Showing posts with label The Open Group Event. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Open Group Event. Show all posts

Monday, July 24, 2017

How The Open Group Healthcare Forum and Health Enterprise Reference Architecture Improve Process and Technology Ills

Transcript of a discussion on how a global standards body and its ecosystem of partners are working to improve how the healthcare industry operates.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download  the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next BriefingsDirect enterprise architecture (EA) thought leadership panel discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator as we examine how a global standards body is working to improve how the healthcare industry functions.

We’ll now learn how The Open Group Healthcare Forum (HCF) is advancing best practices and methods for better leveraging IT in healthcare ecosystems. And we’ll examine the forum’s Health Enterprise Reference Architecture (HERA) initiative and its role in standardizing IT architectures. The goal is to foster better boundaryless interoperability within and between healthcare public and private sector organizations.

With that, please join me now in welcoming our panel of experts: Oliver Kipf, The Open Group Healthcare Forum Chairman and Business Process and Solution Architect at Philips, based in Germany. Welcome, Oliver.

Kipf

Oliver Kipf: Hi, thanks a lot.

Gardner: We’re also here with Dr. Jason Lee, Director of the Healthcare Forum at The Open Group, in Boston. Hello, Dr. Lee.

Dr. Jason Lee: Hi, Dana! Thank you.

Gardner: We’re also here with Gail Kalbfleisch, Director of the Federal Health Architecture at the US Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. Welcome, Gail.

Gail Kalbfleisch: Thank you.

Teamwork is good for your health

Gardner: For those who might not be that familiar with the Healthcare Forum and The Open Group in general, tell us about why the Healthcare Forum exists, what its mission is, and what you hope to achieve through your work.

Lee

Lee: The Healthcare Forum exists because there is a huge need to architect the healthcare enterprise, which is approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the economy in the US, and approaching that level in other developing countries in Europe.

There is a general feeling that enterprise architecture is somewhat behind in this industry, relative to other industries. There are important gaps to fill that will help those stakeholders in healthcare -- whether they are in hospitals or healthcare delivery systems or innovation hubs in organizations of different sorts, such as consulting firms. They can better leverage IT to achieve business goals, through the use of best practices, lessons learned, and the accumulated wisdom of the various Forum members over many years of work. We want them to understand the value of our work so they can use it to address their needs.

Our mission, simply, is to help make healthcare information available when and where it’s needed and to accomplish that goal through architecting the healthcare enterprise. That’s what we hope to achieve.

Gardner: As the chairman of the HCF, could you explain what a forum is, Oliver? What does it consist of, how many organizations are involved?

Kipf: The HCF is made up of its members and I am really proud of this team. We are very passionate about healthcare. We are in the technology business, so we are more than just the governing bodies; we also have participation from the provider community. That makes the Forum true to the nature of The Open Group, in that we are global in nature, we are vendor-neutral, and we are business-oriented. We go from strategy to execution, and we want to bridge from business to technology. We take the foundation of The Open Group, and then we apply this to the HCF.

As we have many health standards out there, we really want to leverage [experience] from our 30 members to make standards work by providing the right type of tools, frameworks, and approaches. We partner a lot in the industry.

The healthcare industry is really a crowded place and there are many standard development organizations. There are many players. It’s quite vital as a forum that we reach out, collaborate, and engage with others to reach where we want to be.

Gardner: Gail, why is the role of the enterprise architecture function an important ingredient to help bring this together? What’s important about EA when we think about the healthcare industry?

Kalbfleisch

Kalbfleisch: From an EA perspective, I don’t really think that it matters whether you are talking about the healthcare industry or the finance industry or the personnel industry or the gas and electric industry. If you look at any of those, the organizations or the companies that tend to be highly functioning, they have not just architecture -- because everyone has architecture for what they do. But that architecture is documented and it’s available for use by decision-makers, and by developers across the system so that each part can work well together.

We know that within the healthcare industry it is exceedingly complicated, and it’s a mixture of a lot of different things. It’s not just your body and your doctor, it’s also your insurance, your payers, research, academia -- and putting all of those together.

If we don’t have EA, people new to the system -- or people who were deeply embedded into their parts of the system -- can’t see how that system all works together usefully. For example, there are a lot of different standards organizations. If we don’t see how all of that works together -- where everybody else is working, and how to make it fit together – then we’re going to have a hard time getting to interoperability quickly and efficiently.

It's important that we get to individual solution building blocks to attain a more integrated approach. 
Kipf: If you think of the healthcare industry, we’ve been very good at developing individual solutions to specific problems. There’s a lot of innovation and a lot of technology that we use. But there is an inherent risk of producing silos among the many stakeholders who, ultimately, work for the good of the patient. It's important that we get to individual solution building blocks to attain a more integrated approach based on architecture building blocks, and based on common frameworks, tools and approaches.

Gardner: Healthcare is a very complex environment and IT is very fast-paced. Can you give us an update on what the Healthcare Forum has been doing, given the difficulty of managing such complexity?

