Richard Soley's On The Road Blog

Winter in the Summer and other Frequent Flyer Mile Collection

One of the things you quickly learn in the international standards business is never to talk about a meeting being “in the summer,” a topic very clear and near to me at the moment as I find myself in lovely southern Chile to participate in the Global Network Architecture Board meeting (GNAB 2010). This area is quite lovely; in fact I have been here several times on vacation with my family, and the Villarica/Pucón region is magnificent: at the foot of an active volcano (Volcán Villarica) and with a lovely lake separating us from the high Andes mountains and Argentina.  Here's the view from my hotel room last night just after I arrived:

Notice that tree on the right with no leaves? That's right, it's winter here, not summer; it was 33 degrees Celsius in Boston when I left on Sunday, and 10 degrees here. Today it's cloudy and colder, but at least calm and quiet. Flying through Santiago's Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL) it was nice to see the repairs well underway after the horrendous 27 February 2010 earthquake, 8.9 on the Richter scale. The main terminal is completely usable, clean and efficient, with the construction continuing apace.

Tomorrow I'll give a keynote on software quality standardization, focusing of course on CISQ. This has been the topic of at least a third of my talks in the last few months, with quite a lot of interest being generated worldwide—not only from traditional outsourcing companies, but from other software vendors and quite a few software users and buyers. The reality is, every software development contract (whether internal or across company boundaries) has some sort of acceptance criteria, and it's absolutely high time that all the many different quality criteria come together into an agreed standard that can be used industry-wide to lower costs and increase quality. I've said quite a lot about that before so I won't belabor it.

This trip leads off a number of events over the next few months. On September 13/14, it will be back to summer for the joint OMG/CIT Workshop on Cloud Computing. CIT, the Club de Investigación Tecnológica has been a partner of OMG's in events for 15 years now, and the Club was instrumental in helping us put together and host our 20^th birthday party last year.

It's always good to be back in Costa Rica, and land of contrasts: high technology and jungles, software and beaches. We were lucky and honored to have the then-President of Costa Rica (and Nobel Laureate) Dr. Óscar Arias speak at our 20th birthday party. This time we'll have the newly-elected President Laura Chinchilla open our event; she's an old friend of the OMG, having opened other events for us in Costa Rica in her previous Ministerial roles.

After that it's back to the beginning of Autumn at home, when I will be lucky enough to enjoy an OMG Technical Meeting week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just 10 km from my home. Hopefully you've already registered as space is going fast and we have several exciting co-located events in store besides the usual standardization efforts: they include the Business Architecture Information Day and seminars and tutorials on Modeling and Middleware, Trusted Software Development and Goal-Driven Business Measurement.

No rest for the weary I'm afraid, however—I will leave midweek to participate in an international energy forum in Monaco. Though not strictly an OMG trip, it's an interest of mine going back many years. From there I will go directly to the annual MDA Forum event in Milan. This annual event always draws a remarkable speaker list (other than yours truly of course), and I'm honored to be participating again.  Last year's event featured a side trip to a quite nice restaurant, Boccondivino my current Milanese favorite, and I've been promised a return trip and will be holding the host to it. Here's a picture of the cheese cart, otherwise known as the seventh course of Boccondivino's eight-course dinner.

The Milan trip will also feature the third workshop of the Software Engineering Methodology and Tools (SEMAT) project that I started last year with Ivar Jacobson and Bertrand Meyer.  From there it's back to Boston for HL7's 24th Annual Plenary and Working Group Meeting, conveniently back in Cambridge, MA followed by a quick trip to Oslo to give a dinner keynote on the first ten years of the Model Driven Architecture. The conference is the MODELS 2010 Conference and I must say I'm particularly excited to go back to Oslo City Hall (the Rådhus) where ten years ago I had the honor to present awards to the creators of SIMULA67 and arguably the object-orientation movement, Kristen Nygaard and Ole Johan Dahl. Here's a memory jog for those that were there—Bill Hoffman and I standing with Kristen Nygaard and the then-mayor of Oslo and host of the reception, Per Ditlev-Simonsen.

