Amazingly, my latest blog is from a few weeks ago in Singapore (for the quarterly meeting of the OMG program, the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®), meetings in Astana, Kazakhstan, and a number of different meetings in Washington, DC. Fortunately all of the meetings were on the same planet.
The quarterly meeting of the IIC was held last month in sunny Singapore, and it was a definite success. With hundreds of attendees to the various working groups, and two new testbeds approved by the Consortium's Steering Committee (for a total of 28, in areas ranging from manufacturing and production to healthcare, energy, agriculture and smart cities), the meeting was clearly useful to all attendees. Friday featured an outreach event (the IIoT World Tour), co-hosted by the IIC, Plattform Industrie 4.0 and most importantly A*STAR (the research arm of the Singaporean government), which was an outstanding local host, showing off their modern city and its research prowess.
I had to miss the World Tour event as the Kazakhstan government picked the same week to announce Digital Kazakhstan in the Kazakh capital of Astana. I went to Astana to meet with the Deputy Prime Minister to participate in the week's announcements, and to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kazakh uranium mining company KazAtomProm to work with it on IIoT and other standards. Their interest in both Object Management Group® (OMG®) and the IIC program was strong, as evidenced by a number of meetings with Deputy Prime Minister Zhumagaliyev and leading industrialists and government industrial associations over a two-day period. We will be seeing much more activity from the Kazakh's over the coming year!
From Astana, I continued westbound through Amsterdam to the United States capital of Washington, DC. There the Washington office of the OMG and I had arranged a number of meetings with various parts of the U.S. government, currently undergoing various changes due to the quadrennial change of administrations. One key meeting was with trade specialists from the United States Commerce Department, interested in how international standards can and will affect American companies; how American companies can best participate in OMG standardization and IIC testbeds, and the current standards landscape in the world. An intense meeting over quite good coffee ensued. A separate lunch with the leadership of the Institute for Justice Information Systems and the Open Geospatial Consortium discussed the future of the Standards Coordinating Council under the new U.S. administration's restructuring. The team also held useful meetings with the leadership from the Data Coalition, the United States Treasury and some local member representatives. A particular highlight was a day-long tour on Capitol Hill and various United States Federal agencies to talk about the importance of software quality (as evidenced by the OMG program Consortium for IT Software Quality™) to software security. This turned out to be of topical importance in the week that featured news of stolen personal and corporate information from Equifax and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
At the end of last month, I attended the quarterly OMG membership meeting in lovely downtown New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A., a first for the OMG meeting! I’ll blog about that meeting soon – so stay tuned.
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