Bird’s-eye view mapping

Lee: The Healthcare Forum began with a series of white papers, initially focusing on an information model that has a long history in the federal government. We used enterprise architecture to evaluate the Federal Health Information Model (FHIM).  People began listening and we started to talk to people outside of The Open Group, and outside of the normal channels of The Open Group. We talked to different types of architects, such as information architects, solution architects, engineers, and initially settled on the problem that is essential to The Open Group -- and that is the problem of boundaryless information flow.
It can be difficult to achieve boundaryless information flow to enable information to travel digitally, securely and quickly. 

We need to get beyond the silos that Oliver mentioned and that Gail alluded to. As I mentioned in my opening comments, this is a huge industry, and Gail illustrated it by naming some of the stakeholders within the health, healthcare and wellness enterprises. If you think of your hospital, it can be difficult to achieve boundaryless information flow to enable your information to travel digitally, securely, quickly, and in a way that’s valid, reliable and understandable by those who send it and by those who receive it.  But if that is possible, it’s all to the betterment of the patient.

Initially, in our focus on what healthcare folks call interoperability -- what we refer to as boundaryless information flow -- we came to realize through discussions with stakeholders in the public sector, as well as the private sector and globally, that understanding how the different pieces are linked together is critical. Anybody who works in an organization or belongs to a church, school or family understands that sometimes getting the right message communicated from point A to point B can be difficult.

To address that issue, the HCF members have decided to create a Health Enterprise Reference Architecture (HERA) that is essentially a framework and a map at the highest level. It helps people see that what they do relates to what others do, regardless of their position in their company. You want to deliver value to those people, to help them understand how their work is interconnected, and how IT can help them achieve their goals.

Gardner: Oliver, who should be aware of and explore engaging with the HCF?

Kipf: The members of The Open Group themselves, many of them are players in the field of healthcare, and so they are the natural candidates to really engage with. In that healthcare ecosystem we have providers, payers, governing bodies, pharmaceuticals, and IT companies.

Those who deeply need planning, management and architecting -- to make big thinking a reality out there -- those decision-makers are the prime candidates for engagement in the Healthcare Forum. They can benefit from the kinds of products we produce, the reference architecture, and the white papers that we offer. In a nutshell, it’s the members, and it’s the healthcare industry, and the healthcare ecosystem that we are targeting.

Gardner: Gail, perhaps you could address the reference architecture initiative? Why do you see that as important? Who do you think should be aware of it and contribute to it?

Shared reference points

Kalbfleisch: Reference architecture is one of those building block pieces that should be used. You can call it a template. You can have words that other people can relate to, maybe easier than the architecture-speak.

If you take that template, you can make it available to other people so that we can all be designing our processes and systems with a common understanding of our information exchange -- so that it crosses boundaries easily and securely. If we are all running on the same template, that’s going to enable us to identify how to start, what has to be included, and what standards we are going to use.

A reference architecture is one of those very important pieces that not only forms a list of how we want to do things, and what we agreed to, but it also makes it so that every organization doesn’t have to start from scratch. It can be reused and improved upon as we go through the work. If someone improves the architecture, that can come back into the reference architecture.

Who should know about it? Decision makers, developers, medical device innovators, people who are looking to improve the way information flows within any health sector.
Who should know about it? Decision makers, developers, medical device innovators, people who are looking to improve the way information flows within any health sector -- whether it’s Oliver in Europe, whether it’s someone over in California, Australia, it really doesn't matter. Anyone who wants to make interoperability better should know about it.

My focus is on decision-makers, policymakers, process developers, and other people who look at it from a device-design perspective. One of the things that has been discussed within the HCF’s reference architecture work is the need to make sure that it’s all at a high-enough level, where we can agree on what it looks like. Yet it also must go down deeply enough so that people can apply it to what they are doing -- whether it’s designing a piece of software or designing a medical device.

Gardner: Jason, The Open Group has been involved with standards and reference architectures for decades, with such recent initiatives as the IT4IT approach, as well as the longstanding TOGAF reference architecture. How does the HERA relate to some of these other architectural initiatives?

Building on a strong foundation

Lee: The HERA starts by using the essential components and insights that are built into the TOGAF ArchitecturalDevelopment Model (ADM) and builds from there. It also uses the ArchiMate language, but we have never felt restricted to using only those existing Open Group models that have been around for some time and are currently being developed further.

We are a big organization in terms of our approach, our forum, and so we want to draw from the best there is in order to fill in the gaps. Over the last few decades, an incredible amount of talent has joined The Open Group to develop architectural models and standards that apply across multiple industries, including healthcare. We reuse and build from this important work.

In addition, as we have dug deeper into the healthcare industry, we have found other issues – gaps -- that need filling. There are related topics that would benefit. To do that, we have been working hard to establish relationships with other organizations in the healthcare space, to bring them in, and to collaborate. We have done this with the Health Level Seven Organization (HL7), which is one of the best-known standards organizations in the world.

