In April, the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®) produced in a joint Forum at Hannover Messe (itself an enormous industrial trade fair dedicated to manufacturing and production, with some 225,000 attendees), highlighting real use cases and testbeds in the Industrial Internet (or as it is generally called in Germany, Industrie 4.0). Our booth beside the Forum booth also had abundant traffic.
Corner shot of busy IIC booth beside Forum booth
(l) Daniel Ostrower, Altitude; Christoph Loeffler, FJORD; Richard Soley, OMG; Fabrice Jadot, Schneider Electric; and Anne Asensio, Dassault Systèmes, participate on Accenture panel, "Design, Consumerization and the Future of Industrial Products."

(l) Ulrich Ahle, FIWARE Foundation; Boris Otto, Fraunhofer ISST; Reinhold Achatz, ThyssenKrupp; Lars Nagel, Industrial Data Space Association; Richard Soley, OMG; and Juan José Hierro, FIWARE Foundation discuss testbed projects to support standards.
(L) Dr. Soley, Executive Director of the IIC and Prof. Dr. Yasuyuki Nishioka, President of the Industrial Value Chain Initiative, a forum of smart manufacturing for connected industries based in Japan, sign an MOU at Hannover Messe 2017. Under the agreement, both parties will work together to align efforts to maximize interoperability, portability, security and privacy for the industrial Internet.
Richard Soley (OMG, right) hosting a Forum panel with Peter Marx, GE; Yukio Kamatani, Toshiba; Dan Isaacs, Xilinx; and Said Tabet (Dell).
In the first week of May, I visited Washington, DC to brief various parts of the United States federal government on the software quality metrics developed by the Consortium for IT Software Quality™ (CISQ™), and standardized by the Object Management Group® (OMG®). Clearly, starting the standardization work on software quality metrics with security metrics derived from the Common Weaknesses Enumeration (CWE) was the right thing to do—it's drawing attention from all over the world, and the rapidly developing interest in cybersecurity in the capital of the United States is emblematic of that. It's awfully important to realize that border security (checked in the case of cyber by penetration testing) is insufficient, given the vast majority of attacks are from the inside. OMG's quality standards are already making waves and my visits to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and various staffers on Capitol Hill made that clear.
From May 9-10 in Chicago, Forrester Research hosted the Digital Transformation Forum, now in its second year. The OMG and the Consortium for IT Software Quality partnered together to support the event. CISQ members were on-site to discuss “risk-managed” digital transformation. I wish I could have joined them!
Attendees heard they are going to have to write a whole lot of new software for their digital business strategies, because digital transformation is really business transformation. Existing software will also have to be transformed because there’s a disconnect between a company’s digital and business assets. Having a standard lingua-franca to communicate the state of business software is turning out to be increasingly valuable for business stakeholders. CISQ’s expertise is in the digital transformation discussion at the software level—specifically the IT systems and applications that are being built or modernized to enable these new capabilities (see CISQ’s Automated Quality Characteristic Measures).
Mid-May featured a swing through South America and the ABC countries (Argentina, Brazil & Chile)—not the right time of the year to do it, of course, since it's spring in Boston and fall in South America. But at least the weather is roughly the same in both places! The initial impetus for the trip was an invitation from the Associação Brasileira de Internet Industrial (Brazilian Association of the Industrial Internet) to participate in its meeting in Joinville, Santa Catarina, southeastern Brazil, which takes place during (and as part of) the ExpoGestão conference in that city. ExpoGestão is a general management interest conference; it has only a small exposition, focusing instead on well-produced and high-quality presentations to a good size audience (about 2,000 people). The major disruptions that are coming our way due to the arrival of the Industrial Internet obviously are relevant to a general management audience, and my talks attracted intense media interest as well.
(l) Gilbert Peralta, General Electric; Richard Soley, OMG; Rizzo Hahn, Pollux Automation
(l) André Zanatta, SENAI Institute of Innovation; Rizzo Hahn, Pollux Automation; Richard Soley, OMG; Cristiane Zimmermann, Marketing WG - SENAI; Luciano Borges, Embraco; and Alexandre D'Angelo, ABII Executive Secretary
One of the founding members of the Association is active IIC member Pollux Automation (in fact its Managing Director Rizzo Hahn is founding President of the Association). They took very good care of me in Joinville (Brazilian food is not kind to my diet however!) and let me know about some of the testbed and standards development plans they have in mind. There's even been some coverage of my participation already:
Never one to waste a long trip, I took the opportunity to also participate in a relatively nearby conference in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina; the Internet Day event is produced by the Cámara Argentina de Internet (Argentinian Internet Council, somehow "CABASE" in Spanish) and explores changes that the Internet is engendering in many markets. I was the keynote on Day One, kicking off after national ministers had talked about the importance of high-bandwidth, high-speed Internet service and how it is considered critical by the fairly new national administration.
The event had about 650 people, and there was tremendous interest from the crowd—we had to stop taking questions to keep the schedule on track. I had met the leaders of CABASE a couple of months before at a conference in Fort Lauderdale. See videos from the event (including me being lazy and speaking in English, though correcting the translator a couple of times, at http://www.internetday.com.ar/2017.html ). There's already press coverage at http://www.cabase.org.ar/gobierno-y-sector-privado-debaten-el-futuro-de-la-conectividad-para-el-ingreso-de-argentina-a-la-economia-del-conocimiento/
The Santiago stop was, as usual, to discuss the future of mining standards. The wheels of this project are grinding slowly, more slowly with the rapidly approaching Chilean national elections. It's good, as always, to see an industry (in this case mining) realize the importance of standardization across competing interests. I had several meetings with mining interests, as well as a group of Boston College kids (!) and their professor conducting a US market-entrance analysis for an IoT restaurant management firm. IoT is everywhere these days!
At the beginning of last week, I was a featured speaker at the No Magic World Symposium conference in Dallas, which focuses on modeling, simulation, and analysis and attracts CIOs, software architects, systems engineers, business analysts, developers, and project managers. Later that week, I hosted a luncheon topic at the MIT CIO Symposium in Cambridge on “IoT Confidence: what are the most significant factors keeping IoT from adoption.” The Symposium is “…is a community of CEOs, CIOs and senior IT executives who connect with academic thought leaders, their practicing peers and IT partners in an annual one-day conference, held on the MIT campus.” At the Symposium, I was also videotaped by SearchCIO, a microsite that is part of the TechTarget syndication that “… provides technology management strategies designed exclusively for the enterprise CIO.”
Next month, I’m flying to Brussels, Belgium for the OMG TC meeting the week of June 5th. Ten Special Events—one or two-day in-depth events on a specific area of interest—are scheduled during the week of the Technical Meeting (TC). They will include days focused on: cyber resilience, business architecture, IIoT in manufacturing, data residency , among others. Our events and TC meetings focus on standards and related practices, methodologies and technologies and are a great benefit whether you’re an OMG member or not. There’s still time to register. Details for these public events are at http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/brussels-17/info.htm.
The following week I'm traveling to the IIC Q2 Member Meeting at the Radisson-Blu in Berlin, Germany. I look forward to both the OMG and IIC meetings as opportunities to meet members face-to-face and as venues for our members to engage, learn, collaborate and network across all industries.
