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CIO Corner

Boundaryless Information Flow is Real and Relevant

Boundaryless Information Flow to Manage Our Safety

EA, Business Agility, and Boundaryless Information Flow

Enterprise Architecture: Return on Investment

Deciding on Open Source

Managing the Flow

Certification - A Part of a Virtuous Circle

Directories - If There Were No Directories I Couldn't Find IT

Boundaryless Information Flow & Enterprise Architecture

Thinking Strategically about Certified Products

Architecture: Make IT Work for You

Open Source and Standards

Architecture: An Essential Tool for the CIO

What Keeps CIO Awake

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Thinking Strategically about Certified Products

OK - so you know about Boundaryless Information Flow:  the need to have integrated access to information in a secure, timely, and reliable manner to support critical business process improvements.  You also know how important Boundaryless Information Flow is; saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost opportunities, and billions in costs. Much has been made of the lack of interoperability being the key technical challenge.  Something that you may not have heard is how important certification is in achieving Boundaryless Information Flow.  This CIO Corner attempts to expose the tip of this iceberg.

Any full solution to the Boundaryless Information Flow problem needs to have a chain of technology components, preferably based on open standards, that:
- Integrate data
- Securely deliver data
- Register data
- Enable the flow of data
- Develop systems that enable this flow of data
- Manage systems that deliver this flow of data
- Adhere to policies that govern the flow of data

These technology components are a part of a chain, and must all do what they are chartered to do. There is a significant risk - when those components aren't certified over their life cycle - that at least one of these key components will not behave according to specification.

This can and probably will result in the information not being delivered in a reliable, timely, and secure manner... the ramifications of this being the millions of dollars in lost productivity, and the billions in costs as stated above. Without a strategy that includes certified products it is easy to introduce an element that breaks that chain. A new boundary is then created, usually resulting in a new, expensive add-on component that addresses the deficiency, a deficiency that should have been addressed by the certified component, and might not have even been a problem if all the products had been certified.

A strategy that includes the procurement of certified products mitigates that risk - not only for a single release, but for the life cycle of a product - in other words, for the long term.

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