In late May, I keynoted at the No Magic World Symposium 2017. I have been honored to be invited to keynote this event every year, and it gets better every year—this time some 400-500 people gathered in No Magic's headquarters city of Allen, Texas. This leading modeling company, an annual sponsor of OMG® meetings, takes pride in supporting OMG modeling standards across the board, and is deeply involved in developing them too. I took this opportunity to talk about semantic standards and the direction the Object Management Group® (OMG®) might take in supporting our vertical-market standards program with core standards in Industrial IoT, systems modeling, business modeling and data sovereignty. My talk was well-received, and as usual I wished I could participate in more of the event―but I was off to Boston to celebrate my daughter's Master's degree (now both offspring have Master's!).
The other reason I rushed back to Boston was to participate in the MIT CIO Symposium 2017. This annual event also goes from strength to strength, approaching a thousand participants. I've participated in the organizing committee for years, in various ways―speaking, judging for the Best CIO awards, and this year running a discussion table on inhibitors to the adoption of IoT in the industrial marketplace. I was surprised to find general agreement with my estimation that the reasons usually given (lack of security and lack of standards) are in fact wrong―as long as there's return on investment, neither will hold back sharp companies from adopting Industrial IoT. We had a good discussion about the skills necessary to implement smarter collection and use of data, and there was general agreement that advanced analytic skills will be increasingly necessary. I also participated in a video produced by TechTarget’s SearchCIO which should be posted this month.
In June, I headed to the OMG member meeting in Brussels and the Industrial Internet Consortium® meeting in Berlin (and a side-trip to Madrid for a Spanish-language event sponsored by the Consortium for IT Software Quality™ (CISQ™)). At the Brussels meeting, OMG announced the formation of the Retail Domain Task Force to assume management of standards developed by the National Retail Federation Association for the Retail Technology Standards division. OMG also named its third technical director in its 28-year history, long-term member Larry Johnson. As always, members continue their work evolving new standards and updating existing ones.
However, before the OMG and IIC member meetings, I flew to Europe a little early, to participate in a conference in Gyor, about halfway between Budapest and Vienna. COM-TECH puts on a good show, and their Smart Factory ConnAction Konferencia 2017 was no different―good examples of digitalization (or Industrial Internet, or Industrie 4.0, whatever you prefer to call it) and lots of discussion of modeling standards to support the same.
In late June, I flew back from the International Term Process Summit in Düsseldorf. The first day of this fascinating event focused on how digitalization and the industrial internet are causing disruption in many industries, in particular the thermal processing manufacturing world. That’s not a world I know much about, so it was interesting talking about IIoT disruption and learning more about thermal processing (which means both heating and cooling by the way). Others talked about disruption as well, with a great talk by Ernst von Weizsäcker on climate change and Aldo Ofenheimer on connected vehicles. I have been saying all over the world that many industries are facing major disruptions from IIoT, machine learning, 3D printing, automation and the like; it’s always interesting to see first-hand the shape those disruptions are going to take.
After I spend the 4th of July in the States with family and friends, I will attend the SAP Leonardo event in Frankfurt. I hope OMG members in the United States had a safe and happy Independence Day.