We are also doing this now with an organization called Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC), which involves academic, government and hospital organizations, as well as people who are focused on developing standards around terminology.

IT’s getting better all the time

Kipf: If you think about reference architecture in a specific domain, such as in the healthcare industry, you look at your customers and the enterprises -- those really concerned with the delivery of health services. You need to ask yourself the question: What are their needs?

And the need in this industry is a focus on the person and on the service. It’s also highly regulatory, so being compliant is a big thing. Quality is a big thing. The idea of lifetime evolution -- that you become better and better all the time -- that is very important, very intrinsic to the healthcare industry.

When we are looking into the customers out there that we believe that the HERA could be of value, it’s the small- to mid-sized and the large enterprises that you have to think of, and it’s really across the globe. That’s why we believe that the HERA is something that is tuned into the needs of our industry.

And as Jason mentioned, we build on open standards and we leverage them where we can. ArchiMate is one of the big ones -- not only the business language, but also a lot of the concepts are based on ArchiMate. But we need to include other standards as well, obviously those from the healthcare industry, and we need to deviate from specific standards where this is of value to our industry.

Gardner: Oliver, in order to get this standard to be something that's used, that’s very practical, people look to results. So if you were to take advantage of such reference architectures as HERA, what should you expect to get back? If you do it right, what are the payoffs?

Capacity for change and collaboration

Kipf: It should enable you to do a better job, to become more efficient, and to make better use of technology. Those are the kinds of benefits that you see realized. It’s not only that you have a place where you can model all the elements of your enterprise, where you can put and manage your processes and your services, but it’s also in the way you are architecting your enterprise.

The HERA gives you the tools to get where you want to be, to define where you want to be -- and also how to get there.
It gives you the ability to change. From a transformation management perspective, we know that many healthcare systems have great challenges and there is this need to change. The HERA gives you the tools to get where you want to be, to define where you want to be -- and also how to get there. This is where we believe it provides a lot of benefits.

Gardner: Gail, similar question, for those organizations, both public and private sector, that do this well, that embrace HERA, what should they hope to get in return?

Kalbfleisch: I completely agree with what Oliver said. To add, one of the benefits that you get from using EA is a chance to have a perspective from outside your own narrow silos. The HERA should be able to help a person see other areas that they have to take into consideration, that maybe they wouldn’t have before.

Another value is to engage with other people who are doing similar work, who may have either learned lessons, or are doing similar things at the same time. So that's one of the ways I see the effectiveness and of doing our jobs better, quicker, and faster.

Also, it can help us identify where we have gaps and where we need to focus our efforts. We can focus our limited resources in much better ways on specific issues -- where we can accomplish what we are looking to -- and to gain that boundaryless information flow.

Reaching your goals

We show them how they can follow a roadmap to accomplish their self-defined goals more effectively.
Lee: Essentially, the HERA will provide a framework that enables companies to leverage IT to achieve their goals. The wonderful thing about it is that we are not telling organizations what their goals should be. We show them how they can follow a roadmap to accomplish their self-defined goals more effectively. Often this involves communicating the big picture, as Gail said, to those who are in siloed positions within their organizations.

There is an old saying: “What you see depends on where you sit.” The HERA helps stakeholders gain this perspective by helping key players understand the relationships, for example, between business processes and engineering. So whether a stakeholder’s interest is increasing patient satisfaction, reducing error, improving quality, and having better patient outcomes and gaining more reimbursement where reimbursement is tied to outcomes -- using the product and the architecture that we are developing helps all of these goals.

Gardner: Jason, for those who are intrigued by what you are doing with HERA, tell us about its trajectory, its evolution, and how that journey unfolds. Who can they learn more or get involved?

Lee: We have only been working on the HERA per se for the last year, although its underpinnings go back 20 years or more. Its trajectory is not to a single point, but to an evolutionary process. We will be producing products, white papers, as well as products that others can use in a modular fashion to leverage what they already use within their legacy systems.

We encourage anyone out there, particularly in the health system delivery space, to join us. That can be done by contacting me at j.lee@opengroup.org and at www.opengroup.org/healthcare.

It’s an incredible time, a very opportune time, for key players to be involved because we are making very important decisions that lay the foundation for the HERA. We collaborate with key players, and we lay down the tracks from which we will build increasing levels of complexity.

But we start at the top, using non-architectural language to be able to talk to decision-makers, whether they are in the public sector or private sector. So we invite any of these organizations to join us.

Learn from others’ mistakes

Kalbfleisch: My first foray into working with The Open Group was long before I was in the health IT sector. I was with the US Air Force and we were doing very non-health architectural work in conjunction with The Open Group.

The interesting part to me is in ensuring boundaryless information flow in a manner that is consistent with the information flowing where it needs to go and who has access to it. How does it get from place to place across distinct mission areas, or distinct business areas where the information is not used the same way or stored in the same way? Such dissonance between those business areas is not a problem that is isolated just to healthcare; it’s across all business areas.

