Towards Sustainable Interoperability in Systems Engineering

Description

Overview

Interoperability is a concept that defines the ability for different systems, tools or processes to work together and exchange or reuse information. However, in reality, pursuing a strategy for interoperability can require more complex considerations.

For instance, we are seeing greater connectivity between the embedded world and embedded systems and the Internet. This is presenting some interesting potentials and challenges. There are many interactions throughout the engineering lifecycle for example the addressing of bugs in the system prior to deployment and also once delivered into the field.

There are dependencies that span people, processes, implementation and tools. The question is how to make things interoperable.

Points covered

The podcast discussion covered five key points:

• What are the 5 most central issues to consider towards sustainable interoperability especially in the context of Systems Engineering?
• What benefits and challenges do you see with the current interoperability strategies and can we learn from previous standardization efforts?
• Are there too many interoperability strategies in play or are we doing a poor job of articulating how the different strategies relate to one another? – Are we in danger of engaging in a standards battle?
• How can one go about making interoperability a primary concern within the organization and engaging the right operational or business sponsors?
• Is the vendor community doing enough to support interoperability and where is the value for them?

Participants

Bola Rotibi, Research Director at Creative Intellect is joined by two guests with experiences and expertise in addressing interoperability strategies within the Systems Engineering field:

Sky Matthews, the CTO for Systems Solutions in IBM Rational. Sky is responsible for technical strategy and initiatives across the portfolio of tools for Systems and Software Engineering and industrial sector. Sky has lengthy experience working with clients in complex and embedded systems development across many industries, including telecom equipment, aerospace/defense, automotive, and electronics. His current areas of focus include design methods and technologies for machine-to-machine/internet-of-things, and product line architecture. Prior to his current role, he was the technical lead for integrating the Telelogic tools in to the Rational portfolio. He has over 20 years of experience working on tools for engineering of complex and embedded systems. Sky is based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and holds a BSc in Computer Science.

Mats Berglund, Enterprise Architect at the CIO office of Ericsson. Mats has 20 plus years of experience in R&D and IT. His passion is the Product Lifecycle discipline and the supporting processes, methods and tools. Seeing the bigger picture, finding patterns, seeking truths and being able to communicate those are cornerstones to Mats. Mats is a proponent of OSLC as a framework for tools integration and has presented at numerous events, most recently at IBM Rationals’ Innovate conference this year where he had his own talk and participated in several panels. His long background at Ericsson includes management and hands on experience from several of the components in Ericsson’s tools landscape, such as SEA, MARS, TITAN, and IT hub. He is also an advocate for ALM tools as well as Agile and Lean methods.