IT-eye

Currently I’m working on my master of science thesis about designing an approach or recipe on how to use IEC CIM based messages in a top-down approach, starting with a business process chain and working my way down to information services and IT systems. As part of this thesis I recently visited the CIM User group Conference in Genval, Belgium, near Brussels. During this bi-anual conference, I learned a lot about how utility organizations in both Europe and North-America are performing digital information exchange using common information models. In the energy-utilities world, aka Transmission/Distribution  System Organizations (TSO/DSO), the emerging trend to exchange digital information between  is by adopting the Common Information Model, or CIM, provided by the International Electrotechnical Commitee (IEC). This standard model is used for the exchange of all kinds of digital information between the IT systems of energy-producers, TSOs and DSOs. What makes IEC CIM special for TSO-related organizations is that the message definitions carry specific energy-related attributes.

Possible drawback of using CIM standards in general, in my opinion, is that it requires additional startup costs to learn and use the standards in respect to “just” do it quick, and with the posibility of doing it dirty also. So, the costs of adopting this standard approach in your information services will payback after a number of integration projects have completed. Also, I noticed that some TSOs are trying to use EIC CIM as their corporate data model, which I think is wrong. IEC CIM is designed for information exchange, so it should only be used primarily for information exchange areas which typically should be a subset of the total corporate data model. Finally, using IEC CIM as corporate data model is equivalent to trying to model the (your) world in one big model, which inevitably will lead to sematics issues. As en example take the entity Account. This entity has a different meaning and hence different attributes for a sales person than for a financial controller in the same organization.

On the other hand, the nice thing of communicating via an industry-wide common information model is that it likely might save work during information exchange and transforming messages from chain partners and interfacing with COTS-systems because the message definitions and semantics are standardized. Adhering to industry standards often lower the life-cycle cost (or in other words TCO) of B2B interfaces and increase the interoperability of IT systems using the B2B interface.