and vendors, and bring together the components of work that are being done in other industry groups. There is a role for all to play. Terry closed with some suggestions for how the CC can engage:
In his closing remarks he emphasized that we all have parts to play. 2.2 Surviving Insecurity – a security architectural viewNick Mansfield, Shell International, presented his view of what integrated information infrastructure means to a multinational company like Shell. He characterized the nature of Shell's business. Shell is a global player, with around 275+ companies operating in 126+ countries. These companies range from being wholly-owned to being licensed to operate someone else's equipment. Shell is involved in all kinds of energy related business areas. There is much diversity in the business, and undertakes innovative engineering in difficult remote and "interesting" places, building infrastructures of all types, including IT, to meet the specific business needs of where it is operating. Shell’s added value in all this is knowledge, resources, and its ability to focus both on the business needs of where it is operating. The essential item here is that the information flow is critical. Their business environment has moved from being done in closed secure buildings to nowadays requiring mobile virtual networks. Shell has the same business objectives as most any other organization - to operate profitably for its shareholders. IT is a big influence in enable them to survive and compete profitably. Survival requires e-risk management, including being able to address low-probability high-risk events. This gives a new role for information security:
Nick considered that in this new information age:
Nick introduced his model of the corporate policy lifecycle, and followed it with his ex-armed services Command Control Computer Centered Information Attack Cycle in which the essential lesson is that while all 4 parts of it are crucial the most important parameter is that the whole is only as good as the weakest part. 2.3 Making it work together – a view from Wall StreetEliot Solomon presented his view of what is needed to make an integrated information infrastructure work, from the perspective of what they do on Wall Street. It is really a real-time global collaboration, in which they share information effectively, everywhere, in which the industry gets it right (meaning making things work) despite individual firm getting it wrong occasionally. In this environment, making money is the business driver - technical elegance claims no prizes. Since all firms have the same choices of technologies, it is of value to study the failures, identify what blocked success, and work to remove obstacles. Eliot then proceeded to present a series of slides listing the following barriers to effective integration, illustrating for each one various symptoms and characteristics that exemplify that barrier:
Eliot concluded that while his presentation is deliberately provocative, it captures significant business issues that merit close consideration when thinking about what real barriers are likely to face anyone working to achieve an integrated information infrastructure. 4. Supplier Council BoFWalter Stahlecker made a brief announcement that he is interested in re-forming a Supplier Council, which he sees can add value if it works together with the Customer Council. In particular he envisages that customers and suppliers can take specific well-formed requirements direct to supplier decision-makers to request responses. He will lead a BoF session at 6pm on Wednesday. 5. SLA QuestionnaireSally Long made a brief announcement that her QoS task force is working on end-to-end quality of service issues, and in defining QoS in the network domain they have an enterprise group working with the TeleManagement Forum on SLA requirements. They are writing a White Paper on SLAs, and would like to bring this as a requirement into the Customer Council. They are preparing a questionnaire to provide information for this White Paper. It will be posted on the QoS Web site very soon and they will appreciate customer members completing it. 6. Engaging with the Open Source CommunityWhat is Open Group’s Place in the Noosphere? Bill Estrem led a discussion on Open Source. He introduced it with a short presentation. We are moving from large companies dictating how software products are done (characterized as the Cathedral approach), and now we are seeing a major move to the open source movement (characterized as the Bazaar approach) and called by some aficionados the "noosphere". In the traditional "Cathedral" approach, software development is a closed activity, source code is a trade secret, and software is sold and supported under strict license agreements. By contrast, in the open source "bazaar" approach, voluntary contributions of source code are made, and that source code is open for inspection, and released versions are used by vendors in their products. Bill listed 9 key elements in defining the nature of open source:
There are also community processes – similar to open source processes, where e.g. Microsoft and Sun have run a middle way between the "cathedral" and the open source approaches. While this is not really "open" it is better than no input from the customer community. Bill depicted shades of open source in terms of well-known sources of software and how they measure in terms of their positioning in relation to their community processes. Bill then listed the Customer benefits:
and the Supplier benefits:
and how he sees that The Open Group could contribute:
all of which would give The Open Group better engagement to the active developer’s community, enhanced ROI for Open Group stakeholders, and expand our influence and ties within the IT community. In discussion:
7. Review of Interoperability Issues for Web ServicesBill Estrem led a discussion on Web Services - the next big thing. He introduced it with a short presentation. Bill considered there is a great opportunity for TOG to contribute to Web Services. Bearing in mind he did not know until this week that Web Services is the theme for the next conference in Boston, he takes appropriate pleasure in finding that this topic in the Customer Council meeting today is effectively a primer for the plenary theme at the next Open Group conference in Boston in July. He defined Web Services as standard application programming interfaces which leverage Internet and World Wide Web protocols to expose application functions for remote execution. In other words, they are another form of distributed computing He illustrated his view of Web services architecture, with a system connected via WSTL to a UDDI directory (Universal Discovery & Data Interchange), down to client devices via a network in which those clients obtain applications via SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) from an applications server. Bill listed the key benefits and opportunities as enabling heterogeneity, providing federation across the value chain, and providing application to application integration. He sees the key challenges and risks primarily as interoperability, security, performance, and scalability - Bill listed issues under each of these items. A particular opportunity could be the fact that there are immature standards in some key areas. So we have a good basis for Web Services enabled with SOAP over HTTP, but we need to build reliable and interoperable systems that have acceptable performance. He thought that The Open Group could make significant contributions. His immediate suggestions were to articulate the requirements, sponsor technology development, and support conformance testing, certification and branding. In discussion:
8. Quick Guide to Requirements JournalIan Dobson gave a quick guide through The Open Group Web home page to the Customer Council public Requirements Journal page, then to the members-only Requirements Journal index. He pointed out the linked progress reports on the members-only Requirements Journal index, and illustrated the nature of the information available there. Ian encouraged all members to review the Requirements Journal index, and if they identify any requirements that are of interest to their business then he will welcome them letting him know so we can get them involved in progressing their interest towards solutions. 9. Q&ANo further questions or concerns were raised.
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