Richard Soley's On The Road Blog

Intelligent Systems and DDS

Perhaps you’ve never heard the term, “Intelligent Systems” but I can pretty much guarantee that you use at least one of these devices on a regular basis. Any technological device that is able to autonomously communicate to another device as well as access the Internet is considered an Intelligent System. These devices include the obvious examples of smartphones and GPS navigation systems, but they also include devices and systems such as: telemedicine, smart vehicles, smart grid energy, and home security systems.

Though its usage has been limited in the past, OMG’s Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware has great potential in the Intelligent Systems industry. The DDS specification enables scalable, real-time, dependable, high performance, and interoperable data exchanges between publishers and subscribers. Systems that use DDS are not only able to communicate independently of each other (thus eliminating the risk of being knocked “offline” because of an issue often experienced by systems that rely on a server or another system- such as too many other users), but they automatically know how to send and receive messages from other DDS devices.

OMG member, Twin Oaks Computing, Inc., recently wrote a whitepaper demonstrating how DDS could be used with the Android operating system. The paper acknowledges that most Android developers today build their apps without middleware as early apps did not communicate off of Android devices. Now that Android has taking a large part of the market, developers want to adapt their existing apps to the Android operating system: a project that can prove to be very costly and time-consuming! Using Communications Middleware, such as DDS, will not only provide portability across different operating systems, it will also simplify the resulting app’s code, all the while dramatically reducing system complexity.

DDS also reduces development, administrative, and maintenance costs of smartphone apps. Instead of completely rebuilding an app when updates need to be added, DDS can be used to simply integrate the update to the existing system. DDS also allows publishers and subscribers to be either added or subtracted without altering the overall system.

The Android operating system is, of course, only one example of how DDS can be used by Intelligent Systems: Real-Time Innovations demonstrated in a case study how the City of Tokyo Metropolitan Highway Line system used DDS to connect a central information-control center with hundreds of information kiosks and displays scattered along the highway.  The control center passes information to the kiosks which give drivers information on traffic conditions, projected arrival times, alternate routes, and enforcement points where traffic is being redirected or controlled due to obstructions in the roadways caused by construction or accidents.

DDS could also be integrated into a home security system that allows homeowners to turn lights on and off at certain times; home meters that can determine exactly how much energy a house is using and send this data to the utilities company; or as OMG member, Prismtech, demonstrates: into medical devices that will connect healthcare staff and patients in diverse geographical locations. This includes home-used devices that transmit medical data to healthcare providers’ offices, and technically advanced scanning and treating devices where data is logged and transmitted.

Can you think of other uses for DDS? If you have any whitepapers or case studies illustrating DDS’s capabilities in various industries, we would love to feature it on our DDS page! Please send all information to OMG’s PR specialist, Julie at julie@omg.org.

Guest Blog Post: James Stikeleather, Executive Strategist and Chief Innovation Officer of Dell

                                                                                                 

Not only is James Stikeleather an old friend, as Executive Strategist and Chief Innovation Officer of Dell, he is a new OMG member as well!

Richard and I have always shared a belief that good standards, common architectures and processes, and shared knowledge can accelerate all of an enterprise’s lines of business. With collaboration and co-creation among the entire ecosystem of IT, the value and benefits of growth can be achieved faster, with less risk and at less cost. I, and many others, believe that the OMG has and continues to excel at this. Equally important, the work of the Cloud Standards Customer Council is driving these same ideas into the world of ubiquitous computing.

But the time has come to step up the game. CIOs and IT departments are not well thought of by their enterprises; that needs to change quickly, or there is a risk that CIOs and their departments will become irrelevant to business. The underlying driver for this disappointment can be linked to the lack understanding of what is happening to the business and a lack of innovation in response. The issue is whether IT can transform gracefully, the way caterpillars become butterflies, or not so gracefully, the way dinosaurs were wiped out and replaced with mammals.

Over the last two years, we have been engaged in primary research with The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, CEB (formerly known as the Corporate Executive Board), Intel and TNS Global in an attempt to paint a picture of how the role of the CIO and the IT department needs transformation. We also engaged with CIOs across the globe in discussions about what they were experiencing and what changes were surprising or bewildering them.  We have now joined up with HBR and CIO Magazine to start the needed transformation conversations and actions.

