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.