We don't have to make the same mistakes. We can take what people have learned and extend it much further.
That was exciting. I was able to take awareness of The Open Group from a previous life, so to speak, and engage with them to get involved in the Healthcare Forum from my current position.
A lot of the technical problems that we have in exchanging information, regardless of what industry you are in, have been addressed by other people, and have already been worked on. By leveraging the way organizations have already worked on it for 20 years, we can leverage that work within the healthcare industry. We don't have to make the same mistakes that were made before. We can take what people have learned and extend it much further. We can do that best by working together in areas like The Open Group HCF.

Kipf: On that evolutionary approach, I also see this as a long-term journey. Yes, there will be releases when we have a specification, and there will guidelines. But it's important that this is an engagement, and we have ongoing collaboration with customers in the future, even after it is released. The coming together of a team is what really makes a great reference architecture, a team that places the architecture at a high level.

We can also develop distinct flavors of the specification. We should expect much more detail. Those implementation architectures then become spin-offs of reference architectures such as the HERA.

Lee: I can give some concrete examples, to bookend the kinds of problems that can be addressed using the HERA. At the micro end, a hospital can use the HERA structure to implement a patient check-in to the hospital for patients who would like to bypass the usual process and check themselves in. This has a number of positive value outcomes for the hospital in terms of staffing and in terms of patient satisfaction and cost savings.

At the other extreme, a large hospital system in Philadelphia or Stuttgart or Oslo or in India finds itself with patients appearing at the emergency room or in the ambulatory settings unaffiliated with that particular hospital. Rather than have that patient come as a blank sheet of paper, and redo all the tests that had been done prior, the HERA will help these healthcare organizations figure out how to exchange data in a meaningful way. So the information can flow digitally, securely, and it means the same thing to those who get it as much as it does to those who receive it, and everything is patient-focused, patient-centric.

Gardner: Oliver, we have seen with other Open Group standards and reference architectures, a certification process often comes to bear that helps people be recognized for being adept and properly trained. Do you expect to have a certification process with HERA at some point?

Certifiable enterprise expertise

Kipf: Yes, the more we mature with the HERA, along with the defined guidelines and the specifications and the HERA model, the more there will be a need and demand for health enterprise-focused employees in the marketplace. They can show how consulting services can then use HERA.

And that's a perfect place when you think of certification. It helps make sure that the quality of the workforce is strong, whether it's internal or in the form of a professional services role. They can comply with the HERA.

Gardner: Clearly, this has applicability to healthcare payer organizations, provider organizations, government agencies, and the vendors who supply pharmaceuticals or medical instruments. There are a great deal of process benefits when done properly, so that enterprise architects could become certified eventually.

My question then is how do we take the HERA, with such a potential for being beneficial across the board, and make it well-known? Jason, how do we get the word out? How can people who are listening to this or reading this, help with that?

Spread the word, around the world

Lee: It's a question that has to be considered every time we meet. I think the answer is straightforward. First, we build a product [the HERA] that has clear value for stakeholders in the healthcare system. That’s the internal part.

Second—and often, simultaneously—we develop a very important marketing/collaboration/socialization capability. That’s the external part. I've worked in healthcare for more than 30 years, and whether it's public or private sector decision-making, there are many stakeholders, and everybody's focused on the same few things: improving value, enhancing quality, expanding access, and providing security.

All companies must plan, build, operate and improve.
We will continue developing relationships with key players to ensure them that what they’re doing is key to the HERA. At the broadest level, all companies must plan, build, operate and improve.

There are immense opportunities for business development. There are innumerable ways to use the HERA to help health enterprise systems operate efficiently and effectively. There are opportunities to demonstrate to key movers and shakers in healthcare system how what we're doing integrates with what they're doing. This will maximize the uptake of the HERA and minimize the chances it sits on a shelf after it's been developed.

Gardner: Oliver, there are also a variety of regional conferences and events around the world. Some of them are from The Open Group. How important is it for people to be aware of these events, maybe by taking part virtually online or in person? Tell us about the face-time opportunities, if you will, of these events, and how that can foster awareness and improvement of HERA uptake.

Kipf: We began with the last Open Group event. I was in Berlin, presenting the HERA. As we see more development, more maturity, we can then show more. The uptake will be there and we also need to include things like cyber security, things like risk compliance. So we can bring in a lot of what we have been doing in various other initiatives within The Open Group. We can show how it can be a fusion, and make this something that is really of value.

I am confident that through face-to-face events, such as The Open Group events, we can further spread the message.

Lee: And a real shout-out to Gail and Oliver who have been critical in making introductions and helping to share The Open Group Healthcare Forum’s work broadly. The most recent example is the 2016 HIMSS conference, a meeting that brings together more than 40,000 people every year. There is a federal interoperability showcase there, and we have been able to introduce and discuss our HERA work there.