The last century of management focused on reducing transaction costs—particularly time and capital.  As the 20th century business, and its IT organization, was focused on the industrialization priorities of repetition, scale and efficiency, the evolving 21st century model of value creation focuses on originality, innovation and efficacy. The key to succeeding today is innovation.  Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.  It’s the only antidote to margin-crushing competition, the only hope for out-performing a dismal economy and the only way to truly amaze your customers.  Innovation—in operations, products, business models and ecosystems—isn’t merely a competitive advantage; it’s the competitive advantage of the future.

What the research shows is that two necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for success in the 21^st century will be for organizations to be socially enabled and to freely operate in digital business ecosystems. Digital business ecosystems mean they can interact with customers, partners, suppliers, even competitors dynamically and fluidly to create value on the fly and in the moment for their customers by assembling each ecosystems participants value propositions uniquely when, where, and how needed. Socially enabled means collaboration, cooperation, co-creation of ideas, value, dynamically across organizational boundaries based upon the social members ability to contribute and the contributions value.

And what those two things need are standards—collaboration, choreography, orchestration, common semantics, and abstracted dynamic infrastructure. If these enabling standards and technologies are not there soon, we run the risk of business adopting, independent of IT, proprietary locked-in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS, BSaaS and pretty much every other “aaS” the marketing types can come up with. Change in the economics of business means enterprises cannot afford to wait. If we cannot get there soon, we run the risk of the mess of the 70s and 80s (and if we are honest, the 90s as well) when IT ignored the PC (not a real computer). Only back then, there was no path (until very late) for getting rid of the mainframe, so IT wasn’t really at risk. Not so much now.

OMG, and now the Cloud Standards Customer Council, has always discovered the need, worked the issues, developed the standards and supported its users with speed and quality. But CIOs and internal IT departments everywhere need you to step it up another notch or two—or three. Technical standards in technology, process, method, knowledge, representation, services levels, even contract language and more are only part of the solution. Management itself has to change. But no matter how well management may change, without the enabling technology to execute with, it is all just a daydream.

Please join the conversation.

 

TechTarget’s Top 10 Q&As

Graphic courtesy of TechTarget

I was pleasantly surprised earlier today to discover that I had been named one of TechTarget’s SearchSOA Top 10 Q&As. Besides being recognized beside such names as Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Distinguised Analyst of Gartner Inc; James Strachan, Senior Consulting Software Engineer of Red Hat; and Kathy McGroddy Goetz, VP of Business Development and Information Management of IBM, being included in this exceptional list meant having my very own quote graphic!

 

Check out the rest of the slide show here! 

A Side Trip to Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

On March 7^th, while on a trip in Mexico City, I had the opportunity to stop in and visit our members from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) –the National Autonomous University of Mexico.   Though it wasn’t my primary reason for visiting the lovely capital city of México, I’m glad I found the time to visit UNAM—brilliant researchers, a lovely campus, and a strong sense of the future of software engineering.  They covered my visit in their departmental blog at http://www.kuali-kaans.mx/.

At Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, March 7, 2013—that’s me in the middle, and Prof. Oktaba standing at my right shoulder (photo courtesy of UNAM) 

UNAM was founded in 1910 and was granted independence of its curriculum and budget by the government in 1929. Its list of alumni is rather impressive, boasting five former Mexican presidents; Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Alfonso García Robles; the first Mexican citizen in space, Rodolfo Neri Vela; and chemistry Nobel Prize laureate, Mario J. Molina.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find one of this bunch of students joining such a distinguished list; their questions were insightful and fascinating, and their participation in OMG’s Foundation for the Agile Creation and Enactment of Software Engineering Methods (FACESEM) software engineering standardization process has been deep and broad.  An initial discussion with Professor Hanna Oktaba, Professor Lupita Ibargüengoitia and their graduate students (including particularly Miguel Morales, well-known to OMG meeting participants over the last year) was followed by a terrific lunch and tour.

