Data Integration – Choosing the Right Approach

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.

The Open Group Event Highlights – July 25-27, 2022 – Washington DC

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.

“All Standards are Wrong”?

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.

Are Standards “The Turning Point” for Agility?

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

The Open Group Event Highlights  – January 31-February 2, 2022

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.

Highlights of 2021, Peek into 2022

By Steve Nunn, President and CEO, The Open Group

Happy New Year! I hope that, wherever you are reading this, 2022 has started well for you and yours. It is clearly a time of continued concern and caution due to the on-going global pandemic, and yet it also feels like a moment of hope and optimism that we might finally begin to regain some kind of normality in our lives. It seems COVID-19 will be with us for some time to come, but I’d like to think that the coming year will be one with far less devastation on a human, social, and economic level. What I can say with certainty is that 2022 will be a busy and significant year for The Open Group.

1 2 3 45