By Steve Nunn, President & CEO, The Open Group.
Happy New Year! I hope that, wherever you are reading this, 2023 has started well for you and yours.
I believe that 2023 will be another busy and significant year for The Open Group, as was 2022. So much happened last year that I thought that I would take the opportunity to look back at some of the highlights of last year, and add a few peeks into this coming year.
By Chris Frost, Principal Enterprise Architect, Application Technology Consulting Division, Fujitsu.
The Open Group has a great set of Standards for digital business. These have evolved over time as members have collaborated to create the standards we need for our businesses.
By Dr. Chris Harding, Founder and Principal of Lacibus Ltd.
How do you approach data integration?
While it is often done on a case-by-case basis, a recent survey of enterprise and solution architects by The Open Group found that 62% of organisations are using or planning to use a specific data integration approach such as data virtualisation, data fabric, or data mesh. How would you pick the right approach for your organisation?
Questions like this are not best answered “off the top of your head”. You want to understand how the different approaches would work in your particular situation. You want to read explanations of them, and case studies. You want to talk to people with similar problems, see what they are doing or have done, and how this compares with what you want to do. You want to be able to follow standards and best practices.
In late July, The Open Group hosted an event bringing together speakers and practitioners from around the world to meet in Washington, DC at the historical Mayflower Hotel, and discuss some of today’s most vital topics in the area of security and resiliency.
With a focus on Zero Trust Architecture and Supply Chain Security, leaders from businesses including Microsoft, IBM, Micro Focus, and ServiceNow joined experts from public sector organizations like NIST and NASA, together with representatives from The Open Group itself, to explore how open standards are driving important developments and actionable insights in these important and developing topics.
By Satya Misra, Associate Director, HCL Technologies
Can you envisage a business that has no clear idea of what it has to work with and how it will achieve crucial goals? Sounds bizarre right! But this is very likely to happen due to the lack of skilled people who can understand and align business goals with a technical strategy and architecture that’s capable of supporting the current needs. This introduces us to an imperative discipline, Enterprise Architecture, which is considered a silver bullet by most organizations.
By Kees van den Brink, Senior Manager Platform Architect, ServiceNow.
This blog title is derived from the famous quote by George E.P. Box from his paper “Science and Statistics”:
Box made this statement in relation to the use of statistical models by scientists, but I’ve found that it applies equally well to the use of open standards by enterprise architects and other digital practitioners.
Key take away from this blog:
o Standards can be useful when you:
o Learn and adopt from what makes sense
o Reject what does not fit
o Want to know more: Read “The Turning Point: A Novel about Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation”
Frankly, standards can be very helpful and are necessary, like the TCP/IP standard, or even old standards such as the Baudot Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code), which helped early instances of what would later be called telecommunications companies grow fast, or the ISO Standards, which help with interoperability.
However, there are a lot of lesser-known standards that are not getting such broad adoption. Examples that come to mind are the IT4IT™ Standard, TOGAF® Standard, BIZBOK®, etc.
