The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 158 - 17 December 2015
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In This Issue
Year End
OMG Technical Meeting Highlights
The State and Future of Software Engineering
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Year End... Already?
It's time to wind things down for 2015. Let this last issue of the year, in spite of being slightly late, leave you with some thoughts to consider as you plan your IT, software or knowledge management activities for 2016. To all our reader, happy holidays, get some rest, stay safe, and come back ready to address the challenges of 2016. The next issue of the KIT should be coming out on January 4.
OMG Technical Meeting in San Diego
The Object Management Group held its quarterly technical meeting in La Jolla, just outside of San Diego, on Dec. 7-11.  Here are some highlights.
  • Two competing proposals emerged for a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a business architecture metamodel. The e-mail discussions leading up to the meeting were contentious, but the authors agreed to work together on these RFPs, so we hope to get a single proposal at the next meeting. The purpose of this effort is to get submissions that define the relationships between the various business architecture concepts contained in existing work, including OMG standards such as BPMN and the bodies of Knowledge developed by the Business Architecture Build, the Global University Alliance, and others. These concepts include strategies, goals, objectives, value, processes, activities, etc. This is a potentially large scope, which first needs to be circumscribed better.
  • The Data Residency Working Group wrote a Request for Information (RFI) with 20 questions to obtain input on the issues of data movement across countries and jurisdictions, the impact of data residency constraints, the various laws and regulations that constrain data location, etc. The RFI was approved and issued. Anyone can respond to the RFI, even non-OMG members. Request a copy here.
  • The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) held a two-day members meeting and a half-day public information meeting at the same time. The IIC continues to work on marketing, technology, testbeds, security, and various vertical applications of the Internet of Things (IoT).
The State and Future of Software Engineering
Claude Baudoin is honored to have been invited to a small conference in the south of France, taking place right now (Dec. 17-18) to discuss the present and future state of software engineering. Most of the other participants are academics from the UK, the US, France, Switzerland, Germany and Russia.

Some of the topics being discussed are the rivalry between code-centric and model-driven engineering, as well as hybrid approach such as an interesting open source project that produced an interactive development environment for domain-specific languages (DSLs).

Some other presentations and discussions hint at the fact that we're moving from software engineering to systems engineering, and might imply that the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) might be the place to start a specification, rather than UML, in the frequent case when software is controlling physical objects.

Another professor talked about a way to allow designers to mix free-form sketches with more formal specifications, automatically inferring the types of the loosely drawn objects, in order to remove some of the usability obstacles that contribute to the relatively low adoption of model-driven engineering approaches.

Stay tuned for a more complete update after the conference ends.

Seen Recently...
"AOL's customers were not called customers or subscribers, they were members . AOL thrived because it helped create a social network."
-- Walter Isaacson, "The Innovators," writing about Steve Case's
strategy for the America Online network (AOL) launched in 1988