Interoperability Summit: Good Intentions, Little Action
The Second Interoperability Summit, held 27-28 June 2002 in Orlando, Florida, showed that more e-business standards groups are willing to collaborate and showed various ways they can do so. The session also illustrated the difficulty of the task ahead and highlighted the need for more concrete action and urgency in achieving the interoperability goal.
The meeting, sponsored by OASIS, Object Management Group, Extensible Business Reporting Language, and HR-XML, continued the work of the first Interoperability Summit held in December 2001 (See Interoperate or Evaporate, XML.Com). At the first summit, participants wrestled with identifying barriers that prevented cooperation among standards groups. At the second, the group of some 50 participants -- down from about 80 the first time -- heard about ways that some organizations try to achieve interoperability, as well as the need for interoperability in particular industries.
The Need For Interoperability
Summit 2 participants received vivid reminders of why business needs interoperability. Jenny Huang of AT&T Labs described the environment in the telecommunications business, one that has not fared well in the current economy. Huang said that for complex services like telecommunications, the common supply chain models behind many e-business standards often do not apply. However, because telecommunications is a vital and ubiquitous service, it still needs to interact with most other industries.
Huang explained that the business processes behind telecommunications services differ markedly from those used to produce and distribute physical goods. The lifecycle for services starts with a provisioning stage, well before delivery of the service. These processes often involve many interactions among the parties and involve the assurance of service delivery as well as specified service level agreements, not often found in the production and distribution of goods. Also, consolidation in the industry makes value chains fluid and more complex.
Huang added that telecommunications providers need to integrate a large number of legacy systems, a condition not unique to that industry. An industry group called the TeleManagement Forum has developed a "Next Generation Operations Systems and Software" (NGOSS) framework to help integrate commercial off-the-shelf software into their companies' operations. NGOSS is a complex and broad program that includes:
- Definitions of business processes for business processes to support future communications services
- Definition of the service framework for building these business solutions
- Implementations and live demonstrations
- Collections of resources, codes, and training materials
Huang said the group of 350 members in 38 countries wants to develop a component architecture, but still needs a map to show how to fit all of the pieces together.
Ron Dorman from the Department of Defense (DoD) Information Systems Agency talked about the interoperability challenges facing that large and complex organization. While much attention is justifiably devoted to providing systems that support the purely military functions of the DoD, Dorman said those operations cannot function without the support activities, such as finance and logistics.
Standards groups from around the world have come together in the interests of advancing interoperability between standards. We agree on the following actions:
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Dorman said for the DoD interoperability means "getting the right data in the right place at the right time". He described the need for a secure, inter-connected network that gets computing power to the end-user "at the edge". At this point, the DoD is characterized by a lot of point-to-point exchanges, in what Dorman called stovepipes.
In the case of tightly focused top-down data transfers in real time, often used in military operations, this approach works. But Dorman added for non-real time business-oriented data, better ways are needed. The DoD's business operations need to work in a more open environment, where the data flow is less structured and can change rapidly. As Jenny Huang noted in the world of telecommunications, the DoD's most recent operations have involved coalitions, which adds even more complexity and an even greater need for interoperability.
Dorman said his agency wants a market-driven approach to encourage innovation in the DoD's use of XML and connect with communities of interest outside the DoD. In this goal, the agency has begun cataloging and registering XML namespaces and created a management forum to decide on the use of new or amended namespaces.
He encouraged XML standards groups to increase their cooperation, particularly for the development of Web services. In this respect, he saw a role for both the business consortiums that can develop specifications quickly, as well as the traditional standards groups that can build a broader consensus.
