“Making Standards Work®”

Standards, TOGAF, UNIX Comments Off on “Making Standards Work®”

By Andrew Josey, The Open Group

Next month as part of the ongoing process of “Making Standards Work®,” we will be setting standards and policy with those attending the member meetings at The Open Group Conference, London, (May 9-12, Central Hall Westminster). The standards development activities include a wide range of subject areas from Cloud Computing, Tools and People certification, best practices for Trusted Technology, SOA and Quantum Lifecycle Management, as well as maintenance of existing standards such as TOGAF® and ArchiMate®. The common link with all these activities is that all of these are open standards developed by members of The Open Group.

Why do our members invest their time and efforts in development of open standards? The key reasons as I see them are as follows:

  1. Open standards are a core part of today’s infrastructure
  2. Open standards allow vendors to differentiate their offerings by offering a level of openness (portable interfaces and interoperability)
  3. Open standards establish a baseline from which competitors can innovate
  4. Open standards backed with certification enable customers to buy with increased confidence

This is all very well, you say — but what differentiates The Open Group from other standards organizations? Well, when The Open Group develops a new standard, we take an end-to-end view of the ecosystem all the way through from customer requirements, developing consensus standards to certification and procurement. We aim to deliver standards that meet a need in the marketplace and then back those up with certification that delivers an assurance about the products or in the case of people certification, their knowledge or skills and experience. We then take regular feedback on our standards, maintain them and evolve them according to marketplace needs. We also have a deterministic, timely process for developing our standards that helps to avoid the stalemate that can occur in some standards development.

Let’s look briefly at two of the most well known Open Group standards:  UNIX® and TOGAF®,. The UNIX® and TOGAF® standards are both examples of where a full ecosystem has been developed around the standard.

The UNIX® standard for operating systems has been around since 1995 and is now in its fourth major iteration. High reliability, availability and scalability are all attributes associated with certified UNIX® systems. As well as the multi-billion-dollar annual market in server systems from HP, Oracle, IBM and Fujitsu, there is an installed base of 50 million users* using The Open Group certified UNIX® systems on the desktop.

TOGAF® is the standard enterprise architecture method and framework. It encourages use with other frameworks and adoption of best practices for enterprise architecture. Now in its ninth iteration, it is freely available for internal use by any organization globally and is widely adopted with over 60% of the Fortune 50 and more than 80% of the Global Forbes 50. The TOGAF® certification program now has more than 15,000 certified individuals, including over 6,000 for TOGAF® 9.

If you are able to join us in London in May, I hope you will be able to also join us at the member meetings to continue making standards work. If you are not yet a member then I hope you will attend the conference itself and network with the members to find out more and consider joining us in Making Standards Work®!

For more information on The Open Group Standards Process visit http://www.opengroup.org/standardsprocess/

(*) Apple estimated number from Briefing October 2010. Mac OS X is certified to the UNIX 03 standard.

Standards development will be part of member meetings taking place at The Open Group Conference, London, May 9-13. Join us for best practices and case studies on Enterprise Architecture, Cloud, Security and more, presented by preeminent thought leaders in the industry.

Andrew Josey is Director of Standards within The Open Group, responsible for the Standards Process across the organization. Andrew leads the standards development activities within The Open Group Architecture Forum, including the development and maintenance of TOGAF® 9, and the TOGAF® 9 People certification program. He also chairs the Austin Group, the working group responsible for development and maintenance the POSIX 1003.1 standard that forms the core volumes of the Single UNIX® Specification. He is the ISO project editor for ISO/IEC 9945 (POSIX). He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core and is the IEEE P1003.1 chair and the IEEE PASC Functional chair of Interpretations. Andrew is based in the UK.