The day I spent at UNAM was tremendously enjoyable; I was very fortunate to have Professor Fernando Arámbula act as personal tour guide during my visit. The main campus was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007 and is just breathtaking—especially the magnificent, mosaic-covered library. UNAM honestly has to be one of the most beautiful universities I’ve ever visited.

UNAM Central Library (photo courtesy of Wikipedia.org)

Everyone I met, both faculty and students, was very interested in what OMG does and was eager to speak to me—I’m quite sure I learned more than any knowledge I imparted. One thing that especially struck me was how fiercely proud they are of being a leading university in the domain of standards adoption and for doing something that most universities don’t: not only is UNAM an OMG member organization, but they are an active specification submitter.  UNAM initially joined OMG in 2011 at a University-level membership, and upgraded to Platform-level three months later in order to be a submitter to the FACESEM request for proposals (RFP).

OMG has a fairly-priced membership fee tier system that allows many different organizations to contribute at different levels, based on size (generally measured by revenue, or turnover) and participation.  The members from UNAM were so passionate about actively contributing to standards creation and adoption that they aggressively lobbied forward-thinking leadership at UNAM to find the additional funds to move up to a Platform membership.   In addition, UNAM participates as a full submitter in FACESEM, including in-person at the meetings, and is considering participation in other specification development processes as well.

UNAM has taken a big risk—and are near a big success in its work on standards—which is what defines a leader. Being a member of organizations such as OMG demonstrates a university’s dedication to practical education for its students as well as an embrace of the latest technologies and ideas and the strength to actively drive standardization. Demonstrating these leadership attributes, in turn, attracts the brightest scholars to the university.

We at OMG would love for more universities to become members. Besides UNAM, we currently have dozens of active university members including my own alma mater the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but also John Hopkins University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, KU Leaven, the University of South Australia and Humboldt Universitaet.  All of them have been instrumental in standards adoption processes over the years. We believe that our university members offer us a vast wealth of knowledge and great opportunities in the years to come.

Visiting the UNAM campus and witnessing the pride and determination that its students and faculty possess has strengthened my appreciation and respect for this university.  I look forward to UNAM’s continued contributions in OMG standardization and, hopefully, for a return visit to its beautiful campus!

Guest Blog Post: Tom Burns, General Manager of Dell Networking

Yesterday was an exciting day here at the OMG offices as we made the announcement that our newest member, Dell, had proposed a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) standardization working committee. Networking is the last bastion of unvirtualized computing infrastructure. As standard-defined networks grow in interest among vendors and end-users, they need to be met with flexible, transparent, powerful standards that help the industry grow rapidly and allow interoperable and portable solutions, while giving customers real choice. Below, Tom Burns, General Manager of Dell Networking, explains why Dell is interested in working on SDN standardization at the OMG.

 

The driving force behind the Open Management Group (OMG) is the principle that several contributors – whether individuals, educational institutions or corporations – can and do work closely to establish the best in open industry standards.  It is this principle that led Dell to be a member of OMG, as it has been at the heart of our enterprise strategy:  to drive openness in all areas of technology, so we can provide the best in solutions, value and choice for our customers.  

Software Defined Networking (SDN) addresses the need for flexibility in managing traffic flow and performance at a software level rather than being limited by a network switch, a server or a storage solution. Dell’s vision, and one that we believe is shared with several of the OMG members, is that SDN goes beyond the network. This solution should look beyond the data center, in fact across the entire enterprise. A “controller” which drives disruption on how enterprises operate and is jointly developed, commercialized and promoted, using open standards as a principle, needs to take all infrastructure into consideration.

Dell’s position is open standards are required to build an SDN controller and anything short of that is in fact contrary to the goals of OMG and could lead to a closed or proprietary solution, minimizing customers’ choice.  And for the reasons stated above, it may also limit the potential of original concepts and goals of SDN. 

The proposed OMG SDN Working Committee aims to accelerate open multi-vendor development through cooperation and collaboration. Dell is excited to be part of this initiative along with other leading technology companies and institutions to be announced. Dell sees this as a tremendous opportunity through disruptive technologies to deliver customers broader choice and greater value.

