By Chris Harding, Principal, Lacibus, LTD, and Member of The Open Group
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is emerging as a powerful technology with many applications. Here are some thoughts on its application to standards development, with a call to participate in The Open Group work that uses it.
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.
y, Associate Director, Enterprise Architecture & Strategy
I consider open standards a huge time saver when getting started on any architecture engagement. I would like to start a conversation here about the use of architecture standards for agility in a digital transformation. In the comments, would you please answer the following question?:
Which standards have you tried using, to solve which problems, and what benefits did you receive?
To get this started, here are some of the standards we opted to include in a book I recently co-authored with Kees van Brink and Sylvain Marie called, “The Turning Point: A Novel about Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation.” The novel tells the story of Enterprise Architects and other characters in a company who recently went through a merger and who use several standards together to accelerate a Digital Transformation, including these standards from The Open Group
By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, The Open Group
Last week’s global virtual event brought together over a thousand attendees from around the world to discuss how open digital standards can help push forward the state of play around data science, the digital enterprise, and environmental footprint reduction.
Speakers from organizations including IBM, Capgemini, PwC, Fujitsu, and AXA made for a lively and informative three days, with virtual attendees tuning in to learn about everything from human-centered AI, through digital product lifecycles, to tracking carbon emissions with satellites.
By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, The Open Group
Last week, The Open Group Open Digital Standards October 2021 brought together organizations and speakers from across the world to discuss how the cross-industry development of open standards is helping businesses become digital-first. The global event was hosted in Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States. The event commemorated The Open Group 25th anniversary – acknowledging and reminiscing the remarkable achievements in the technology standards arena. Over 2,600 attendees from more than 100 countries gathered virtually to to share in the celebration and learn more about open technology standards.
Last week, our Open Digital Standards July 2021 event brought together vendors and end-user organizations from across the globe to discuss how the cross-industry development of open standards is helping businesses become digital-first. It was fantastic to have over 1,040 attendees from more than 90 countries gather virtually to discuss this critical roadmap to digital transformation.
Last week, The Open Group Open Footprint™ Forum (OFP) held its first virtual event, June 23-24, 2021. It brought together experts from across the globe to introduce and demonstrate the work that has gone into the Forum since it launched in August 2020. Speakers, from a plethora of industry leading organizations such as Accenture, AWS, Deloitte, ERM, IBM, Infosys, Shell, WBCSD, and Wipro hosted sessions outlining the mission of the Open Footprint Forum, explanations of the Open Footprint Data Platform, as well as live demonstrations of the Platform to show its applicability to all industries.
A description of the author’s recent experience implementing Open Agile Architecture practices on projects. This post focuses on continuous architectural refactoring, particularly planning, understanding and guiding the architecture. Working on an enterprise SaaS application, continuously evolving to support existing and new customers and use cases.
In the world of technology, there are paradigms of language that arise organically and artificially over time. Necessity requires a shared mode of communication for ideas and as a result, descriptors, nouns, and technical designators are created and shared. The problem arises when certain words acquire a surfeit of meaning, so much so that they paradoxically become less meaningful. There are many examples of this but for our purposes, we’re going to look at “Supply Chain Security”.
The transition to Digital First has become a necessity for the survival of private and public sector organizations in a post-pandemic world. It was therefore fantastic to see attendees gather virtually over the course of three days to discuss tangible solutions for navigating the challenges we face today. Sessions and workshops were hosted by a plethora of leading industry experts and centered on the development and implementation of open digital standards to address issues critical to the success of a Digital First enterprise.
By Jim Hietala (VP, BD and Security), Andras Szakal (VP and CTO), John Linford Security and OTTF Forum Director) – The Open Group
In potentially the most damaging cyber-supply chain attack ever, a leading IT systems management vendor became the latest hi-tech company to suffer a major cybersecurity breach with wide-reaching consequences. The malware that caused the attack has been dubbed SUNBURST by Microsoft and code-named Solorigate by FireEye, the security consulting firm that uncovered the breach after falling victim to it late last year.
After successfully infiltrating the development environment, attackers were able to observe and learn how to subvert the vendor’s development and operations pipeline. Hackers were then able to maliciously taint the vendor’s product by planting a sophisticated trojan. Once the software, which required broad systems access, was installed in customers’ environments, the attackers were able to leverage the tainted software to exfiltrate sensitive information from within an organization’s network.
By Steve Nunn, President and CEO, The Open Group
Happy New Year everyone!
Firstly, I hope that you, your family, and friends, have been able to stay safe during these trying times. So many around the world have lost so much in this COVID-19 pandemic which clearly will be with us for some time yet. We must, however, be heartened by the unprecedented speed with which vaccines have been developed. The delivery and administration of these vaccines has only just begun, of course, but we have good reason to be optimistic about the coming months.
This document takes an evolutionary approach to align with and build upon existing or upcoming frameworks, standards, and best-practices, such as the TOGAF® standard, Archimate® Modeling Language, or ISO 9001 for healthcare. All application-related screenshots in this article are based on a prototype, modelled in Enterprise Architect.
The Open Group Security Forum is thrilled to announce the publication of an update to the Open FAIR™ Body of Knowledge (BoK). The Open FAIR BoK is comprised of The Open Group Risk Taxonomy (O-RT) Standard and The Open Group Risk Analysis (O-RA) Standard. The Open Group initiated a standards effort regarding FAIR ~10 years ago, and these standards define the official, open, vendor-neutral and consensus-developed definition of FAIR.
This blog post is the third of three in a series to describe updates to the Open FAIR™ Body of Knowledge. It will describe specific updates to O-RT to bring it to Version 3.0. The first post described revisions made to both O-RA and O-RT for consistency between the documents; the second post described specific updates to O-RA to bring it to Version 2.0.
In the ongoing transition to Digital-First, an increasing number of technology executives, managers, and practitioners are looking for new approaches that will help them to make sense of the evolving business landscape and deliver digital products and services.
As an organization that is known for solving business issues through global industry collaboration, The Open Group hosted its third virtual event October 26-29, 2020, which provided over 3,300 registrants with the opportunity to discover the critical digital standards that enable a smooth transition to a Digital-First enterprise.