We’ve collaborated with the Office of the National Coordinator where the Federal Heath Architecture sits, with the US Veterans Administration, with the US Department of Defense, and with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). This is all US-centered, but there are lots of opportunities globally to not just spread the word in public for domains and public venues, but also to go to those key players who are moving the industry forward, and in some cases convince them that enterprise architecture does provide that structure, that template that can help them achieve their goals.

Future forecast

Gardner: I’m afraid we are almost out of time. Gail, perhaps a look into the crystal ball. What do you expect and hope to see in the next few years when it comes to improvements initiatives like HERA at The Open Group Forum can provide? What do you hope to see in the next couple of years in terms of improvement?

Kalbfleisch: What I would like to see happen in the next couple of years as it relates to the HERA, is the ability to have a place where we can go from anywhere and get a glimpse of the landscape. Right now, it’s hard to find anywhere where someone in the US can see the great work that Oliver is doing, or the people in Norway, or the people in Australia are doing.
Reference architecture is great to have, but it has no power until it's used

It’s really important that we have opportunities to communicate as large groups, but also the one-on-one. Yet when we are not able to communicate personally, I would like to see a resource or a tool where people can go and get the information they need on the HERA on their own time, or as they have a question. Reference architecture is great to have, but it has no power until it’s used.

My hope for the future is for the HERA to be used by decision-makers, developers, and even patients. So when an organizations such as some hospital wants to develop a new electronic health record (EHR) system, they have a place to go and get started, without having to contact Jason or wait for a vendor to come along and tell them how to solve a problem. That would be my hope for the future.

Lee: You can think of the HERA as a soup with three key ingredients. First is the involvement and commitment of very bright people and top-notch organizations. Second, we leverage the deep experience and products of other forums of The Open Group. Third, we build on external relationships. Together, these three things will help make the HERA successful as a certifiable product that people can use to get their work done and do better.

Gardner: Jason, perhaps you could also tee-up the next Open Group event in Amsterdam. Can you tell us more about that and how to get involved?

Lee: We are very excited about our next event in Amsterdam in October. You can go to www.opengroup.org and look under Events, read about the agendas, and sign up there. We will have involvement from experts from the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Norway, and this is just in the Healthcare Forum!

The Open Group membership will be giving papers, having discussions, moving the ball forward. It will be a very productive and fun time and we are looking forward to it.
Again, anyone who has a question or is interested in joining the Healthcare Forum can please send me, Jason Lee, an email at j.lee@opengroup.org.

Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been discussing the latest developments in The Open Group Healthcare Forum, and how it's advancing best practices and methods for better leveraging IT in healthcare ecosystems. We've learned how the HERA initiative is standardizing IT architectures and fostering boundaryless interoperability across the healthcare industry globally.

Please join me in thanking our panel: Oliver Kipf, The Open Group Healthcare Forum Chairman and Business Process and Solution Architect at Philips; Dr. Jason Lee, Director of the Healthcare Forum at The Open Group, and Gail Kalbfleisch, Director of the Federal Health Architecture at the US Department of Health and Human Services.

And lastly a big thanks you to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion, as well as a thank you to our audience for joining. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator.

Thanks again for listening. Feel free to pass this content on to your cohorts and others in your community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a discussion on how a global standards body and its ecosystem of partners are working to improve how the healthcare industry operates. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.


Tuesday, October 18, 2016

How Governments Gain Economic Benefits from Inter-Public Cloud Interoperability and Standardization

Transcript of a panel discussion with members of The Open Group on the latest developments in eGovernment and cloud adoption.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Thought Leadership Panel Discussion coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Paris Event and Member Meeting October 24 through 27, 2016 in France.

Gardner
Given that the Paris event has a focus on the latest developments in eGovernment, our panel will now explore how public-sector organizations can gain economic benefits from cloud interoperability and standardization.

As government agencies move to the public cloud computing model, the use of more than one public cloud provider can offer economic benefits by a competition and choice. But are the public clouds standardized efficiently for true interoperability, and can the large government contracts in the offing for cloud providers have an impact on the level of maturity around standardization?

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host and moderator as we examine how to best procure multiple cloud services as eGovernment services at low risk and high reward.

With that, please join me now in welcoming our panel, Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability at The Open Group. Welcome, Chris.
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Harding: Thank you, Dana. It's great to be in this podcast.

Gardner: We're here also with Dave Linthicum, Senior Vice President at Cloud Technology Partners. Welcome, Dave.

Linthicum: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, we're here with Andras Szakal, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at IBM U.S. Federal. Welcome, Andras.

Szakal: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: Andras, let's start with you. I've spoken to some people in the lead-up to this discussion about the level of government-sector adoption of cloud services, especially public cloud. They tell me that it’s lagging the private sector. Is that what you're encountering, that the public sector is lagging the private sector, or is it more complicated than that?

