By The Open Group
On Tuesday, April 21, Allen Brown, President & CEO of The Open Group, began the plenary presenting highlights of the work going on in The Open Group Forums. The Open Group is approaching 500 memberships in 40 countries.
Big Data & Open Platform 3.0™ – a Big Deal for Open Standards
Ron Tolido, Senior Vice President of Capgemini’s group CTO network and Open Group Board Member, discussed the digital platform as the “fuel” of enterprise transformation today, citing a study published in the book “Leading Digital.” The DNA of companies that successfully achieve transform has the following factors:
- There is no escaping from mastering the digital technology – this is an essential part of leading transformation. CEO leadership is a success factor.
- You need a sustainable technology platform embraced by both the business and technical functions
Mastering digital transformation shows a payoff in financial results, both from the standpoint of efficient revenue generation and maintaining and growing market share. The building blocks of digital capability are:
- Customer Experience
- Operations
- New business models
Security technology must move from being a constraint or “passion killer” to being a driver for digital transformation. Data handling must change it’s model – the old structured and siloed approach to managing data no longer works, resulting in business units bypassing or ignoring the “single souce” data repository. He recommended the “Business Data Lake” approach as a approach to overcoming this, and suggested it should be considered as an open standard as part of the work of the Open Platform 3.0 Forum.
In the Q&A session, Ron suggested establishing hands-on labs to help people embrace digital transformation, and presented the analogy of DatOps as an analogy to DevOps for business data.
Challengers in the Digital Era
Mariano Arnaiz, Chief Information Officer in the CESCE Group, presented the experiences of CESCE in facing challenges of:
- Changing regulation
- Changing consumer expectations
- Changing technology
- Changing competition and market entrants based on new technology
The digital era represents a new language for many businesses, which CESCE faced during the financial crisis of 2008. They chose the “path less traveled” of becoming a data-driven company, using data and analytics to improve business insight, predict behavior and act on it. CESCE receives over 8000 risk analysis requests per day; using analytics, over 85% are answered in real time, when it used to take more than 20 days. Using analytics has given them unique competitive products such as variable pricing and targeted credit risk coverage while reducing loss ratio.
To drive transformation, the CIO must move beyond IT service supporting the business to helping drive business process improvement. Aligning IT to business is no longer enough for EA – EA must also help align business to transformational technology.
In the Q&A, Mariano said that the approach of using analytics and simulation for financial risk modeling could be applied to some cybersecurity risk analysis cases.
Architecting the Internet of Things
Kary Främling, CEO of the Finnish company ControlThings and Professor of Practice in Building Information Modeling (BIM) at Aalto University, Finland, gave a history of the Internet of Things (IoT), the standards landscape, issues on security in IoT, and real-world examples.
IoT today is characterized by an increasing number of sensors and devices each pushing large amounts of data to their own silos, with communication limited to their own network. Gaining benefit from IoT requires standards to take a systems view of IoT providing horizontal integration among IoT devices and sensors with data collected as and when needed, and two-way data flows between trusted entities within a vision of Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management. These standards are being developed in The Open Group Open Platform 3.0 Forum’s IoT work stream; published standards such as Open Messaging interface (O-MI) and Open Data Format (O-DF) that allow discovery and interoperability of sensors using open protocols, similar to the way http and html enable interoperability on the Web.
Kary addressed the issues of security and privacy in IoT, noting this is an opportunity for The Open Group to use our EA and Security work to to assess these issues at the scale IoT will bring.
Kary Främling