Richard Soley's On The Road Blog

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

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!).

Title slide of keynote presentation at No Magic World Symposium

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. 

Dr. Soley explains how OMG automated software quality standards, drafted by CISQ, reduce cost and risk associated with IT applications at CISQ event in Madrid.

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.

Dr. Soley delivers the keynote at Smart Factory ConnAction Konferencia 2017.

(l) Moderator (Bóna Péter, Com-Forth); Soltész Attila, 4S-2000; Dr. Richard Mark Soley, OMG; Kalman Tiboldi, TVH Group; Szincsák Attila, Denso Gyártó Magyarország; Dr. Nikodémus Antal, Nemzetgazdasági Miniszterium and Szenczi György, MentorPartner (not shown) at Smart Factory ConnAction Konferencia 2017 

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 4^th 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.

 

 

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

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:

• http://anoticia.clicrbs.com.br/sc/economia/noticia/2017/05/internet-industrial-impoe-uma-nova-realidade-para-empresas-e-trabalhadores-dizem-especialistas-9791126.html
• http://www.pelissari.com.br/pelissari-e-a-primeira-consultoria-sap-a-se-associar-a-abii-associacao-brasileira-de-internet-industrial/
• http://www.abessoftware.com.br/noticias/abes-participa-da-1%C2%AA-conferencia-internacional-da-associacao-brasileira-de-internet-industrial-abii
• http://www.agorajoinville.com.br/joinville/expogest%C3%A3o-2017-recebe-cerca-de-6-mil-participantes-em-joinville-1.1973554 
• http://anoticia.clicrbs.com.br/sc/noticia/2017/05/ate-2020-50-bilhoes-de-coisas-serao-conectadas-pela-internet-9800265.html
• http://conecdados.jor.br/internet-industrial-vai-mudar-o-rumo-do-jogo-sua-empresa-esta-preparada/

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 5^th. 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.

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

On Monday, April 24th at Hannover Messe, the Linux Foundation launched the EdgeX Foundry, an open source software project designed to help companies build a common open framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing. The EdgeX framework addresses the problem of fragmentation of IoT infrastructure, component complexity and the lack of a common IoT solution framework that is slowing broad market acceptance and growth in IoT, an important focus of the standards work at the Object Management Group® (OMG®) and of course the testbed initiatives of the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®).

OMG is delighted to participate in the launch of this important new open-source initiative because it will drive interoperability and spur digital transformation in the IoT space. The EdgeX project aligns with our legacy of distributed computing and middleware standards and our current efforts in semantics and IoT. Businesses will be able to choose from an ecosystem of best-in-class software, hardware and services providers rather than developing their own edge computing solutions.

Dell Technologies is supporting the EdgeX initiative by contributing its FUSE source code base consisting of more than a dozen microservices and over 125,000 lines of code. Dell sits on both the OMG Board and IIC Steering Committee.

Some of the impetus and standards for the EdgeX project are the result of the work of OMG members who have developed, promulgated and deployed middleware standards for more than a quarter century. The Data-Distribution Service™ and CORBA® standards transfer bits and bytes from place to place on huge and complex networks. These standards have been deployed in literally billions of systems today, from mobile phones to banking systems, air combat sensor and firing integration systems, to operating room systems.

Understanding the meaning of data moving around industrial networks is another part of the interoperability challenge. OMG members have focused on semantic meaning for more than 20 years, publishing standards to integrate semantics—like the Ontology Definition Metamodel™ and the related Model-Driven Message Interoperability™ standards.

The IoT needs more of these semantic standards because millions of industrial devices are now connecting and sharing their extensive data on huge networks of analytics engines, sensors, and actuators. OMG looks forward to helping to unite the IoT community with solutions like the EdgeX Foundry with its wide array of standards and commercial offerings at the IoT edge, enabling faster ROI for industrial organizations.

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

Last month, I was invited by Dr. Said Tabet from Dell (a member of both the Object Management Group® (OMG®) Board of Directors and an Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®) Steering Committee member) to visit Dell's Cambridge office (oddly enough in the same exact building where Bill Hoffman, the President and COO of OMG and I met 35 or so years ago) to brief a senior executive from an automotive company about standards and testbeds at OMG and IIC. I also had a teleconference with two gentlemen at MIT who are running an "Industry 4.0" course, followed with a teleconference to plan the Global Conferences panel at CeBIT. A busy week, but for once near home!