Guest Blog Post: Hudson Hollister, Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition

Almost a year ago, I founded the Data Transparency Coalition, a trade association with one mission: to persuade legislators and civil servants to publish and standardize the U.S. government’s data. We believe in data transparency for the government’s whole portfolio-spending data, management and performance documentation, regulatory directives and disclosures, legislative actions, and judicial.

Data transparency will benefit both government and society in many ways: it will strengthen democracy by improving the accountability of government to its citizens; improve the efficiency of private markets by giving investors and customers access to regulatory filings; improve efficiency of government finances and programs by enabling new management tools; sharpen the enforcement of laws and regulatory requirements; and generate new opportunities for the technology industry in Big Data search analysis, compliance solutions, citizens engagement, implementation and data republication.  

Our first focus has been on the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), originally proposed in Congress in 2011. The DATA Act would impose consistent data models on all executive-branch spending data and require everything- grant and contract records, agencies’ budget reports, payment requests- to be published online. The House of Representatives passed the DATA Act on suspension (unanimously) in April 2012; the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on federal spending data transparency in July; and a new version of the DATA Act was introduced with bipartisan support in the Senate in September. However, the Senate version was never considered in committee and the bill died with the expiration of the 112^th Congress. We’re now working on getting the DATA Act re-introduced in the new 113^th Congress, which came into session last month.

As 2013 began, so did a new partnership between the Coalition and OMG. The two organizations have agreed to work together to pursue the adoption of data standards in the federal government. We bring complementary strengths to the table: the Coalition has public policy expertise and OMG has decades of experience in developing and governing data standards. As part of our partnership, the Coalition and OMG will offer each other’s members a 10% discount for first-year annual fees.

In 2013, the Coalition will expand its vigorous advocacy for data standards in Washington D.C. In addition to pursuing the passage of the DATA Act, we will release the first comprehensive policy roadmap for data transparency in the U.S. government. Through policy roundtables with members of Congress and senior staff of federal agencies, we will connect our members with the decision-makers who will craft and implement the DATA Act and future mandates. In late summer, we will host our first major policy conference in the Washington, DC area. The conference will bring together all the constituencies of data transparency: members of Congress, agency leadership, technology solutions providers, open-data advocates, transparency activists, and academic and philanthropic leaders.  

We are excited to partner with OMG to pursue the adoption of data standards throughout the U.S. government. If you are interested in learning more about the Data Transparency Coalition, please visit our website at www.datacoalition.org.

The Importance of the Consumer Device Safety Standard (CDSS)

In 2010, Toyota Motor Corp. found itself in the middle of a crisis: it’s once impeccable reputation for high-quality vehicles had been tarnished with three recalls- one right after the other. An apparent sudden, rapid acceleration in Toyota vehicles led owners to fear for their safety while prospective buyers began looking elsewhere. Though the company experienced a brief slip in sales, three years later, it returned to its status as one of the top selling automotive companies.

Toyota learned many lessons from this experience: a system that is sluggish to capture status throughout the manufacturing, development and customer support  processes along with sluggish decision-making exacerbates problems; local issues involving a global corporation can instantly spread all over the world; an issue that was apparently “out of scope” (i.e., user-installed floor mats in Toyota vehicles) can become no longer “out of scope” for functional safety in real customer use; and finally, that it’s difficult to explain how software-intensive systems are designed to be safe. In order to resolve these issues, Toyota joined the OMG and proposed work on what is now called the Consumer Device Safety Standard (CDSS). This new standards process has been an instant success, in the sense that many companies are already participating. The fact that the apparent issue has been dealt with (see NASA’s report for the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) only highlights the need for an industry-wide integrated functional safety and dependability standard.

On Tour to Explain CDSS: Stefan Voget, Naoya Ishizaki, me, Achim Seibertz, Christoph Ainhauser, Maged Khalil and Matthias Nick and BMW Car IT in Munich, Germany

The real long-term purpose of CDSS is to have a shared methodology for safety and dependability, broadly adopted across the consumer device industry (automotive, robotic, home-control, entertainment, mobile-telephone, etc.) as an accepted way to design devices for safety and dependability (in a very broad sense- which might include security, reliability, etc.). The two reasons for this would be:

-So that we have devices that are more dependable, and with increasing dependability from model to model; and

-So that the shared methodology, simply because it is broadly adopted, becomes a safe harbor from litigation and liability procedures.

