20 November 1998, Sanctuary Cove(Hope Island, Queensland Australia)

The Task Force meeting was organised on 20 November, as the conclusion of the Strategic Workshop on Enterprise Integration and Enterprise Computing (19-20 November 1998). The meeting had the aim of discussing the results of this workshop.

The Task Force held a short meeting to evaluate the results of the workshop with the view of defining new work strategy for the coming years. The position stataments of participants can be obtainied from the web-site http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~bernus/taskforce/Maeetings/brisbane98/invitation.html

Members present:

Start: 16:30 pm

Discussion:

1. There is an opportunity to create a synergy by the combination of enterprise integration and systems and software engineering in the development of new systems- and software engineering life-cycle standards, which will extend to reference architectures of both type I (reference models) and of type II (life-cycle architectures).

2. There is a need to characterise in GERAM space the several reference models currently in development, with the intent of demonstrating their relationships, possibly creating synergy, and eliminating unnecessary duplication. (See details in Neil Christopher's white paper prepared for the workshop). To quote from this paper: ‘In spite of its large commitment of resources MSID [Manufacturing Systems Integration Division of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology] and other similar organizations participating in enterprise-wide standards development activities have not sufficiently articulated the complex relationships between enterprise integration related standards. In order to address this problem MSID is proposing a project to use Generalized Enterprise Reference Architecture Model (GERAM), developed by the IFIP/IFAC Taskforce on Enterprise Integration, to represent the context and relationships between these standards.’

Tools / workbenches that allow the navigation of this space (e.g. graphical representation and model management) would be of great help, but no mature tool is widely available (although some tools start to emerge). It was felt that ODP work could be positioned in the GERAM space but there was no significant interest or need for joint work to be undertaken [chair's note: this might change in the future].

3. The delineation of tasks between industry development (both on the level of individual company and industry interest groups), task-force committee work, and standardisation is of great interest to each of these groupings, because the wrong poisitioning of work in this space will impede the application of results, and will lead to duplication of work, and may lead to lack of end user support. Each of the work items proposed within the Task Force need to be considered in this space. This philosophy is shared with the ISO SC5 WG1 (see position paper of Jim Nell, WG1 convener). Unfortunately (with the exception of point 1 above on systems and software life-cycle standards) the workshop was not conclusive with regards to the actual sharing of tasks, and it was concluded that more work was needed to define and position new work items of the Task Force and of ISO TC184/SC5/WG1.

4. Members present agreed to provide input along these lines to TC184 SC5 WG1 in the form of new work item proposals

5. As a logical consequence of the (4) above members agreed to continue work of the definition of new Task Force mandates, such as: considering what effort is needed to keep the GERAM specification alive, in terms of further development, dissemination, demonstrations of applications through compliant architectures; defining possible new work on enterprise engineering methodologies, modelling languages, etc.

6. It was agreed that it is desirable to extend the membership with more industry experts, and that the chair should make effort to find suitable candidates.

7. There was an agreement on the inadequacy of current modelling languages to provide sufficient detail regarding the design and development of the human / organisational architecture of the enterprise. Some issues are: can the management of competencies be achieved through better / more detailed modelling?, can the representation of mental states (such as trust, agreement, etc) be used to improve organisational characteristics and in general the co-ordination of enterprise activities?, as well as others. This could contribute to the

a) Development of better organisational modelling languages / tools to help management to predict organistaional characteristics;

b) The enrichment of the GERAM specification with agreed concepts on human organisational aspects of enterprise integration.

Adjurned: 18:00

Next meeting: 5 July 1999, Beijing

Last Update 7 July 1999, P. Bernus