In mid-March, I traveled to Berlin for several functions, including the annual Bosch ConnectedWorld conference, presided over by IIC Steering Committee member and old OMG friend Dirk Slama, to participate in a technical workshop managed by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (German Economics and Energy Ministry) in preparation for the German G20 Presidency this year. The technical workshop in preparation for the G20 was fascinating. About 650 attendees from all 20 of the G20 countries, worked together to come to some compromise about what the G20 dispatches might say about the Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0 after the ministerial meetings next month. Fortunately, both the Industrial Internet Consortium and the Object Management Group were mentioned, and quite often too.  The whole world appears to be suddenly keen on testbeds to learn more about the industrial use of IoT and standards to provide interoperability, portability, security, and privacy.  I guess we were prescient!

I was also honored to help graduate a fresh batch of students from the ReDI School of Digital Integration. Old friend Claus Schaale of CISCO worked with others, including Dirk Slama and other talents from Microsoft, to train these talented engineers in the Internet of Things development.

ReDI helps integrate refugees in Germany (mostly from Syria and Iraq) by training them to develop software. I was privileged to help recognize their graduation from the program.

Hundreds of speakers at the CeBIT Global Conferences and photographs of all of them adorned Hannover Messe's Hall 8 south entrance. (Can you find me on the bottom?)

Then I returned to the United States for a long weekend—a day in Boston, then three days in Washington for the beginning of the OMG and IIC quarterly meetings in Reston. The quarterly meetings were very successful—something like 1200 attendees registered for the meetings and special events which were open to the public. I had to leave immediately after the OMG Board meeting on March 21st to travel to CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, where I sat on a couple panels (including one with Tanja Rückert, EVP LoB Digital Assets and IoT at SAP) and helped work the IIC stand. 

This month, I had an excellent few days in Singapore, where interest in all of OMG's brands—OMG, IIC, CISQ™ and CSCC™—is running high!  The trip started out with an early-morning appearance on CNBC's show The Rundown with Akiko Fujita.  The interview was focused on securing the Internet of Things, but there was a good discussion of standards and testbeds as well.  You can view a brief clip of the show at http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000605413

Inside look at the studio for the CNBC program, The Rundown

The main event of this trip was my third sojourn to one of the world's best shows on the Internet of Things, IoT Asia 2017. This event is going from strength to strength, with excellent speakers and a fascinating set of exhibitors including not only large IoT vendors, but small and medium-sized enterprises, startups and regional pavilions (quite noticeably both Singapore and France). Interest in IIC testbeds and the status of OMG standards was quite high.

(l): Rama Ramakrishna, Salesforce; Vivek Kumar, Geometric Ltd.; Wouter Van Wersch, GE ASEAN; Charles Reed Anderson, Founder, Charles Reed Anderson & Associates; Swaroop Balakrishnan, Bosch Software Innovations GmbH and myself at IoT Asia 2017

As I was in town anyway, I met with government-owned firms and agencies and participated in a workshop organized by International Enterprise Singapore entitled Digitalisation of Manufacturing. Interest in all of our activities is riding high.

This week, I’m in Santiago meeting with government, academic, and mining institutions. Soon I’m off to return to Hannover, Germany for Hannover Messe, the world’s leading industrial show, the week of April 24^th.  I'm sure I'll have more to say then! 

  

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

In mid-February, I traveled to the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2017 (NILF).  NASSCOM ( http://www.nasscom.in/) is the nearly 30-year-old association of Indian ICT firms, and NILF is its flagship event. I was proud to join the glittering luminaries on the agenda, talking about IoT standards and testbeds of course (VIDEO). The entire leadership of the Indian ICT industry was there, plus an impressive collection of speakers from around the world focusing on digital disruption (and a lot of discussion about how United States politics might have an impact, positive or negative, on the Indian ICT industry). There were thousands of people in attendance as there was constantly a large crowd both in the plenary hall and outside playing the connection game. The theme of the Forum was “Re-imagine don’t Re-engineer” which fit nicely with my presentation about how the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®) is enabling industries to be reimagined, due to digital disruption.

On stage at NILF, Dr. Soley explains how the IIC promotes the accelerated growth of the Industrial Internet of Things.