Szakal
Szakal: It's a bit more complicated than that. The public sector born-on-the-cloud adoption is probably much greater than the public sector and it differentiates. So the industry at large, from a born-on-the-cloud point of view is very much ahead of the public-sector government implementation of born-on-the-cloud applications.

What really drove that was innovations like the Internet of Things (IoT), gaming systems, and platforms, whereas the government environment really was more about taking existing government citizens to government shared services and so on and so forth and putting them into the cloud environment.

When you're talking about public cloud, you have to be very specific about the public sector and government, because most governments have their own industry instance of their cloud. In the federal government space, they're acutely aware of the FedRAMP certified public-cloud environments. That can go from moderate risk, where you can have access to the yummy goodness of the entire cloud industry, but then, to FedRAMP High, which would isolate these clouds into their own environments in order to increase the level of protection and lower the risk to the government.

So, the cloud service provider (CSP) created instances of these commercial clouds fit-for-purpose for the federal government. In that case, if we're talking about enterprise applications shifting to the cloud, we're seeing the public sector government side, at the national level, move very rapidly, compared to some of the commercial enterprises who are more leery about what the implications of that movement may be over a period of time. There isn't anybody that's mandating that they do that by law, whereas that is the case on the government side.

Attracting contracts

Gardner: Dave, it seems that if I were a public cloud provider, I couldn't think of a better customer, a better account in terms of size and longevity, than some major government agencies. What are we seeing from the cloud providers in trying to attract the government contracts and perhaps provide the level of interoperability and standardization that they require?

Linthicum: The big three -- Amazon, Google and Microsoft -- are really making an effort to get into that market. They all have federal sides to their house. People are selling into that space right now, and I think that they're seeing some progress. The FAA and certainly the DoD have been moving in that direction.

Linthicum
However, they do realize that they have to build a net new infrastructure, a net new way of doing procurement to get into that space. In the case where the US is building the world’s biggest private cloud at the CIA, they've had to change their technology around the needs of the government.

They see it as really the "Fortune 1." They see it as the largest opportunity that’s there, and they're willing to make huge investments in the billions of dollars to capture that market when it arrives.

Gardner: It seems to me, Chris, that we might be facing a situation where we have cloud providers offering a set of services to large government organizations, but perhaps a different set to the private sector. From an interoperability and standardization perspective, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

What’s your perspective on how public cloud services and standardization are shaping up? Where did you expect things to be at this point?

Harding: The government has an additional dimension to that of the private sector when it comes to procurement in terms of the need to be transparent and to be spending the money that’s entrusted to them by the public in a wise manner. One of the issues they have with a lack of standardization is that it makes it more difficult for them to show that they're visibly getting the best deals from the taxpayers when they come to procure cloud services.

Harding
In fact, The Open Group produced a guide to cloud computing for business a couple of years ago. One of the things that we argued in that was that, when procuring cloud services, the enterprise should model the use that it intends to make of the cloud services and therefore be able to understand the costs that they were likely to incur. This is perhaps more important for government, even more than it is for private enterprises. And you're right, the lack of standardization makes it more difficult for them to do this.

Gardner: Chris, do you think that interoperability is of a higher order of demand in public-sector cloud acquisition than in the private sector, or should there be any differentiation?

Need for interoperability

Harding: Both really have the need for interoperability. The public sector perhaps has a greater need, simply because it’s bigger than a small enterprise and it’s therefore more likely to want to use more cloud services in combination.

Gardner: We've certainly seen a lot of open-source platforms emerge in private cloud as well as hybrid cloud. Is that a driving force yet in the way that the public sector is looking at public cloud services acquisition? Is open source a guide to what we should expect in terms of interoperability and standardization in public-cloud services for eGovernment?

Szakal: Open source, from an application implementation point of view, is one of the questions you're asking, but are you also suggesting that somehow these cloud platforms will be reconsidered or implemented via open source? There's truth to both of those statements.

IBM is the number two cloud provider in the federal government space, if you look at hybrid and the commercial cloud for which we provide three major cloud environments. All of those cloud implementations are based on open source -- OpenStack and Cloud Foundry are key pieces of this -- as well as the entire DevOps lifecycle.
So, the economy of APIs and the creation of this composite services are going to be very, very important elements. If they're closed and not open to following the normal RESTful approaches defined by the W3C and other industry consortia, then it’s going to be difficult to create these composite clouds.

So, open source is important, but if you think of open source as a way to ensure interoperability, kind of what we call in The Open Group environment "Executable Standards," it is a way to ensure interoperability.

That’s more important at the cloud-stack level than it is between cloud providers, because between cloud providers you're really going to be talking about API-driven interoperability, and we have that down pretty well.

So, the economy of APIs and the creation of this composite services are going to be very, very important elements. If they're closed and not open to following the normal RESTful approaches defined by the W3C and other industry consortia, then it’s going to be difficult to create these composite clouds.

