Member Newsletter

September 2004

Welcome to a new edition of The Open Group Member Newsletter! We hope it will be a valuable resource for our members, and a tool as useful as The Open Group website.

Please let us know if there is anything you would like to see in this newsletter, or on our website, by e-mailing us. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

In This Issue:

• CEO Corner with Allen Brown
  
• The Open Group Calls for Greater Interoperability on ComputerWeekly.com
  
• Conference Preview: Boundaryless Information Flow™: Securing the Extended Enterprise
  
• Conference Preview: Enterprise Architecture: Making IT Pay – 3rd Architecture Practitioners Conference
  
• Information Quality: Your Decisions Are Only as Good as Your Information – Article by Dr. Chris Harding
  
• The Open Group Announces LSB 2.0 Certification Program
  
• Sneak Peek: Boundaryless Information Flow™: Architecting the Identity Management
  
• The Open Group’s Mike Lambert will speak at the INBOX event
  
• Certification News
  
• TOGAF Open Training Sessions
  
• Press Roundup
  
• Top Downloads from the Web
  
• Industry Events Calendar
  
• Final Thoughts
  
• Issue index
  
• Comments
  

CEO Corner with Allen Brown

If you have been to one of the quarterly conferences of The Open Group recently you may have heard me quote Peter Drucker on the need to focus on the “I” of IT. To paraphrase Drucker, he compares the Information Revolution to similar events in history and claims that no real changes took place for the first 50 years in each case. In the case of the revolution brought about by the printing press, all that happened was that 10,000 monks were no longer required to write the text for books. However, it was not until around 50 years after the invention of the printing press that any real impact was made on the lives of people - generally as a result of the bulk printing of the Lutheran Bible and making it available at very low cost. At the time of the industrial revolution, it was not until 50 years had passed that anything other than simple mechanization of manual processes came about. When it did, through the railroads, it enabled many people to travel great distances on frequent occasions and brought significant change to daily life.

Drucker concludes that it is now over 50 years since the information revolution began and that all we have done is to automate manual tasks: it has not yet made a fundamental change in the way decisions are made in organizations. We have so far focused on the “T” in IT. It is now time to focus on the “I”.

The importance of focusing on the “I” is starting to get attention. In the article, “Information Quality: Your Decisions Are Only as Good as Your Information”, submitted to this newsletter by Chris Harding, he continues the dialogue started at the Brussels conference on information quality. In fact, he will continue to lead the discussion at our October New Orleans conference in a session on Tuesday afternoon of the Holistic Information Management Task Force, which is open to all attendees of the conference.

At the conference in Boston in July, the Information Quality workshop identified three key areas for standardization:

• Metadata to facilitate information retrieval, to provide a trust context for information, and to enable information re-use;
• Application interfaces to support information tagging; and
• Metrics for information retrieval and other information operations.

In New Orleans, the Holistic Information Management Task Force meeting will:

• Review existing technology and standards;
• Identify gaps; and
• Agree on a charter for The Open Group work on holistic information management.

I am sure that Chris and the other folk leading this activity would like to see you there.

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The Open Group Calls for Greater Interoperability on ComputerWeekly.com

ComputerWeekly.com recently published an article by The Open Group’s Vice President of Marketing, Graham Bird, ‘Business Needs Open Standards for Applications.’ In the article, Bird asserts that suppliers must provide greater interoperability. He states, “There are very few open standards that enable interoperability - and hence free flow of information- between business applications.”

Bird points out that a good deal has been done for open-systems platforms and some middleware, to alleviate the problems of the lack of common standards, but there is virtually nothing out there for an organization that needs access to integrated information when it is required, in the form it is required, on the device of choice. He says that The Open Group has issued a ‘Declaration of Independence’ to address this lack of interoperable standards.

The Declaration is intended to show companies in the IT supply industry that there is a great deal of support for the development and use of open standards across the industry. Bird argues that proprietary systems are wrong for businesses that are evolving, reaching new customers, making new contacts and expanding their infrastructures. “They do not meet today’s challenges. Businesses need to change their processes to meet business needs, and information systems must change and evolve in step with these changes.”

Businesses need information to flow in a secure, reliable and timely manner, so that that they are able to extract and integrate data stored in the past - when there was little or no knowledge of how it might be used in the future. The only way to do that cost-effectively, Bird reasons, is for systems to be easier to integrate. The only way to do that is to use open standards.