Next stop will be the SECR 2010 conference in Moscow, the 6^th Central and Eastern European Software Engineering Conference where software quality is again my topic.  This well-established conference focuses on the software industry throughout Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Russia and the members of the CIS. Although I've had the opportunity to visit the lovely city of St. Petersburg (both for work and for vacation) several times over the years, it's been a while since I spent any time in Moscow and I'm looking forward to seeing how the city has changed and grown, as any city changes and grows. I'd love to share some of my photos from the PC World Forum in Moscow I attended for OMG in July of 1991 (my sole visit to the Soviet Union), which included a traditional stand-up dinner in the Kremlin—but that was before the advent of consumer digital photography, so you'll have to wait for some scanning.

The following week I'm off to Washington, DC—as always in Washington there will be plenty of different meetings and activities, including a keynote on Business Process Modeling, Business Rules and related standards at the International Business Rules Forum. I'll be talking about Business Ecology^® of course and announcing the winner of this year's Business Process Modeling awards from the BPM/SOA Community of Practice. I guess that gives me an excuse to share one of my hobbies—aerial photography. Here's an aerial shot of Washington, DC, one of my early ones, from a Bombardier CRJ40 that had just left Washington's Ronald W. Reagan International Airport.

From there it's off to Orlando to visit Mickey Mouse, uh, I mean, participate in this year's Gartner ITxpo. Our partnership with Gartner has grown substantially over the last two years and I'm excited to participate in their mega-event again this year. In fact, later this year I expect to be at their Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, where we will present more work from our Business Ecology Communities of Practice and OMG standardization efforts in Cloud Computing. More later on coming trips to Brazil, Dallas, Sydney and Bangalore. In the meantime, one of my recent aerial photos, of the city I call home.

How well do you know OMG?

As you may have figured out by now, I travel a lot. While there are downsides, it is so very nice to approach the counter at Boston’s Logan International Airport and have Frank say, “Hello Dr. Soley, where to today? You don’t need to take out your identification.” You might ask yourself why I travel so much. The reason is the amazing breadth and depth of activity at OMG, from standards in dozens of technology and industry areas to communities of practice focused on several different management and technology practices. Rather than talk about my trips in the last two weeks—which included:

• San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A. (a keynote about modeling and enterprise architecture, Business Ecology and the BPM/SOA Community of Practice to a large U.S. Department of Defense crowd);
• San José, Costa Rica (a keynote about how successful use of social media depends on adding to human contact);
• Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A. (to talk to a group of healthcare organizations about integrating their information systems using our healthcare standards and the MDMI protocol translation standard);
• Brussels, Belgium (to talk to several different companies ranging from universities and research institutions, to event management partners in Europe and companies automating financial institutions with modeling solutions);
• Washington, DC, U.S.A. (to help run our Cyber Security Workshop, launching our new Cyber Security Community of Practice, and to visit local members to brief on current activities in the government and military spaces).

…I want to discuss a pet peeve of mine. I love my job, especially the opportunity to talk to such an amazing breadth of people about such an amazing variety of topics. However, it still pains me to hear every now and then that “OMG equals CORBA” or “OMG is just about UML.” So I thought I’d focus on that issue for this entry.

If all you know about OMG is CORBA^® or the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML^®) then you are missing most of the picture. OMG has been a leader in modeling and middleware standards for more than 20 years, but did you know that OMG…

• is also a leading proponent of Business-IT integration standards?
• is active in cloud computing, healthcare, finance, event processing, business process management, service-oriented architecture, government, software assurance, space and many others?
• has several advocacy groups under the Business Ecology® umbrella, covering cyber security, event processing, green business, and BPM/SOA?
• delivers results besides standards, from awards programs to shared best-practices documents like the EA2010 study on enterprise architecture?

Surprised? Huh, guess there’s a lot more to OMG than you thought.

