By Sarina Viljoen, The Open Group South Africa
It’s been nearly a year since The Open Group published its first set of best practices for the natural resources industry, the Exploration and Mining Business Reference Model (EM Model). The EM Model, which was developed under the auspices of The Open Group Exploration, Mining, Metals and Minerals Vertical (EMMMv™) Forum and The Open Group South Africa, establishes a blueprint for organizations in the natural resources industry to help implement Enterprise Architectures within their organizations and provide standard operating best practices and support for vendors delivering technical and business solutions to the industry. Designed to cater to business activities across a variety of different types of mining organizations, the model is helping companies align both their business and technical procedures to provide better measures for shared services, health, safety and environmental processes.
The past year has brought much progress for the EMMMv™ Forum and the model, which is currently being used by global exploration and mining organizations to great success. But don’t just take it from the horse’s mouth. We’ve also received some glowing endorsements from industry experts and analysts such as Mike Woodhall, a mining executive with GMSI, one of the world’s largest providers of mining technical software, support and mining consulting services. According to Mike:
“Since the model went public I have not used anything else as a basis for discussion… (because using) the E&M model as a reference with clients allows us to engage with any client and any mining method.
The E&M process model captures the mining business generically and allows us and the clients to discuss further levels of detail based on understanding the specifics of the mining method.
I have lost count of the number of laminated A4 copies I have handed out — certainly in the hundreds. For me this is one of the two most significant parts of the exercise: The fact we have a multi-party definition (no one person could have produced the model), and the fact that we could capture it legibly on one A4. Proud to be associated.”
Another very significant recognition of the model came last fall from industry analyst firm Gartner in its report ,Process for Defining Architecture in an Integrated Mining Enterprise, 2020. In the report, Gartner suggests that “the mining industry should drive toward one or more significant industry initiatives that will yield better standards for integration that will simplify the definition of an enterprisewide architecture.”
In addition to these milestones, the EMMMv™ Forum is currently working on its second major deliverable, a Business Capabilities Model. The model will allow the mining organization and its vendors to understand the capabilities required to be successful in the exploration and mining space, and will lead on to the information model. The Business Capabilities will deliver a reference model against which application vendors may map their application offerings and clients may determine the coverage they have from an application perspective in the different capability areas. A first active version of the model will become available to members in October.
For further information on the EM model, please visit the EMMMv™ Forum page.
Sarina Viljoen, EMMMv™ Forum Director, is a business and IT professional, strategic thinker, speaker and trainer with solid experience in Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a mechanism to facilitate business change. Her experience and training in the various facets of enterprise architecture supports her in the multiple EA related roles she plays. She is TOGAF™ 9 and Zachman™ certified and in her training role she has seen hundreds of TOGAF™ practitioners through their paces. She is an ongoing contributor to the development of TOGAF™ and has been instrumental in framing today’s thinking of what enterprise architecture is. Sarina is based in South Africa, holds a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) from the University of Johannesburg and a Master of Science (Management of Innovation and Technology) from the Da Vinci Institute for Technology Management.