The smart software vendors are now providing integration points for their systems and applications to make it easier for information systems to respond and evolve to meet changing business needs. They are active in delivering systems built on open standards - the best have certified products. But, Bird states, “Too many suppliers still cling to proprietary systems in the mistaken belief that it is the best way to retain customers.”

In conclusion, Bird remarks that “IT is one of the few remaining industries to believe that differentiation on price or on proprietary solutions is the only way to compete.

As the buyer, the choice is yours, and IT suppliers will only change their behaviour when you demand that they do so.” One sure way to make these demands heard? Redirect your money to products, services and suppliers that demonstrate that they support open standards. Preferably certified open systems.

Read the article: http://www.opengroup.org/comm/press/articles/Business%20needs%20open%20standards.pdf

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Conference Preview: Boundaryless Information Flow™: Securing the Extended Enterprise

The Open Group’s autumn conference, Boundaryless Information Flow™: Securing the Extended Enterprise, is taking place on October 18-21, 2004 at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, LA, USA.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks pose a debilitating threat to enterprise networks and the flow of information throughout the boundaryless organization. In 2000, DDOS attacks took three to four days to replicate across the Internet, but in 2003 the Slammer worm took just eight minutes. The actions of attackers - spreading viruses, stealing information and identity, undermining privacy, spoiling web sites, proving they can break security measures - need constant responses; it's a continual catch-up. The threat to the enterprise is real, is all-pervasive, and is now automated.

In response, to focus on what is most important – safeguarding information, and making IT systems as fail-safe, dependable and reliable as possible - is critical.

This conference will bring together the foremost IT security and other experts to detail the current security threats, discuss the issues for enterprise communications, and outline practical solutions.

Confirmed Speakers include:

• Dr. Bill Hancock, CISSP, CISM, Vice President of Security Practice & Strategy and Chief Security Officer, Savvis Communications
• Bob Blakley, Chief Scientist, Security and Privacy, IBM
• Mark O’Neill, Chief Technology Officer, Vordel
• Mark Reichert, Chief Technology Officer, Schools Interoperability Framework
• Ben Calloni, Research Program Manager, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, Chair RTES Forum
• Mick Coady, VP Security Practice, Computer Associates Int.

For more information and to register, please visit http://www.opengroup.org/new-orleans2004

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Conference Preview: Architecture Practitioners’ Conference - Enterprise Architecture: Making IT Pay

The 3rd Architecture Practitioners' Conference is taking place on October 19-21, 2004 at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, LA (concurrent with The Open Group’s Securing the Extended Enterprise conference).

Enterprise architecture is becoming an essential function in most organizations, providing strategic context for the evolution of information technology within the enterprise, in response to the changing needs of the business environment. It also enables organizations to maintain the right balance between permitting innovation and catering to the integration needs of the extended enterprise. In this event, The Open Group provides a forum for all key constituencies and stakeholders to come together and explore new ways to solve problems, share best practices, and network with peers.

This two-day conference will focus on how enterprise architecture can best contribute to creating real business value, provide experience-based insight into the approaches and methods that have proved most effective for developing enterprise architectures around the world, and clarify the limitations that exist in this emerging field.

The conference will take a highly practical, hands-on approach, combining presentations and discussions on best practices with interactive workshops, case study reviews and demonstrations of the latest tools.

At the conference, you will:

• Participate in highly practical workshops teaching best practices in the enterprise architecture process
• Review in-depth case studies from organizations that put theory into practice, learning what works and what doesn't
• Experience demonstrations and presentations on leading tools supporting open methods for enterprise architecture
• Network with leading architecture experts, vendors, and peers in the enterprise architecture field

For the full agenda: http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/0410norl/apc-agenda.htm

To register for the event, please visit http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/0410norl/q404arch-prac.htm

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Information Quality: Your Decisions Are Only as Good as Your Information

By Dr. Chris Harding, The Open Group

Mistakes happen, but some have larger impact than others. Mary in accounting sometimes sends out a wrong invoice. A mistake. Jane in the emergency unit gives the wrong medicine to an allergic patient. That’s due to a mistake too. In 1999, three Chinese journalists were killed in the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Also due to a mistake. Mary’s mistake can easily be corrected with a short phone call and a new invoice, even though if repeated, it impacts efficiency and possibly her company’s reputation. The wrong medicine and bombing mistakes are a different story: lives were lost, and in Belgrade, there was also serious political damage – the bombing was considered one of the worst political setbacks of the Kosovo conflict.