Over the years, IT has made a series of shifts towards a closer relationship with strategic business alignment and has moved up the corporate ladder in terms of leadership and design. While “geek pride” is still going strong, the days of the pocket-protector wearing IT guy huddled in the server room closet, shunning daylight, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and energy drinks are pretty much gone. Business savvy IT departments and IT savvy business people are now working together, focusing on the needs of the enterprise. As IT has entered the mainstream (and as Nick Carr puts it, in most companies, no longer differentiates), alignment has to give way to integration. That is, in fact, the central tenet of Business Ecology. Business processes have to be optimized to find opportunities to innovate, and an IT service organization constantly struggling to align will rarely optimize nor innovate.

OMG has mimicked this trend toward better business-IT integration in all our programs and standards development efforts and continues this course going forward. Today some 85% of OMG standardization activities are focused on some two-dozen industry vertical markets (healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, life sciences, government, military command control, etc.) allowing for targeted solutions to real-world integration issues. As new technology areas enter the mainstream, such as cloud computing, OMG members also are working to help define how these systems interact with existing infrastructures.

To further promote the benefits of business-IT integration, OMG launched the Business Ecology^® Initiative (BEI). Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation. OMG has also developed several Communities of Practice to support BEI including BPM/SOA Community of Practice™, Green CIO Community of Practice™ (GCIO™ CoP), Cyber Security Community of Practice ™ and Event Processing Community of Practice™.

These Communities of Practice are comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors, dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption of specific, key business-technology strategies, by the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market businesses. They aren’t focused on standards in the technical sense, but instead are communities of people, agencies and companies driving common standardized means of education, definitions and goals for use by business and IT. Basically these are the folks who have gone through the battles of being early adopters of various management strategies and technology directions and lived to tell the tale. They are willing and eager to share their stories of success, not-so-success and best practices with others.

So what about CORBA and UML, you ask? Has OMG abandoned these standards? Of course not! CORBA and its newer publish-and-subscribe cousin DDS are still widely used, including in air traffic control systems and most mobile phones to name a couple of major application areas. UML, according to the analysts, the most widely-used modeling standard out there, is a living document, with a new effort to enhance the specification currently underway, lead by Steve Cook, Software Architect at Microsoft. UML was only the first of the modeling languages in the OMG modeling constellation, now comprising business modeling (BPMN, SBVR, BMM), rule modeling (SBVR, PRR), systems engineering modeling (SysML), services modeling (SoaML), data warehouse modeling (CWM) and even modeling language modeling (MOF).  With more than 20 years of standards development (and nearly 1,000 completed standards processes) under our belt, we’ve also done a few other things as well.

OMG issues rapidly growing suites of both industry-specific and general standard software specifications. Based on OMG’s flagship Model Driven Architecture^® (MDA^®), these standards implement business functions equivalently and interoperably on virtually all popular middleware platforms (you may have heard of them) including Web Services, XML/SOAP, C#/.Net, Enterprise JavaBeans, and others in addition to OMG’s own CORBA. The Data Distribution Service (DDS), first focused on the needs of military and financial services firms, supports data centric publish-subscribe semantics and is finding its way into many new applications as well. Both middleware standards support real-time & embedded as well as less constrained systems.

Standards like the Model Driven Message Interoperability (MDMI) specification, “middleware for messaging,” are applicable beyond their initial vertical foci, in this case financial services, to other areas such as healthcare, which also have complex messaging requirements. OMG is also working on specifications for the Property & Casualty Insurance industry, Life Sciences, Space, Software Assurance, Robotics, Business Process Management, etc.

By now you’re surely convinced that OMG is more than a one-trick pony, with more than just a couple of popular modeling and middleware specifications. We haven’t been resting on our laurels and we’re certainly not living in the past. We understand how to find, develop and deliver rapid, high-quality solutions to management and technology issues from communities of smart people with shared goals. Our members represent the future of business and IT integration and are solving the tough problems presented by a changing global economic reality. They’ll be the ones developing the next generation of standards…where will you be?

