Open Group Boston Grid

At the Open Group Architecture Practitioner Conference, I caught up with Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, to talk about TOGAF and the other activities of The Open Group. I also spoke with Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability.

The Open Group originated as a merger of two UNIX standards bodies (X/Open and Open Software Foundation); and UNIX certification (e.g. Apple Leopard) is still its best-known product and cash cow.

The two rising stars in The Open Group portfolio are Architecture and Security.

At the core of Architecture is The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). TOGAF 9.0 is now available. It was launched in the US in February, and this conference represents the European launch. There are several forums and groups working in parallel with the main TOGAF Architecture Forum, including Business Architecture, SOA and ArchiMate.

Clearly there may be a temptation in some quarters to see TOGAF as a bucket for everything that is remotely architectural. The latest TOGAF guide does contain material on business architecture and SOA and security, as well as the core architectural framework and process. However, the working groups operate on a loosely-coupled basis - for example, the SOA working group timetable is not synchronized to the Architecture Forum timetable - and this probably makes a more modular structure inevitable, at least in publication and possibly also curriculum.

There is common interest and a desire for harmonization between The Open Group and other standards bodies, notably OMG and OASIS. (See minutes of SOA Summit from February 2009, which may go some way to addressing David Sprott's concerns on SOA Concept Standards from January 2009.)

Security brings together a number of forums and groups, including the Jericho Forum and Identity Management. Again there is common interest with other standards bodies.

At some point, these two "rising stars" may become "cash cows". Looking into the future, The Open Group may need to seek new initiatives. Semantic Interoperability may be a "problem child" at the moment, but this presumably creates a common interest with W3C, especially given Tim Berners-Lee's interest in the Semantic Web.

And maybe a few more problem children we don't know about yet.

Standards 2

In my recent post on Standards, I said that "while there is a lot of debate about individual standards, or the choice between apparent alternatives, there is little rigorous debate about standardization as a whole".

So I was happy to see the announcement (via John Gøtze) of the latest issue of MIS Quarterly, a Special Issue on Standards-Making, guest-edited by Kalle Lyttinen and John Leslie King.

"The introductory article by the editors Kalle Lyytinen and John Leslie King, Standard Making: A Critical Research Frontier For Information Systems Research, is freely available, as are abstracts for all articles, but you need access to a research database to get online access to full-text articles."

I have known (and been impressed by) Kalle for many years, and I am delighted to see the latest product of his researches. But I infer from his article that rigorous debate is going to be limited to those who can master a range of interacting intellectual disciplines, including some difficult areas of economics and sociology, as well as the technological aspects.

So we are still a long way from having decent answers to the questions I posed earlier.

Technorati Tags: standardization standards

Standards

Andy Hayler's post on business rules Through a Rule Darkly includes a comment about a readers' poll reported by David Stodder, editor of Intelligent Enterprise, in an article entitled Mission Intelligence: Hide Complexity, Expose the Rules.

"I was amused by the readership poll quoted that said that 61% of respondents say that they have 'no standard process or practice' for business rules management. This might imply that 39% actually did, a number I would treat with considerable caution. Personally I have yet to encounter any that does so on a global basis."

For my part, I always treat these kind of polls with caution. My observation is that people often don't have a clue about what is really going on in their own organizations. They attempt to answer these questions by combining beliefs of what ought to be going on (largely based on what they read in the trade press) with an impression of the general capability of their own organization (linked to emotive factors such as pride and motivation).

[See my post on Received Opinion]

In interpreting this particular survey, Andy adopts the law of the excluded middle. Yes plus No must sum to 100%. Andy uses this calculation - presumably tongue in cheek - to call the Yes vote into question. But even if we assume the don't-knows have been taken care of, there are further problems with this kind of survey.

One of my first mentors in data modelling, Raimo Rikkilae, taught me that there were always three answers to any question: "zero", "one" and "many". Thus for example it is often useful to reframe apparently binary (Yes/No) questions into more complex questions (e.g. Always/Never/Sometimes).

So if 61% of organizations have no standards, this doesn't necessarily mean that the remaining 39% have exactly one standard. It could mean that they have many overlapping standards. (Of course, you might argue that having lots of different standards is tantamount to having no standards at all - but many organizations fail to operate according to this logic.)

Meanwhile, the easiest way to implement a single standard is to make it so vague and abstract that anything you like can be interpreted as conforming to the standard. (Of course, you could argue that having a vague and ambiguous standard is useless, and doesn't really count as a standard at all, but how many organizations follow this logic?)

On this analysis, it's hard to take figures such as 61% or 39% seriously - except as rhetorical gestures. If we want to assess the level of standardization in an organization (whether business rules or anything else), we need to investigate the matter properly, with a clear understanding of (a) what counts as a meaningful standard and (b) how to make sense of the multiplicity of standards in play.

And there is a wider question here - which links to governance. What is the relationship between standardization and the existence (and enforcement) of multiple standards? Does the software industry need more standards - or fewer? Obviously there are some strong vendor interests at stake, but there are also some independent bodies with strong standardization agendas. But while there is a lot of debate about individual standards, or the choice between apparent alternatives, there is little rigorous debate about standardization as a whole.

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Related post Received Wisdom (January 2005)

Business Collaboration Framework

A strange notice appeared on the BCF website before it went off the air, from which it appeared that the various parties building the Business Collaboration Framework had not managed to develop/sustain satisfactory terms for their own collaboration. Something to do with IPR.

As a result of the lack of any policy statement that can be evaluated by our legal advisors we are compelled to concur with the potential risks and exposure identified by Mr. David Marsh, UN/CEFACT Legal Rapporteur, during his presentation at the May Plenary session. Accordingly, we have had no alternative but to inform the UNECE that Ge-BAC has suspended all active project team participation by its employees within UN/CEFACT and its Groups.

Further, on the advice of our legal counsel, Ge-BAC has suspend its hosting services for the TMG and BCF web sites, as well as the TMG list server, in order to avoid legal challenges related to the ownership and distribution rights of the IP reflected in the content of all online material. Ge-BAC regrets this action, but as a small company we must avoid all unwarranted potential legal actions. At such time as the UNECE can successfully provide IPR policy documentation, we will evaluate the acceptability of that policy to our business operations and continued full participation in UN/CEFACT activities.

Standardization is an unusual enterprise, and its committees are often dominated by people of a certain personality type. But even so, one might have thought that those engaged in standardizing collaboration would have the knowledge and skill to construct an effective collaboration for themselves.

However, a standards effort must anticipate and represent all possible difficulties. The BCF collaborators had clearly stumbled across some intractable difficulty, and had the clarity and wisdom to recognize it as such, instead of fudging it as other less self-conscious collaborators might have done.

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