Gardner: We saw that OpenStack had its origins in a government agency, NASA. In that case, clearly a government organization, at least in the United States, was driving the desire for interoperability and standardization, a common platform approach. Has that been successful, Dave? Why wouldn’t the government continue to try to take that approach of a common, open-source platform for cloud interoperability?

Linthicum: OpenStack has had some fair success, but I wouldn’t call it excellent success. One of the issues is that the government left it dangling out there, and while using some aspects of it, I really expected them to make some more adoption around that open standard, for lots of reasons.

So, they have to hack the operating systems and meet very specific needs around security, governance, compliance, and things like that. They have special use cases, such as the DoD, weapons control systems in real time, and some IoT stuff that the government would like to move into. So, that’s out there as an opportunity.

In other words, the ability to work with some of the distros out there, and there are dozens of them, and get into a special government version of that operating system, which is supported openly by the government integrators and providers, is something they really should take advantage of. It hasn’t happened so far and it’s a bit disappointing.

Insight into Europe

Gardner: Do any of you have any insight into Europe and some of the government agencies there? They haven’t been shy in the past about mandating certain practices when it comes to public contracts for acquisition of IT services. I think cloud should follow the same path. Is there a big difference in what’s going on in Europe and in North America?

Szakal: I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with my counterpart in the UK. The nice thing about the way the UK government is approaching cloud computing is that they're trying to do so by taking the handcuffs off the vendors and making sure that they are standards-based. They're meeting a certain quality of services for them, but they're not mandating through policy and by law the structure of their cloud. So, it allows for us, at least within IBM, to take advantage of this incredible industry ecosystem you have on the commercial side, without having to consider that you might have to lift and shift all of this very expensive infrastructure over to these industry clouds.

The EU is, in similar ways, following a similar practice. Obviously, data sovereignty is really an important element for most governments. So, you see a lot of focus on data sovereignty and data portability, more so than we do around strict requirements in following a particular set of security controls or standards that would lock you in and make it more difficult for you to evolve over a period of time.
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Gardner: Chris Harding, to Andras’ point about data interoperability, do you see that as a point on the arrow that perhaps other cloud interoperability standards would follow? Is that something that you're focused on more specifically than more general cloud infrastructure services?

Harding: Cloud is a huge spectrum, from the infrastructure services at the bottom,up to the business services, the application services, to software as a service (SaaS), and data interoperability sits on top of that stack.

I'm not sure that we're ready to get real data interoperability yet, but the work that's being done on trying to establish common frameworks for understanding data, for interpreting data, is very important as a basis for gaining interoperability at that level in the future.

We also need to bear in mind that the nature of data is changing. It’s no longer a case that all data comes from a SQL database. There are all sorts of ways in which data is represented, including human forms, such as text and speech, and interpreting those is becoming more possible and more important.

This is the exciting area, where you see the most interesting work on interoperability.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, one of the things that some of us who have been proponents of cloud for a number of years now have looked to is the opportunity to get something that couldn’t have been done before, a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

It seems to me that if you have a common cloud fabric and the sufficient amount of interoperability for data and/or applications and infrastructure services and that cuts across both the public and the private sector, then this difficulty we've had with health insurance, payer and provider, interoperability and communication, sharing of government services, and data with the private sector, many of the things that have been probably blamed on bureaucracy and technical backwardness in some ways could be solved if there was a common public cloud approach adopted by the major public cloud providers. It seems to me a very significant benefit could be drawn when the public and private sector have a commonality that having your own data centers of the past just couldn't provide.

Am I chewing on too much pie in the sky here, Dave, or is there actually something to be said about the cloud model, not just between government to government agencies, but the public and private sectors?

Getting more savvy

Linthicum: The public-cloud providers out there, the big ones, are getting more savvy about providing interoperability, because they realized that it’s going to be multi-cloud. It’s going to be different private and public cloud instances, different kinds of technologies, that are there, and you have to work and play well with a number of different technologies.

However, to be a little bit more skeptical, over the years, I've found out that they're in it for their own selfish interests, and they should be, because they're corporations. They're going to basically try to play up their technology to get into a market and hold on to the market, and by doing that, they typically operate against interoperability. They want to make it as difficult as possible to integrate with the competitors and leverage their competitors’ services.

So, we have that kind of dynamic going on, and it’s incredibly frustrating, because we can certainly stand up, have the discussion, and reveal the concepts. You just did a really good job in revealing that this has been Nirvana, and we should start moving in this direction. You will typically get lots of head-nodding from the public-cloud providers and the private-cloud providers but actions speak louder than words, and thus far, it’s been very counterproductive.

Interoperability is occurring but it’s in dribs and drabs and nothing holistic.

Gardner: Chris, it seems as if the earlier you try to instill interoperability and standardization both in technical terms, as well as methodological, that you're able to carry that into the future where we don't repave cow paths, but we have highly non-interoperable data centers replaced by them being in the cloud, rather than in some building that you control.
The public-cloud providers out there, the big ones, are getting more savvy about providing interoperability, because they realized that it’s going to be multi-cloud.

