by Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO
I've been a little remiss in reporting my travel lately, so this starts at the end of June. I went on a trip that started in Munich (well, north of the city) at the lovely Schloss Hohenhausen (pictured at both day and night). There each year the Chief Executive of Deutsche Telekom holds a small (about 100 people) invitation-only event called 24 Hours (which oddly are spread over three days). The entire event is held under Chatham House Rule.1
Due to this privacy rule open conversation is maximized, with topics ranging from politics (especially European politics) and basic income to technology (5G and IoT came up quite a lot). As always, the mix of think-tank experts, CEOs from companies large and small and other smart people made for lively conversation.
From Munich I traveled to Amsterdam to take part in the OMG Quarterly Technical Committee Meeting. Discussion and Request Processes on artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) ("blockchain") joined the busy meeting, churning out a half-dozen new specifications and with a record number of processes underway. The quite odd hotel – Park Inn by Radisson Amsterdam City West – was a hit for interesting design and lost a lot in useful meeting spaces but didn't slow more than a hundred request processes.
Staying in Europe, I then flew to Hamburg, the nearest major airport to Travemümde. There was held the annual IOTA Summer Summit ("SumSum"); relating to both the standards program at OMG (where DLTs in general and IOTA in specific are going through standardization) and the testbed program at IIC (where there is active discussion about studying DLTs in the IIC programs and possible joint testbeds) and I serve on the Supervisory Board (Stiftungrat) of the Foundation. This DLT is important as it was designed from the ground up to be used in machines (industrial IoT settings): small footprint, high transaction rate, zero cost.
It was a good three days of discussion and exciting to meet the widely distributed team (100 people from 26 countries). The only downside was the Human Resources report stating a young average age and a highest age that matches my own!
After some time in the States, I had a trip to the RSA Asia/Pac and Japan show in Singapore. Mostly focused on measure and management of threats in cyberspace, there was intense interest of course in risk management but also in code quality, IoT device security and measurement of same. It is surprising how often risk management is only carried out late in the use of code - why not measure code size, technical debt and quality before code is live. In fact, why not do that at the model level in a model-based software engineering (or Model Driven Architecture) informed process? That of course is the direction taken by the OMG code quality standards developed by the OMG Consortium for Information & Software Quality.
As the heat rises in the northern summer, activity slows somewhat but will come roaring back with September featuring meetings of both the OMG in Nashville and the IIC in Anaheim.
Best,
Richard