This very impressive setting was also the venue to sign an initial agreement between the IIC® and NASSCOM's new Centre of Excellence for the Internet of Things to advance the Industrial Internet. At the signing ceremony, we were lucky enough to have not only myself and the CEO of the new Centre, but also NASSCOM leadership including: President Chandrashekhar Rentala and Chairman CP Gurnani, and leading IIC members Bill Ruh of General Electric and Venkat Sarma of L&T Infotech. This is, as they say in Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Left: IIC Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley stands with: Bill Ruh (GE), President Chandrashekhar Rentala (NASSCOM), Sanjeev Malhotra (NASSCOM) & Venkat Sarma (L&T Infotech).

Front Left: Sanjeev Malhotra (NASSCOM) & IIC Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley shake hands after signing agreement. Rear Left: Chairman CP Gurnani (NASSCOM), Bill Ruh (GE) & President Chandrashekhar Rentala (NASSCOM)

I also had the opportunity to talk to the three gentlemen about the India chapter of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and its annual event in Bangalore, which I will try to participate in this year.

At the end of last month and the beginning of March, I attended Mobile World Congress 2017, the big GSM Association conference hosted by Fira de Barcelona in the lovely city of Barcelona. As always, it was a great show with solid interest from attendees in IIC testbeds and Object Management Group® IoT activities. I was almost overwhelmed by at least a dozen analyst and press briefings.

This week, the Object Management Group announced some exciting news—OMG® formed a partnership with the National Retail Federation (NRF). OMG will now manage certain retail standards—formerly under the auspices of NRF— that increase quality, decrease cost and increase choice in retail systems. You can read the release here. I’m also visiting Berlin for Bosch ConnectedWorld and a workshop in support of the G20 Meeting this week. I’ll have more information about these meetings in an upcoming blog.

Next week, I head out to the OMG TC and IIC quarterly meetings in Reston, VA. The OMG Special Events Program includes a lineup of thought leaders in: business architecture, IIoT security, healthcare and business process modeling, cybersecurity and cyber resilience, among other standards work. On March 23, the IIC is hosting a complimentary Industrial Internet Innovation Forum, a public forum designed to assist organizations in developing their IIoT strategy .There is still time to register for these events. The public is also welcome to attend a complimentary gathering on the morning of March 22 to learn and network over user experiences, vendor challenges and successes with products based on OMG standards with OMG Ambassadors. The event includes a continental breakfast from 8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom D at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston, Virginia.

After my stay in Reston, I travel back to Germany for CeBIT's Global Forum and IoT Forum, where I’ll be speaking about testbeds & standards. 

 

 

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

As I wrote this last month, I was on the last leg of a trip that's relatively normal for me—Boston to New York, to Paris, through Abu Dhabi to Hyderabad, through London to Santiago de Chile. Fortunately all on the same planet! 

Paris was a very quick trip in support of the Consortium for IT Software Quality™ (CISQ™) and the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®). The first meeting was an annual kickoff meeting for CAST Software, the first sponsor of CISQ and still a major supporter. 

Opening day at CAST Software’s sales meeting in Paris

Though generally limited to CAST Software employees, the importance of software quality struck home through presentations from two of their key customers, Generali (the large insurance company) and Cognizant (who also resell CAST's CISQ-compliant products). The Generali speaker talked about dealing with some 48 million lines of legacy code, mostly in COBOL, and the importance of keeping that codebase running; Cognizant talked about the 130 of their customers already using CISQ-compliant code quality metrics. The CISQ metrics, standardized through the Object Management Group® process (and some of which are already headed to ISO through the OMG® Publicly Available Standard connection with ISO) are increasingly important, as the previously fragmented code quality metrics world made it harder to apply consistent and flexible metrics.  Keep an eye on this market!

Ms. Renate Bister-Reinhard, Software Technology Generali Deutschland Informatik Services GmbH, and Daniel Maly, Senior Vice President and Managing Director DACH at CAST, taking audience questions at the CAST sales meeting.

I also had the opportunity to meet with French government figures and participants in the French Alliance Industrie du Futur, which is seeking to work with the IIC moving forward.  I was on the ground in France not much more than a day, but it was a good day (as it usually is in the lovely city of Paris!).

I then spent four days in Hyderabad, a fascinating city in central India, the capital of two Indian states in fact: Andhra Pradesh, and the new state of Telangana, which was recently carved out of Andhra Pradesh.  The city has amazing boulder fields, with some boulders precariously balanced in unlikely ways.  But I was there to participate in Geospatial World Forum, a business and technology forum focused on the growing importance of geospatial data and geospatial data processing.  This came about through our working relationship with OMG® member Information Sharing Environment and our longstanding cooperation with the geospatial data standards organization Open GIS Consortium.