Obviously, the existence of a standard will accelerate the wide and broad adoption of that methodology; while ISO 26262 and other standards provide the right basis from a “dictionary” and terminology point of view, they do not provide sufficient methodology and procedure; that is what OMG is developing through the CDSS standardization process.

As I mentioned above, many companies are already interested (and are already taking part in this process); these include consumer device manufacturers, precisely to increase consumer acceptance through delivery of more dependable products, as well as creation of methodology safe harbor; suppliers to consumer device manufacturers (who obviously must use the same methodology and terminology when delivering parts to their customers); and tool vendors (who will be looked to by the manufacturers and their suppliers to suppliers to support the standardized methodologies in the current and future tool chains, among others.  

In addition, we have received quite a lot of attention from government agencies and research institutions who have been working in the functional safety domain for some time and have significant experience to add; as well as other standards organizations (like SAE International and ISO), on whose efforts OMG will depend as well.

If you would like to learn more about CSCC, contact the Systems Assurance Task Force Chairs at sysa-chair@omg.org or if you want to get involved with moving the standard forward, contact Ken Burk at ken.berk@omg.org. 

Armageddon is Coming…

I gave the keynote speech at the Software Quality Days conference in Vienna last week. That coupled with OMG’s recent adoption of the Automated Function Point (AFP) specification got me thinking about how important software quality really is in today’s world. It seems like every other day headlines scream about the latest computer glitch that screws up our technologically-entwined lives: whether it is BlackBerry owners experiencing major service outages in Europe or the London Stock Exchange’s system grounding to a halt during the busiest trading time. As we come to rely more and more on technology in our every-day tasks, technology glitches go from being mere nuisances to becoming catastrophes.

Many vendors write test cases to identify their software’s weaknesses and safeguard against failures. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that testing is not delivering the level of assurance that consumers demand. Academics and practitioners alike realize that testing, even against clear requirements, can never be sufficient to ensure quality software.

Many organizations do in fact use some sort of software quality metric. But a lot of the time these metrics are created to focus on the quality of the software development process rather than that of the actual product. Organizations can also pay for a private quality metric software artifact. But maintaining these different metrics in hundreds or thousands of organizations introduces the problem of useless differentiation and forces costs to rise.

That’s where software quality standards organizations- such as the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), a joint effort of OMG and the CMU Software Engineering Initiative- come into play. These organizations work on standards that will not only ensure that a vendor’s software is of sound quality, but by using one standardized program rather than private ones, vendors can maintain costs.

With AFP, CISQ has already developed a standard for automating the popular Function Pont measure according to the counting guidelines of the International Function Point User Group. Using AFP automates and therefore dramatically reduces the cost of function point counting and will eliminate any inconsistencies that may arise through error-prone manual FP counting. This is only the beginning for CISQ, which is now establishing a computable software quality standard for IT applications with scoring guidelines. (Keep your eyes peeled in the coming months!)

We all managed to survive December 21^st, 2012 and with standards organizations such as CISQ and OMG protecting our software from failure, we will manage to avoid a technological apocalypse as well!

Guest Blogger: Mr. Kenneth Rubin, Chair of Healthcare Services Specification Program (HSSP) and OMG Healthcare Task Force

Week-in and week-out, we continually focus on what still needs to be done, rarely pausing to pay attention to what has already been accomplished. As 2012 draws to a close, I wanted to pause a moment and acknowledge all of the work and efforts that have been made in contributing to what has been another productive and successful chapter in HSSP's history. At the end of the day, our community survives based upon the time and effort that is contributed by all of our participants and participating organizations. This is very much recognized and appreciated.