IBM IMPACT: BPM All the Time

IBM’s IMPACT conference in Las Vegas was a blast this week. Well, those of you who know me well probably know that I don’t love Vegas all that much, but the conference made the trip more than worthwhile—even more so with the consistent, show-wide focus on Business Process Management and Business Process Modeling. It was BPM all day, every day, and not only does that feed well into OMG’s focus on BPM standards and Business Architecture, but coming off of IBM’s purchase of Lombardi Software (and the long-time support of existing IBM products as well as the new Lombardi products for OMG standards like BPMN, UML, BPMM, SBVR, PRR) and the constant references to Model Driven Architecture during the proceedings made me feel great. Nearly a decade after we published the first Model Driven Architecture strategy paper, it’s become a consistent reality in the marketplace.

The BPM/SOA Community of Practice highlighted BPM & SOA adoption in the financial services and manufacturing sectors thanks to able and excellent presentations by Jerry Hermes (Navy Federal Credit Union), Kevin Collins (Ford Motor Company) and Paul Tazbaz (Wells Fargo Bank). A sold-out room kept the moderator (yours truly) and the panelists hopping with questions about how to get C-level buy-in, how to measure success, how widespread BPM and SOA are in organizations and even whether the panelists would do it again if they had it to do over (they all said yes). This is the third year that the BPM/SOA CoP (and its predecessor SOA Consortium) have highlighted success stories at IMPACT, and we plan to continue.



Unfortunately there were too many competing presentations for the Business Ecology Initiative presentation by Mel Greer of Lockheed Martin and I, so attendance was light for our overview of BEI and Lockheed Martins’ focus on BEI adoption. The slides are easy to get (see: Download 2010-05-05 IMPACT BEI Panel 1740) however so anyone can get a quick feel for where that’s going.

Attendance was very definitely up over last year at IMPACT, another great sign of an improving economy. IBM contacts told me that attendance was up almost 40% in fact, and it certainly appeared that way to me. A full “main tent” general session program including IBM executives, CIO’s from several industries, futurists and magicians made it worth getting up early each day (or, apparently for some participants, staying up through the night).  I ran into many analysts and journalists I’ve known for years, including one I’d spoken to many times but never met in person, Joe McKendrick of McKendrick & Associates (thanks to TechTarget’s Jack Vaughan for introducing us—I didn’t realize it was him as he looks nothing like his email address).

I also ran into old friends and Gartner analysts Roy Schulte and Yefim Natis, and got deeply embroiled with Roy on the topic of our about-to-launch Event Processing Community of Practice.  Interest is high in both the EP-CoP and the upcoming Cyber Security Community of Practice launch later this month. All are components of the Business Ecology Initiative—optimization for innovation.

Speaking of Gartner, we’ve been doing these sorts of panels at other events besides IMPACT for years, including Gartner’s Application Development, Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management conferences, and we’ll continue that trend this year. We’ll use the BPM/SOA CoP panel at the BPTrends Business Process Forum to announce the winners of the "Business Agility and Process Optimization Enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)” Case Study Competition, sponsored by BPTrends and TechTarget. So look for more trip reports here.  I can’t stop traveling yet, I’ve got more to say and more places to say it!

An Overview on OMG in the Finance Industry

After a successful OMG Technical Meeting in Jacksonville, Florida (March 22-26) I again hit the road on a round-the-world trip. I’m actually on the last stop in Tokyo at the moment; normally I hate eastbound round-the-world trips given the constant loss of hours, but this time I was glad I went West-to-East instead of the other way around, or I’d probably be grounded at Heathrow with the rest of the Iceland volcano ash cancellations. This was another exciting and productive trip, with stops in London, Dubai and Tokyo. The topics ranged from energy management to Model Driven Message Interoperability adoption. 