GEOSPATIAL World Forum signage inside the Hyderabad International Convention Centre

The event was quite large; I participated not only in the main event with some 3,000 attendees, but also in two smaller, invitation-only events, including the 200-attendee oddly-named "Geo Buiz" (the latter word a compression of "business" and "buzz") and the 50-participant workshop on the application of IoT to geospatial data (and vice versa), which I led.

By far the most common discussion on the floor of the show, during the workshop and on the 3,000-attendee exhibit floor (with about 30 booths, notably a large booth from the Survey of India, celebrating its 250th anniversary) was IoT, secondarily artificial intelligence and deep/machine learning.  Geospatial data, after all, is just another kind of data—but with a very well-defined semantic, which opens up opportunities for clever machine-learning optimizations.  This is a technology area to watch, as there is quite a lot of application of geospatial data (and other positional data, for example inside the human body) to many vertical markets.  Think of the question "where is ...." and that's positional data— relevant to everything.  Outside of technology, there was quite a lot of discussion of partnerships, collaboration and both ad-hoc and formal interoperability standards.

I ended the month in sunny Santiago for meetings with mining interests in Chile!  I do like summer:)

Volcano Osorno, in the Lakes Regional of southern Chile

 

 

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

We’ve been saying and listening for some time that The Internet of Things has the potential to transform industries. In the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®), the job is not to develop and invent technology, but to apply IoT in industrial settings to provide transformational business outcomes and find new disruptive products and services that change the way business is done. IIC brings together companies, research organizations, government agencies and industrial users (i.e. manufacturers, miners, banks, healthcare organizations, agriculture concerns, etc.) that either want to make an IoT product or make use of IoT technologies in the industrial space.

IIC helps them build testbeds, prototypes and/or demonstration systems to find those disruptive products and services to create transformational business outcomes. The testbeds also point to practical experiences in applying IoT. Who do you need to hire? How do you train your people? How do you find the right partners?

There are many IoT success stories in manufacturing, energy, transportation, smart cities, etc. We are going to see many, many more IoT success stories in the next couple of years. However, some of the innovations will fail; I am a real believer in failing. The IIC will have some testbeds that will not have successful outcomes but it will be extremely important to learn what failed.

The IIC is not a standards organization itself. It hands over standards requirements and priorities to standards organizations to officially formulize solutions that will make Industrial IoT solutions reliable, repeatable and secure. One such organization, of course, is the Object Management Group®, which focuses on semantic integration standards. One of the challenges facing IoT is the meaning of data moving around the network. Semantic integration is a difficult problem, and exactly what OMG has been focusing on for the past 15 or 20 years.

One great example is the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO®) standard for capturing and communicating, in an unambiguous way, information about financial instruments that are traded around the globe. Developed with the EDM Council, FIBO is rapidly becoming the way that large financial institutions capture, communicate and integrate financial data so that it can be understood across vast chasms between systems.

I’ll be speaking about the current and future states of the IoT, and the IIC and OMG’s roles in both, at the IoT Evolution Expo from February 7-10 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I will deliver a keynote about the IIC, join a panel to discuss how companies can work together to gain the advantages of IoT and present what the future holds for IoT and how we will judge our future successes on Wednesday, February 8th. Register here and use the code IIC for a 20% discount.

I hope you can join me then.

 

For a listing of all OMG trademarks, visit http://www.omg.org/legal/tm_list.htm. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.*FIBO and Financial Industry Business Ontology are registered trademarks of the EDM-C, used with permission.

Preview

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

The end of 2016 saw continued momentum for standards and testbeds. For example, last month, I had the opportunity to brief operational executives from Woodside Energy.  Woodside is the largest private LNG (liquefied natural gas) provider in the world, tapping huge fields northwest of Australia in the Indian Ocean.  They have been doing amazing things already with the Internet of Things, but are running into huge performance and data integration problems as they pull together their operational and information systems.  The attendees were intensely interested in the Object Management Group® (OMG®) standards and the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC) testbeds. 

