By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications
The Open Group kicked off Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow™ July 21 at the spectacular setting of the Hyatt Boston Harbor. Allen Brown, CEO and President of The Open Group, welcomed over 150 people from 20 countries, including as far away as Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India.
The first keynote speaker was Marshall Van Alstyne, Professor at Boston University School of Management & Researcher at MIT Center for Digital Business, known as a leading expert in business models. His presentation entitled Platform Shift – How New Open Business Models are Changing the Shape of Industry posed the questions “What does ‘openness’ mean? Why do platforms beat products every time?”.
Marshall Van Alstyne
According to “InterBrand: 2014 Best Global Brands”, 13 of the top 31 companies are “platform companies”. To be a ‘platform’, a company needs embeddable functions or service and allow 3rd party access. Alystyne noted, “products have features, platforms have communities”. Great standalone products are not sufficient. Positive changes experienced by a platform company include pricing/profitability, supply chains, internal organization, innovation, decreased industry bottlenecks and strategy.
Platforms benefit from broad contributions, as long as there is control of the top several complements. Alstyne commented, “If you believe in the power of community, you need to embrace the platform.”
The next presentation was Open Platform 3.0™ – An Integrated Approach to the Convergence of Technology Platforms, by Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability, The Open Group. Dr. Harding discussed how society has developed a digital society.
1970 was considered the dawn of an epoch which saw the First RAM chip, IBM introduction of System/370 and a new operating system – UNIX®. Examples of digital progress since that era include driverless cars and Smart Cities (management of traffic, energy, water, communication).
Digital society enablers are digital structural change and corporate social media. The benefits are open innovation, open access, open culture, open government and delivering more business value.
Dr. Harding also noted, standards are essential to innovation and enable markets based on integration. The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ is using ArchiMate®, an Open Group standard, to analyze the 30+ business use cases produced by the Forum. The development cycle is understanding, analysis, specification, iteration.
Dr. Harding emphasized the importance of Boundaryless Information Flow™, as an enabler of business objectives and efficiency through IT standards in the era of digital technology, and designed for today’s agile enterprise with direct involvement of business users.
Both sessions concluded with an interactive audience Q&A hosted by Allen Brown.
The last session of the morning’s plenary was a panel: The Internet of Things and Interoperability. Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, moderated the panel. Participating in the panel were Said Tabet, CTO for Governance, Risk and Compliance Strategy, EMC; Penelope Gordon, Emerging Technology Strategist, 1Plug Corporation; Jean-Francois Barsoum, Senior Managing Consultant, Smarter Cities, Water & Transportation, IBM; and Dave Lounsbury, CTO, The Open Group.
IoT Panel – Gardner, Barsoum, Tabet, Lounsbury, Gordon
The panel explored the practical limits and opportunities of Internet of Things (IoT). The different areas discussed include obstacles to decision-making as big data becomes more prolific, openness, governance and connectivity of things, data and people which pertain to many industries such as smart cities, manufacturing and healthcare.
How do industries, organizations and individuals deal with IoT? This is not necessarily a new problem, but an accelerated one. There are new areas of interoperability but where does the data go and who owns the data? Openness is important and governance is essential.
What needs to change most to see the benefits of the IoT? The panel agreed there needs to be a push for innovation, increased education, move beyond models of humans managing the interface (i.e. machine-to-machine) and determine what data is most important, not always collecting all the data.
A podcast and transcript of the Internet of Things and Interoperability panel will be posted soon.
The afternoon was divided into several tracks: Boundaryless Information Flow™, Open Platform 3.0™ and Enterprise Architecture (EA) & Enterprise Transformation. Best Practices for Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow across the Government was presented by Syed Husain, Consultant Enterprise Architecture, Saudi Arabia E-government Authority. Robert K. Pucci, CTO, Communications Practice, Cognizant Technology Solutions discussed Business Transformation Justification Leveraging Business and Enterprise Architecture.
The evening concluded with a lively networking reception at the hotel.
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Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, joined The Open Group in 2013 and spearheads corporate marketing initiatives, primarily the website, blog and media relations. Loren has over 20 years experience in brand marketing and public relations and, prior to The Open Group, was with The Walt Disney Company for over 10 years. Loren holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas A&M University. She is based in the US.