What do you think is going to be part of the discussion at The Open Group Paris Event, October 24, around some of these concepts of eGovernment? Shouldn’t they be talking about trying to make interoperability something that's in place from the start, rather than something that has to be imposed later in the process?

Harding: Certainly this will be an important topic at the forthcoming Paris event. My personal view is that the question of when you should standardize something to gain interoperability is a very difficult balancing act. If you do it too late, then you just get a mess of things that don’t interoperate, but equally, if you try to introduce standards before the market is ready for them, you generally end up with something that doesn’t work, and you get a mess for a different reason.

Part of the value of industry events, such as The Open Group events, is for people in different roles in different organizations to be able to discuss with each other and get a feel for the state of maturity and the directions in which it's possible to create a standard that will stick. We're seeing a standard paradigm, the API paradigm, that was mentioned earlier. We need to start building more specific standards on top of those, and certainly in Paris and at future Open Group events, those are the things we'll be discussing.

Gardner: Andras, you wear a couple of different hats. One is the Chief Technology Officer at IBM US Federal, but you're also very much involved with The Open Group. I think you're on the Board of Directors. How do you see this progression of what The Open Group has been able to do in other spheres around standardization and both methodological, such as an enterprise architecture framework, TOGAF®, an Open Group standard,, as well as the implementation enforcement of standards? Is what The Open Group has done in the past something you expect to be applicable to these cloud issues?

Szakal: IBM has a unique history, being one of the only companies in the technology arena. It’s over a 100-years-old and has been able to retain great value to its customers over that long period of time, and we shifted from a fairly closed computing environment to this idea of open interoperability and freedom of choice.

That's our approach for our cloud environment as well. What drives us in this direction is because our customers require it from IBM, and we're a common infrastructure and a glue that binds together many of our enterprise and the largest financial banking and healthcare institutions in the world to ensure that they can interoperate with other vendors.

As such, we were one of the founders of The Open Group, which has been at the forefront of helping facilitate this discussion about open interoperability. I'm totally with Chris as to when you would approach that. As I said before, my concern is that you interoperate at the service level in the economy of APIs. That would suggest that there are some other elements for that, not just the API itself, but the ability to effectively manage credentials, security, or some other common services, like being able to manage object stores to the place that you would like to be able to store your information, so that data sovereignty isn’t an issue. These are all the things that will occur over a period of time.

Early days

It’s early, heady days in the cloud world, and we're going to see all of that goodness come to pass here as we go forward. In reality, we talk about cloud it as if it’s a thing. It’s true value isn't so much in the technology, but in creating these new disruptive business capabilities and business models. Openness of the cloud doesn’t facilitate that creation of those new business models.

That’s where we need to focus. Are we able to actually drive these new collaborative models with our cloud capabilities? You're going to be interoperating with many CSPs not just two, three, or four, especially as you see different factors grow into the cloud. It won’t matter where they operate their cloud services from; it will matter how they actually interoperate at that API level.

Gardner: It certainly seems to me that the interoperability is the killer application of the cloud. It can really foster greater inter-department collaboration and synergy, government to government, state to federal, across the EU, for example as well, and then also to the private sector, where you have healthcare concerns and you've got monetary and banking and finance concerns all very deeply entrenched in both public and private sectors. So, we hope that that’s where the openness leads to.
It won’t matter where they operate their cloud services from; it will matter how they actually interoperate at that API level.

Chris, before we wrap up, it seems to me that there's a precedent that has been set successfully with The Open Group, when it comes to security. We've been able to do some pretty good work over the past several years with cloud security using the adoption of standards around encryption or tokenization, for example. Doesn’t that sort of give us a path to greater interoperability at other levels of cloud services? Is security a harbinger of things to come?

Harding: Security certainly is a key aspect that needs to be incorporated in the standards where we build on the API paradigm. But, some people talk about move to digital transformation, the digital enterprise. So, cloud and other things like IoT, big-data analysis, and so on are all coming together, and a key underpinning requirement for that is platform integration. That's where the Open Platform 3.0™ Forum of The Open Group is centering on the possibilities for platform interoperability to enable digital platform integration. Security is a key aspect of that, but there are other aspects too.

Gardner: I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing the latest developments in eGovernment and cloud adoption with a panel of experts. Our focus on these issues comes in conjunction with The Open Group Paris Event and Member Meeting, October 24-27, 2016 in Paris, France, and there is still time to register.

So please check out The Open Group website at www.opengroup.org for more information on that event, and many others coming in the future.

With that, I'd like to thank our guests, Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability at The Open Group; David Linthicum, Senior Vice President at Cloud Technology Partners, and Andras Szakal, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at IBM US Federal.
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And a big thank you as well to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion, and lastly, thank you to our audience for joining us on this BriefingsDirect panel discussion. This is Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a panel discussion with members of The Open Group on the latest developments in eGovernment and cloud adoption. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

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