Here are a couple of quick snippets of the trip:

• In London, I visited some of OMG’s current members like Casewise, discussing new potential Domains for OMG like energy management and smart grids. I also spent some time visiting our new Finance Domain Task Force (FDTF) chair Rob James of HSBC to go through the nitty-gritty of Domain Task Force management.
  
• In Dubai, I keynoted the IEEE-DEST 2010 conference, and surprisingly, discussing energy management and smart grids (and other topics) with prospective members.
  
• While here in Tokyo, I’ve participated in discussions on MDMI adoption by Japanese banks, meeting with a group of local CIO's and current and prospective members—and had yet another conversation on energy management and smart grids!
  

As the work of the FDTF came up several times on my trip, I thought I would provide an overview of what conversations are going on in that space.

The Finance Domain Task Force (FDTF, http://fdtf.omg.org/) has had a great run over the past few years. Of special importance has been the adoption of the Model Driven Message Interoperability (MDMI) specification (http://www.omg.org/spec/MDMI/1.0/), but the Task Force continues to work on two other projects, both targeted for delivery in 2010: Information Models for Property & Casualty Insurance, and a UML^® Profile for XBRL Global Ledger Framework. The group’s long-time co-chairs, Joe Bugajski and Mark Eisner, have shepherded the FDTF processes for years, and for various reasons have decided to stand down and give a “new generation” a chance to lead the group to its next set of efforts. OMG is very lucky that OMG Board member and HSBC Change Delivery Architect Rob James stepped forward, and was elected to replace Mark Eisner at the March meeting of the FDTF in Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.A.  Joe stays on for a while to help with the transition.

To help us move forward, SWIFT OMG representative Marc Delbaere kindly hosted a discussion in SWIFT’s London offices with Rob James, Andrew Watson (OMG Vice President and Technical Director) and myself present in April. Besides the usual chair start-up discussion (and an excellent pub lunch, at the hopefully not prescient Hung, Drawn & Quartered), most of the discussion was how to ensure that FDTF’s next steps continue to meet the immediate and long-term needs of financial institutions moving forward.

Rob and Marc hit on a powerful idea that the FDTF had agreed at their most recent meeting to consider at a strategy-planning meeting. This idea, which has worked well in other Task Forces over the years, is to capture and describe scenarios of use whose capture would seriously bring down costs, decrease time-to-market and increase process quality at financial institutions. These should include a range of real financial activities from account management to risk management, and from trading to settlement. With these descriptions in hand, and wide support from many financial institutions, the FDTF could craft very precise descriptions (perhaps using OMG’s Business Motivation Model http://www.omg.org/spec/BMM/1.0/ and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules, http://www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/1.0/) to describe how best to implement processes in real institutions using standards from OMG and others.

It’s a simple but powerful idea that will over a short period generate plenty of interesting, useful and valuable road map items for the FDTF, and I look forward to participating!

Richard in London with Marc Delbaere of SWIFT, Rob James of HSBC and OMG's Vice President and Technical Director Andrew Watson at far right.

In Dubai, keynoting IEEE-DEST 2010.

Last stop: Japan. With representatives from UTI, Honda and IBM.

Richard in Paris; Software Quality

Time to say something about the software quality effort recently started at OMG, and mix in another travel Excellent Adventure, this one along with our own intrepid Vice President of Business Development, Ken Berk. Ken and I spent a few days in Paris in mid-February—OK, I know it’s been a month, but it was a fascinating trip and well worth mentioning some aspects.  And it didn’t hurt that Paris is a magnificently beautiful city, despite the horror of La Défense rising outside Porte Maillot.

Most of our focus for this trip was on growing the aforementioned software quality effort. The core idea for this effort came from two places almost simultaneously—it was first and foremost a natural outgrowth of our legacy modernization efforts (also called Architecture-Driven Modernization, see http://adm.omg.org/) and the very active Software & Systems Assurance standardization efforts. Once you have in place standards for connecting code-recognizing systems and storing the recovered models of those codes (that is, the OMG Knowledge Definition Metamodel) it makes sense to see what else you can do with that reconstructed or recovered model. Static code quality analysis follows quite naturally from code modernization and assurance.

