IT-eye

My last blog about common information models (CIMs) gave a general idea about common information models. By now you might wonder what is purpose of using common information models is, so I will try to address this by explaining the strategic importance of standardization in digital information exchange, either business to business (B2B) or application to application (A2A).Organizations nowadays are more and more interconnected. This is true for the flow of materials from producer to consumer as for the digital information flow. For example, take a manufacturing or retailer organization. This organization purchases raw materials from one or more business partners, then add value to these raw materials and sells the manufactured products to his customers which might be other business partners, who typically try to add more value to the products in this value chain, or end-consumers.

In the digital age, this flow of materials is heavily supported by a flow of digital information between the information systems from all organizations in the value chain. Now, this information flow can designed and developed into software components in ad hoc solutions and point-to-point integration, but this will ultimately lead to a relative high cost of ownership for the life-time of these software components. Also, the ability of these software components to interact with other systems (aka interoperability) over the entire life-time will be moderate because of the lack of standards within one organization and between the connected organizations.

To get round these problems and enable global open markets in which all organizations speak the same language and use the same semantics while exchanging digital information, several communities and associations like IEC, ISA, OPC,  ebXML, OAGi, and more are creating (cross-) industry standards for exchanging information between organizations (B2B) and applications (A2A) using so called common information models (CIM). Some of these communities offer open standard models that can be used free of charge for developers of software systems and others are only accessible for paying members.

The difficulty is to find a suitable CIM standard and find consensus about this standard model with our business partners. Knowledge of the available CIM standards provided by the different communities is required to make this choice.

When a standard is chosen, the next challenge is how to merge this standard in your IT-landscape. When you already have a corporate data model or a canonical data model (CDM) in place, this challenge is a minor one. However, if no CDM exists, the CIM standard can help in defining a CDM. Two flies in one stroke! This is a major challenge, however because creating a CDM typically takes time. Creating a CDM is typically something that is part of the enterprise architecture and has (should have) strategic value.

Finally, when the CIM is merged with your CDM, software components which exchange messages based on the CIM standard can be developed or bought. This is the easiest part of the whole exercise because all message definitions and flow are already defined by the CIM standard and developers don’t have to worry about this. Software vendors like Oracle and SAP offer these software components. For example, Oracle’s AIA offering uses the OAGi standard (among others)  in their solution.

Additional side effect of using a industry wide standard is that you can use it as a selection criteria for commercial of the shelf (COTS) software. This will likely reduce the implementation cost of integrating these software into the organization.

Government: although the example used above is about manufacturing and retail, it also applies to governments as well. The products in the value chain are translated to licences and official documents and etcetera. A typical government also has business partners. In the Netherlands these are typically the providers of the GBA, BAG and other (local) governments etcetera. Take for example the process of a person that moves from from city A to city B. These information (GBA) is exchanged via the so called Overheids Service Bus. The common information model used here is the Referentiemodel Stelsel van Gemeentelijke Basisgegevens (RSGB), using Standard Uitwisselings Formaat (StUF) as the universal standard exchange format, the national standard for the government sector.