By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications
The Open Group’s San Francisco conference, held at the Marriott Union Square, began today highlighting the theme of how the industry is moving “Toward Boundaryless Information Flow™.”
The morning plenary began with a welcome from The Open Group President and CEO Allen Brown. He began the day’s sessions by discussing the conference theme, reminding the audience that The Open Group’s vision of Boundaryless Information Flow began in 2002 as a means to breakdown the silos within organizations and provide better communications within, throughout and beyond organizational walls.
Heather Kreger, Distinguished Engineer and CTO of International Standards at IBM, presented the first session of the day, “Open Technologies Fuel the Business and IT Renaissance.” Kreger discussed how converging technologies such as social and mobile, Big Data, the Internet of Things, analytics, etc.—all powered by the cloud and open architectures—are forcing a renaissance within both IT and companies. Fueling this renaissance is a combination of open standards and open source technologies, which can be used to build out the platforms needed to support these technologies at the speed that is enabling innovation. To adapt to these new circumstances, architects should broaden their skillsets so they have deeper skills and competencies in multiple disciplines, technologies and cultures in order to better navigate this world of open source based development platforms.
The second keynote of the morning, “Enabling the Opportunity to Achieve Boundaryless Information Flow™,” was presented by Larry Schmidt, HP Fellow at Hewlett-Packard, and Eric Stephens, Enterprise Architect, Oracle. Schmidt and Stephens addressed how to cultivate a culture within healthcare ecosystems to enable better information flow. Because healthcare ecosystems are now primarily digital (including not just individuals but technology architectures and the Internet of Things), boundaryless communication is imperative so that individuals can become the managers of their health and the healthcare ecosystem can be better defined. This in turn will help in creating standards that help solve the architectural problems currently hindering the information flow within current healthcare systems, driving better costs and better outcomes.
Following the first two morning keynotes Schmidt provided a brief overview of The Open Group’s new Healthcare Forum. The forum plans to leverage existing Open Group best practices such as harmonization, existing standards (such as TOGAF®) and work with other forums and vertical to create new standards to address the problems facing the healthcare industry today.
Mike Walker, Enterprise Architect at Hewlett-Packard, and Mark Dorfmueller, Associate Director Global Business Services for Procter & Gamble, presented the morning’s final keynote entitled “Business Architecture: The Key to Enterprise Transformation.” According to Walker, business architecture is beginning to change how enterprise architecture is done within organizations. In order to do so, Walker believes that business architects must be able to understand business processes, communicate ideas and engage with others (including other architects) within the business and offer services in order to implement and deliver successful programs. Dorfmueller illustrated business architecture in action by presenting how Procter & Gamble uses their business architecture to change how business is done within the company based on three primary principles—being relevant, practical and making their work consumable for those within the company that implement the architectures.
The morning plenary sessions culminated with a panel discussion on “Future Technology and Enterprise Transformation,” led by Dave Lounsbury, VP and CTO of The Open Group. The panel, which included all of the morning’s speakers, took a high-level view of how emerging technologies are eroding traditional boundaries within organizations. Things within IT that have been specialized in the past are now becoming commoditized to the point where they are now offering new opportunities for companies. This is due to how commonplace they’ve become and because we’re becoming smarter in how we use and get value out of our technologies, as well as the rapid pace of technology innovation we’re experiencing today.
Finally, wrapping up the morning was the Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF), a forum of The Open Group, with forum director Sally Long presenting an overview of a new Open Trusted Technology Provider™ Standard (O-TTPS) Accreditation Program which launched today. The program is the first such accreditation to provide third-party certification for companies guaranteeing their supply chains are free from maliciously tainted or counterfeit products and conformant to the Open Trusted Technology Provider™ Standard (O-TTPS). IBM is the first company to earn the accreditation and there are at least two other companies that are currently going through the accreditation process.
Monday’s afternoon sessions were split between two tracks, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Enterprise Transformation and Open Platform 3.0™.
In the EA & Enterprise Transformation track, Purna Roy and John Raspen, both Directors of Consulting at Cognizant Technology Solutions, discussed the need to take a broad view and consider factors beyond just IT architectures in their session, “Enterprise Transformation: More than an Architectural Transformation.” In contrast, Kirk DeCosta, Solution Architect at PNC Financial Services, argued that existing architectures can indeed serve as the foundation for transformation in “The Case for Current State – A Contrarian Viewpoint.”
The Open Platform 3.0 track addressed issues around the convergence of technologies based on cloud platforms, including the impact of Big Data as an enabler of information architectures by Helen Sun, Enterprise Architect at Oracle, and predictive analytics. Dipanjan Sengupta, Principal Architect at Cognizant Technology Solutions, discussed why integration platforms are critical for managing distribution application portfolios in “The Need for a High Performance Integration Platform in the Cloud Era.”
Today’s plenary sessions and many of the track sessions can be viewed on The Open Group’s Livestream channel at http://new.livestream.com/opengroup.
The day ended with an opportunity for everyone to share cocktails and conversation at a networking reception held at the hotel.
Andras Szakal, VP & CTO, IBM U.S. Federal and Chair of the OTTF, presented with a plaque in honor of IBM’s contribution to the O-TTPS Accreditation Program, along with the esteemed panel who were key to the success of the launch.