By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications
Day two, February 4th, of The Open Group San Francisco conference kicked off with a welcome and opening remarks from Steve Nunn, COO of The Open Group and CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects.
Nunn introduced Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, who provided highlights from The Open Group’s last quarter. As of Q4 2013, The Open Group had 45,000 individual members in 134 countries hailing from 449 member companies in 38 countries worldwide. Ten new member companies have already joined The Open Group in 2014, and 24 members joined in the last quarter of 2013, with the first member company joining from Vietnam. In addition, 6,500 individuals attended events sponsored by The Open Group in Q4 2013 worldwide.
Updates on The Open Group’s ongoing work were provided including updates on the FACE™ Consortium, DirectNet® Waveform Standard, Architecture Forum, Archimate® Forum, Open Platform 3.0™ Forum and Security Forum.
Of note was the ongoing development of TOGAF® and introduction of a three-volume work including individual volumes outlining the TOGAF framework, guidance and tools and techniques for the standard, as well as collaborative work that allows the Archimate modeling language to be used for risk management in enterprise architectures.
In addition, Open Platform 3.0 Forum has already put together 22 business use cases outlining ROI and business value for various uses related to technology convergence. The Cloud Work Group’s Cloud Reference Architecture has also been submitted to ISO for international standards certification, and the Security Forum has introduced certification programs for OpenFAIR risk management certification for individuals.
The morning plenary centered on The Open Group’s Dependability through Assuredness™ (O-DA) Framework, which was released last August.
Speaking first about the framework was Dr. Mario Tokoro, Founder and Executive Advisor for Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Dr. Tokoro gave an overview of the Dependable Embedded OS project (DEOS), a large national project in Japan originally intended to strengthen the country’s embedded systems. After considerable research, the project leaders discovered they needed to consider whether large, open systems could be dependable when it came to business continuity, accountability and ensuring consistency throughout the systems’ lifecycle. Because the boundaries of large open systems are ever-changing, the project leaders knew they must put together dependability requirements that could accommodate constant change, allow for continuous service and provide continuous accountability for the systems based on consensus. As a result, they put together a framework to address both the change accommodation cycle and failure response cycles for large systems – this framework was donated to The Open Group’s Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum and released as the O-DA standard.
Dr. Tokoro’s presentation was followed by a panel discussion on the O-DA standard. Moderated by Dave Lounsbury, VP and CTO of The Open Group, the panel included Dr. Tokoro; Jack Fujieda, Founder and CEO ReGIS, Inc.; T.J. Virdi, Senior Enterprise IT Architect at Boeing; and Bill Brierly, Partner and Senior Consultant, Conexiam. The panel discussed the importance of openness for systems, iterating the conference theme of boundaries and the realities of having standards that can ensure openness and dependability at the same time. They also discussed how the O-DA standard provides end-to-end requirements for system architectures that also account for accommodating changes within the system and accountability for it.
Lounsbury concluded the track by iterating that assuring systems’ dependability is not only fundamental to The Open Group mission of Boundaryless Information Flow™ and interoperability but also in preventing large system failures.
Tuesday’s late morning sessions were split into two tracks, with one track continuing the Dependability through Assuredness theme hosted by Joe Bergmann, Forum Chair of The Open Group’s Real-Time and Embedded Systems Forum. In this track, Fujieda and Brierly furthered the discussion of O-DA outlining the philosophy and vision of the standard, as well as providing a roadmap for the standard.
In the morning Business Innovation & Transformation track, Alan Hakimi, Consulting Executive, Microsoft presented “Zen and the Art of Enterprise Architecture: The Dynamics of Transformation in a Complex World.” Hakimi emphasized that transformation needs to focus on a holistic view of an organization’s ecosystem and motivations, economics, culture and existing systems to help foster real change. Based on Buddhist philosophy, he presented an eightfold path to transformation that can allow enterprise architects to approach transformation and discuss it with other architects and business constituents in a way that is meaningful to them and allows for complexity and balance.
This was followed by “Building the Knowledge-Based Enterprise,” a session given by Bob Weisman, Head Management Consultant for Build the Vision.
Tuesday’s afternoon sessions centered on a number of topics including Business Innovation and Transformation, Risk Management, Archimate, TOGAF tutorials and case studies and Professional Development.
In the Archimate track, Vadim Polyakov of Inovalon, Inc., presented “Implementing an EA Practice in an Agile Enterprise” a case study centered on how his company integrated its enterprise architecture with the principles of agile development and how they customized the Archimate framework as part of the process.
The Risk Management track featured William Estrem, President, Metaplexity Associates, and Jim May of Windsor Software discussing how the Open FAIR Standard can be used in conjunction with TOGAF 9.1 to enhance risk management in organizations in their session, “Integrating Open FAIR Risk Analysis into the Enterprise Architecture Capability.” Jack Jones, President of CXOWARE, also discussed the best ways for “Communicating the Value Proposition” for cohesive enterprise architectures to business managers using risk management scenarios.
The plenary sessions and many of the track sessions from today’s tracks can be viewed on The Open Group’s Livestream channel at http://new.livestream.com/opengroup.
The day culminated with dinner and a Lion Dance performance in honor of Chinese New Year performed by Leung’s White Crane Lion & Dragon Dance School of San Francisco.
We would like to express our gratitude for the support by our following sponsors: BIZZDesign, Corso, Good e-Learning, I-Server and Metaplexity Associates.
O-DA standard panel discussion with Dave Lounsbury, Bill Brierly, Dr. Mario Tokoro, Jack Fujieda and TJ Virdi