Equal to that essentially “bottom-up” reason was a critically important “top-down” one: the enormous and growing need for static code quality analysis in support of software development outsourcing and off-shoring. Not only do buyers want to get code of known, measurable, repeatable quality; but also, outsourcers and off-shorers want a consistent way to contract for development (and not coincidentally, show off their superior abilities to deliver high-quality systems). Already most outsourcing and off-shoring contracts include some kind of static code quality metric, but the proliferation of such measures helps no one. Obviously a standard would lower costs (and likely improve quality) across the board. A sufficiently widely recognized code quality metric might even someday have an effect on the packaged software market—though that is not the focus of our efforts.

As always in a new OMG effort, OMG staff is deeply involved in bringing together both likely vendors and likely users of a quality standard. In this instance we’re even helping manage a group of submitters (called the Consortium for IT Software Quality, or CISQ) work together to submit to an OMG RFP that is being discussed even as I type these words. Both OMG and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University are sponsoring CISQ.

Anyway, back to the Paris visit. We bracketed many other shorter visits and teleconferences with visits to a static code quality analysis vendor and a likely major user. CAST Software is providing the Director of CISQ in the person of its Chief Scientist Bill Curtis (long-time OMGers will recognize Bill from his participation in the standardization of the Business Process Maturity Model, BPMM, and others may recognize his name from the development of the Capability Maturity Model). Our visit to CAST impressed us with the depth and breadth of their commitment to software quality standardization—they already have products in the area, and are committed to conformance with a standard that doesn’t even exist yet. We were even more impressed with a wonderful lunch to which CAST’s Executive Vice President Gérard Karsenti treated us, at L'Escarbille in Meudon.

At the other end of the spectrum, we had the opportunity to meet with Anne-Sophie Luce at AXA Group headquarters in Paris 8. Anne-Sophie is responsible for governance and performance of IT projects across AXA’s worldwide insurance systems, leaving her with an enormous need to bring down the cost of systems while increasing quality—and obviously, a quality standard for code (and not just process) will be part of that equation. AXA was one of the first to sign up to CISQ and the OMG’s software quality efforts, and her clear and focused requirements will be invaluable to the process. And it probably doesn’t hurt that she spent years at THALES, an OMG Contributing member of many years, where she was quite aware of (and supportive of) OMG standardization efforts!

In any case, an excuse to visit Paris is always welcome—but to do so with a clear focus on an exciting new OMG standardization effort is even better!

Richard Soley & Anne-Sophie Luce in the the atrium of AXA Group headquarters in Paris.

Richard Soley (left) and Gérard Karsenti (right) at L'Escarbille Restaurant in Meudon.

Open Standards for Software Radio

As snow pummeled the U.S. northeast once again, I set off back on February 7^th for an unusual triangle trip – Washington, DC (to meet with the leadership of Open Health Tools, which is building open-source healthcare IT solutions based partially on OMG standards); then to Santa Barbara, California to meet with Ivar Jacobson and Bertrand Meyer (together we are leading an effort to reinvent software engineering as a rigorous engineering discipline). Last stop on this whistle-stop tour was San Diego, California, to meet with the Joint Program Executive Office Joint Tactical Radio System (JPEO JTRS) at the Point Loma United States Navy base in San Diego harbor.

And a whistle-stop it was, too – while I had intended from the start to avoid California driving by taking the lovely train ride from Santa Barbara to San Diego, the week started out unexpectedly with a 7 ½-hour ride from Boston to Washington as the third major storm of the year blanketed the U.S. capital with another 50cm (20”) of snow.  It was quite strange to see no snow at all on the ground on the entire trip south until noticing a light rime in Philadelphia and perhaps 10cm (4”) in northern Delaware. My hometown of Baltimore, however, was staggering under about 30cm (12”) of snow, and the capital was essentially in lockdown from yet another blizzard. The quiet of downtown Washington (except for people sloshing about in snow, ice & slush) was in fact quite lovely. I will resist the impulse to make metaphorical comparisons between a city closed for business, and political processes in a similar state nearby!