Later that month, the Boston Chief Technology Officer Club, which I helped found, met for breakfast and a presentation.  The speaker was Stephen Mellor, CTO of the Industrial Internet Consortium (and well known to the UML® community at the Object Management Group too, of course). The Club doesn’t make projectors available, PowerPoint slides aren’t allowed, and interruption is encouraged.  The meetings, if the speaker is smart, turn into fascinating conversations and even arguments.  Steven was interrupted constantly, signifying a great topic and an excellent speech.  After a long argument about model-driven systems and executable modeling, and a surprisingly short discussion of agile methods (both of which Stephen has been involved in), there was a great discussion on IoT standards, security and testbeds. 

IIC CTO Stephen Mellor speaks at the Boston Chief Technology Officer Club.

As most people know, Boston is a hotbed of innovation and creativity in life sciences; one cornerstone of that activity is Biogen, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts across the street from MIT.  Through a contact I met a couple of years ago at a NECINA (New England Chinese Information and Networking Association) meeting, I was invited to an event called the Biogen Business Inclusion Challenge (BIC).  Managed by the supply chain and procurement operations at Biogen, the BIC (which will be an annual event) brings together diverse suppliers to compete, on the basis of innovation and other key points, for awards from Biogen.  This is a high-level activity at Biogen, supported directly by the former CEO George Scangos.  I was honored to be the only non-Biogen employee in the judging panel of four. Starting with 20 entries, four were chosen for brief presentations and Q&A in front of not only the four judges, but also an audience of about 200-250 including both Biogen employees and other interested parties. The winner, Encova, showed an extraordinarily innovative prototype robot for swabbing bioreactors and other equipment for biologics, while keeping the operator safe (nearly 100 people died due to swabbing mistakes over the past year, I was horrified to learn). Definitely a fascinating afternoon!

Finally, I was interviewed by managers at consulting firm A.T. Kearney for a World Economic Forum study on the future of production, intensely interesting to me from both the standards and testbed points of view.  As readers of my reports/blogs will realize, I am a participant in the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on the Digital Economy & Society, a closely-allied area, so I found their questions quite interesting. 

Now that 2017 is here, I’m looking forward to seeing continuing strides in standards development and testbeds by OMG and Industrial Internet Consortium members. Just in the last year, OMG members have developed and published standards in areas including: finance, architecture, component modeling, software sizing, language-coding support, safety-critical systems, robotics and metalanguages for modeling. The IIC continues advancing IIoT with testbeds: in Sensor-to-the-Cloud Connectivity, Factory Automation Platform as a Service, Smart Airline Baggage Management and the Security Claims Evaluation testbeds as well as focusing on collecting learnings from those testbeds.

Both organizations are starting the New Year on a strong footing. Like many other CEOs, I’ll make a prediction – 2017 will be the best year yet!

Richard Soley's On the Road Blog

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, our Senior Vice President of Government Relations, Steve MacLaird, arranged for the two of us to participate in a key meeting of the US-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade (JCCT). Located in a spectacularly lovely library hidden away in the northwestern corner of the main United States Department of Commerce building in Washington, DC, the meeting brought together key figures in US-China trade (including the Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China, the Secretary of Commerce of the United States, and the United States Trade Representative) to discuss the value of standards for the Industrial Internet. 

The timing of this event couldn’t have been more fortuitous. Just three weeks ago, the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC) signed a cooperative agreement with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). CAICT and China Electronics Standards Institute (CESI) representatives attended, both well aware of Object Management Group® (OMG®) and IIC, and there was intense interest in both OMG IIoT standardization and IIC testbeds.

As a presenter on the “The Role of Standards in Shaping the Digital Economy” panel, I discussed standards, the value of Industrial Internet testbeds and the nexus among standards, the evolving digital economy and the areas where standards are central to harnessing the benefits of the digital economy. Song Jiwei, from the China Electronics Standardization Institute explained how standards work in China. The process involves a combination of technology and industry standards with a focus on intelligent manufacturers. Chen Wei, Vice President of Nuctech Company Limited, echoed my comments that we want world standards, versus using regional unique terms/words in the United States, China and elsewhere. 

Panelists (from left:) Moderator, Joe Bhatia, CEO, American National Standards Institute (ANSI); Dr. Richard Soley, CEO, Object Management Group and Executive Director, Industrial Internet Consortium; Dean Garfield, CEO, Information Technology Industry (ITI) Council; Song Jiwei, China Electronics Standardization Institute; Chen Wei, Vice President, Nuctech Company Limited

Other presentations highlighted the importance and opportunities for collaboration among stakeholders to ensure that the development of standards facilitates prompt and effective commercial deployment of relevant technologies. United States Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and the U.S. Ambassador for Trade Michael Froman (below left) emphasized the importance of cooperation and transparency of data information flow that has to be balanced with the needs of national security and free trade.  Collaboration across borders, both in technological development and application will accelerate IoT technology applications and accompanying growth.  Given China’s and the United States’ positions as the world’s leading markets, such collaboration is of heightened importance between the two countries. The Secretary challenged the group to work towards those goals. Ambassador Froman stated what needed to be determined was what role government plays in the IoT, IIoT and standards.