All three mistakes happened due to the lack of quality information or a problem in the information flow. According to management guru Peter Drucker, there is nothing more treacherous than a manager’s attempt to make precise decisions on the basis of coarse and incomplete information. The Japanese quality guru, Kaoru Ishikawa, said to ‘speak with data’ - but the data have to be accurate. The cost of poor quality information today is enormous. Yet in today’s highly competitive environment, companies cannot afford to make the wrong decision or lose efficiency due to the poor quality of information they use. With the overwhelming amount of data available today, managing information, ensuring its quality, navigating it and making sense of it is becoming a huge issue for enterprises of all kinds.

Although techniques for managing quality of goods, services and processes are now quite sophisticated, information quality management is still lagging. Ways of dealing with information quality have been suggested and tried. They include both academic theories and practical rules of thumb applied by outside consultants to their clients’ problems for a fee. Some methods focused specifically on dealing with dirty data, from techniques for data cleaning and records matching, to more complex toolkits such as data reconciliation frameworks and complex data cleaning workflows. Other techniques, although they acknowledged the importance of clean data, mainly emphasized the need to focus on business management perspective, and to improve processes. For example, some business consulting methodologies use principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) applied to managing data warehousing information quality; other approaches to process management that impact information quality include Six Sigma, and Quality Function Deployment (QFD). Yet another approach is based on cooperative information systems (CIS).

However, one key issue is that there is no agreed way to measure information quality. Appropriate metrics would help user organizations improve their information quality. But there is not even an agreement on different categories for the metrics. This has been a problem for a number of years, yet there is still no solution in sight. Although it's easy to measure physical characteristics like size, weight or quantity, measuring highly abstract characteristics like information quality is much more of a challenge. A number of researchers identified different characteristics such as accuracy, precision, currency, output timeliness, reliability, completeness, conciseness, format, understandability, report usefulness, sufficiency, freedom from bias, relevance and others. However, there is no agreement on a definitive set. To make the issue more complex, add the need to account for potential differences between objective high quality data and subjective lack of confidence in the data by users, or the need to account for potential differences between subjective assessments by stakeholders/users versus custodians/IT departments. Most metrics today are developed by companies on an ad hoc basis to solve specific problems. That takes money and people.

But the problem is not just to find a metric. It is to find a -standard- metric that everyone will use and that will enable results in different organizations to be compared directly.

How to go about finding a standard metric? Development of a standard metric (or set of metrics) can only be done by a body that:

• can develop an understanding of the requirements;
• can combine the inputs from customers, vendors, and the academic community;
• has the authority to speak for the industry.

Members of The Open Group, a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium with a long track record of contributing to IT standards, have recognized the importance of access to integrated quality information and made information central to its vision and mission. Its vision focuses on driving the creation of Boundaryless Information Flow™, to enable access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability. The Open Group realizes the importance of developing a standard way of measuring information quality and has started looking into the problem, calling on its members to assist with developing a standard way to measure information quality.

It will not be easy or quick, to find the right solution – this is a very complex issue. But there is a consensus in the industry that a new approach is needed and would bring significant efficiencies and cost-savings. Making information and data quality a priority will ensure that investments of time and money already put in will pay off, and mistakes from decisions based on erroneous information will be minimized - from setting the right price for an airline seat to a life saved in an emergency room.

For more information, please contact Dr. Chris Harding

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The Open Group Announces LSB 2.0 Certification Program

The Open Group announced a certification program for the latest LSB 2.0 Specification that was developed by The Free Standards Group. The Open Group serves as the Certification Authority.

Read more: http://www.opengroup.org/press/14sep04.htm

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Sneak Peek: Boundaryless Information Flow™: Architecting the Identity Management

The January 24-28, 2005 conference occurring in San Francisco, CA, USA, will spotlight the progress made on enabling interoperable identity management solutions, and introduce key concepts of architecting identity management including trust, identity management and authentication; provisioning; permissions management and authorization; and directories and their roles. It will discuss the business value of identity management, the most effective measures for cost/benefit assessment, limiting legal liability, and how to make informed decisions.

Highlights:

• Why should you invest in identity management?
• What is identity in IT terms?
• Can you trust electronic identity?
• Can effective identity management reduce your company’s legal liability?
• How can you control the risk and secure your intellectual property?
• How can you best architect an identity management framework?
• What are the business requirements for identity, authentication and assurance?
• What is the status of standards for identity management?