I would also like to take this opportunity to highlight some of the HSSP milestones that have occured this year:

>  The Resource Location and Updating Service (RLUS) passed its normative ballot and became a final specification.  After languishing for some time following its “Draft Standard” status, this specification finally graduated to a normative work. Special thanks to Stefano Lotti of Invitalia/HL7 Italia for his herculean work in getting this long overdue work item complete
 
>  The [Healthcare and Community] Services Directory (ServD) Specification was adopted by the OMG as a technical specification.  Anchored by the team of Brian Postlethwaite and Peter Young, the ServD specification had a very successful and rapid adoption to the kudos of the OMG Architecture Board, a rarity.
 
> The Common Terminology Services Release 2 (CTS2) technical specification was adopted.  Championed originally by the Mayo Team and then with the support of Phast, CTS2 was among the most visible specifications to come through HSSP.  While their “ride” was perhaps not as smooth as some of the other standards activities, CTS2 has created a tremendous energy and excitement across the industry, and continues to quickly pick up steam in the form of new adopters and implementations.   Special kudos to Harold Solbrig, Craig Stancl, Ana Estelrich, Russ Hamm for their efforts, and special thanks to Chris Chute for having the foresight and fortitude to continue to invest in this important work.
 
> Produced informative guidance on use of HSSP and other standards to address the needs of the Immunization Community in the form of the Cross-Paradigm Implementation Project.  This effort has spearheaded cross-community collaboration and is leading the way as an early-adopter of emerging HL7 methodology in conjunction with engaging new communities.  Kudos to Alean Kirnak for her efforts in continuing to drive differing constituencies to work together.
 
> Adoption of the hData REST profile for RLUS (formerly the hData RESTful Specification), and all of the hard work that Gerald Beuchelt and his team have contributed to this work.  Having arrived at the SOA WG in HL7 without any prior knowledge of the OMG RLUS specification, the team at Mitre was able to align hData to the RLUS Platform Independent Model in very short order, creating our first “new addition” platform support as an adjunct to an existing specification.
 
> Adoption of the Medication Statement Profile for RLUS, the first specialization of what had been a generic specification for use in a domain-specific environment.  Gerald Beuchelt, Hugh Glover, and all the others involved in this project are owed our thanks for exploring new ground as we determine how our foundational standards are applied into other domains (and for establishing a model for collaboration between other HL7 workgroups and SOA)
 
>  Significant “uptick” in reference implementations of HSSP activities, including but not limited to the OpenCDS community (spearheaded by Ken Kawamoto and the University of Utah), the CTS2 Toolkit (spearheaded by Kevin Johnson and Mayo Clinic), and several broad, open HSSP implementation activities in Italy (thanks to Stefano Lotti and the HealthSOAF project) and Germany (thanks to Franhoufer Institute and the entire team there).  [My apologies that I do not know all of the key players involved in these efforts].
 
> Several educational and training events were held, including the “Interconnected Health” conference in Chicago, Illinois; presence at HIMSS in Las Vegas; “Information Seminars” in Rome, Singapore, and Cambridge; and a very well attended webinar on SOA.  This is in addition to the many educational sessions, forums, and webinars hosted on specific standards within our portfolio.
 
> In addition to the above, we have initiated a number of new projects (and continue to make progress on existing activities) that hopefully will be on this list in 2013.  As has become our custom, this list is devoted to major accomplishments and milestones.  This in no way diminishes the hard work of each of our project leads and valuable contributors whom may not have been specifically mentioned.
 
> Finally, with the close of 2012, we bid adieu to Gerald Beuchelt, whom has served as HL7 SOA co-chair and will be departing us as he undertakes a change in career path to activities outside of the health domain.   Thanks Gerald for all of your hard work, your drive, your sense of humor, and your passion.  You will be missed and are welcome back at any time.

No doubt a number of significant efforts and individual contributors have been overlooked, and for that, I am sorry. As you can see, 2012 has been a fruitful and productive year. My sincerest thanks to everyone that has contributed to this work, whether as an author, reviewer, implementer, or supporter. Here is looking forward to another great year, to making a difference, and to having the most fun possible while doing important and meaningful work positively affecting the health and wellness of people across the globe. Happy holidays to all of you, and wishing you the best for 2013!

OMG Interview on The Pulse Network