Instead I’d like to focus on an excellent meeting at JPEO JTRS where I was privileged to share a cup of coffee with John Armantrout, Chief Technology Officer (and briefly meet Dr. Rich North, Technical Director as well). This is the group that manages the U.S. Department of Defense acquisition process for software radios, an important area of standards development at OMG.

JTRS JPEO has strongly supported open standards in general and OMG in particular for years. In addition, OMG has worked alongside the Wireless Innovation Forum (WIF, previously known as the SDR Forum) for years. OMG and WIF are committed to strengthening, deepening and extending the cooperation between our two organizations, and have several projects currently underway to not only strengthen current cooperation, but also to look for more opportunities to serve our members and the industry. This includes my own personal focus, moving standardized software radio technology into the commercial sphere – where immediate benefits will include better mobile phone interoperability, wider and cheaper roaming capabilities, and not coincidentally lower cost for military software radio installations. Look for OMG and WIF to make some interesting announcements in the coming weeks!

Welcome to the Inaugural "On the Road"

As anybody who knows me can attest, I travel…a lot. I need the frequent flyer miles (I’m down to my last million). Most of this travel is on behalf of OMG. I’ve met some truly fascinating people and spoken at more conferences and organizations than I can easily count. And if we’ve ever had the pleasure of an in-person meeting, you probably also know that I have an awful sense of humor (and an inability to keep it to myself). Unfortunately for me, my staff thinks I nevertheless need to share my wit with a broader audience. After suffering through yet another round of “Richard, when are you going to blog about your travels and tell the world about the cool stuff that’s going on at OMG?” from my loyal staff, I’ve finally capitulated. It was either that or invest in a pair of earplugs. So in this space, I’ll be sharing with you stories from my travels and news that doesn’t necessarily make it into the open through more official channels but certainly deserves recognition. For my inaugural blog entry, I’d like to tell you about my recent trip to the HL7 International quarterly meeting, and the importance of OMG’s work in healthcare standards.

 

In case you haven’t seen the news, OMG and HL7 International recently issued a press release detailing some of our accomplishments from 2009. You can read it here. The press release is a pretty standard listing of individual achievements – but in reality, there has been some real forward progress in service-oriented healthcare IT standards.

 

We’re pretty excited about the work we’re doing, which is ultimately helping healthcare organizations provide higher-quality, lower-cost healthcare through standards. When you get right down to it, that’s about saving lives, which seems like a worthy goal. I’ve been regularly attending, along with the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force co-chairs Ken Rubin and Robert Lario and our counterparts at HL7, monthly leadership calls to discuss progress and areas for future collaboration. I recently returned from the HL7 quarterly meeting in Phoenix (week of January 18, 2010) where I spoke with many people excited about the work we’re doing on HSSP. And it’s not just the private sector that’s excited about healthcare IT; the US, UK, Australian, Costa Rican, Canadian and Singapore governments are very active in this space.

 

(Take a look at the presenters at the 2009 SOA in Healthcare Workshop to get an idea of the broad industry and government involvement in healthcare IT: keynotes for this workshop included: The Honorable James B. Peake, M.D., Lieutenant General, USA (Ret) Secretary of Veterans Affairs from 2007 – 2009; and Theresa Cullen, M.D., M.S., RADM, U.S. Public Health Service, Chief Information Officer, Indian Health Service. You’ll also see presenters from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (US); the Department of Veterans Affairs; the National Health Service; US Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM) and many more. We’ll be holding another SOA in Healthcare workshop in 2010. Be sure to stay tuned for details.)

 

Thanks for checking out the first installment of “On the Road.” I’ll be periodically updating this space with anecdotes from my travels and news of note from OMG.

 

— Richard