Chinese Premier Wang Yang (right) explained that 10+ years ago, China was not industrialized; but now it is the 2^nd largest economy in the world, after that of the US. China wants an open market economy but has to address national interests just as the US does. He stated that like the Internet, cooperation is a set of ones  (1) and zeros (0).  Mutual Trust is a “1” and Cooperation is a “0”.  Without mutual trust, there is no cooperation and zero will be accomplished.

Vice Minister Liu closed the session with the observation that standards should not restrict innovation.  China is a major player, but the US is a powerhouse in the digital economy.  China is growing in capability–US is #1, China is #2 in the world economy , so both countries need to learn how to cooperate and succeed.  China’s desire is cooperation, not friction. 

I'll be back online after the OMG and IIC quarterly meetings (Dec. 5-9th) for more travel updates.

 

World Standards Day

October 14 marks World Standards Day when the IEC, ISO and ITU membership commemorates the cooperative efforts of a worldwide community that develop and publish international standards for a wide range of industries and technologies.

The Object Management Group® (OMG®) has led the way in drafting and publishing technology standards since 1989. Several years ago, OMG decided to submit the majority of its specifications to ISO to become ISO standards. The ISO Secretariat has allocated to OMG a block of numbers, 19500-19699, for the purpose of identifying ISO standards that originate from OMG. A list of ISO adopted specifications is below:

Business Process Model and Notation	19510:2013	formal/2013-11-03
Common Object Request Broker Architecture,  v3.1.1	Part 1:  Interfaces: 19500-1:2012 Part 2:  Interoperability: 19500-2:2012 Part 3:  Components: 19500-3:2012	formal/2012-05-03   formal/2012-05-04   formal/2012-05-05
Knowledge Discovery Metamodel, v1.3	19506:2012	formal/2012-05-08
Meta Object Facility Core, v2.4.2	19508:2014	formal/2014-04-05
Meta Object Facility Core, v1.4.1	19502:2005	formal/2005-05-05
XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), v2.4.2	19509:2014	formal/2014-04-06
XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), v2.0.1	19503:2005	formal/2005-05-06
Object Constraint Language, v2.3.1	19507:2012	formal/2012-05-09
Unified Modeling Language, v2.4.1	Part 1: Infrastructure: 19505-1:2012 Part 2: Superstructure: 19505-2:2012	formal/2012-05-06   formal/2012-05-07
Unified Modeling Language, v1.4.2	19501:2005	formal/2005-04-01

This year’s theme is “Standards Build Trust.” End users, businesses and academia can trust that these international standards, created by OMG members, embody quality, safety, and compatibility.

Trust is also the cornerstone of the OMG standards process. OMG’s one-vote-per-member policy ensures that every member organization—whether large or small—has an effective voice in our voting process. OMG’s balanced, open and transparent standardization process engenders trust in those organizations that use products based on OMG standards.

With the rise of interconnected devices and machines and smart analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT) is spurring new business innovations that weren’t conceivable even a few years ago. OMG members have been working in the IoT space for quite some time which is why its industrial IoT standards are helping to engender the public’s trust in the safety, reliably and dependability of products that are becoming more complex and more connected to IoT-based technologies. OMG's focus on semantic standards—not only moving data around, but capturing the meaning of that data—is critical to the success of OMG standards in many vertical markets, which are key to the Industrial Internet of Things.

OMG has pioneered industrial IoT standards that: link information across connected machines, enterprise systems, and mobile devices; ensure that consumer-sensitive devices (like autonomous cars) operate safely; share threat information and security attacks across different devices, IT systems, and protocols; define ways for devices manufactured by thousands of companies to operate safely and reliably; and analyze and manage the structural quality of IT software to prevent breaches caused from violations of good architectural and coding practice.

OMG is a community of literally thousands of people who have executed its rapid, neutral, international standardization process over one thousand times in 27 years, and will continue to contribute to interoperability, portability, security and privacy for years to come.  We thank that community for their support.