OSLC & OSLC Steering Committee Assessment

OSLC & OSLC Steering Committee Assessment

June 2016

John Wiegand - former OSLC Steering Committee chair

1. Summary.

This is an attempt by an insider to provide an outsider's perspective. Absorbing steering committee meetings and 1:1 member interviews and coloring with my own opinions, the following assessment catalogs where OSLC is and how the steering committee is shepherding it.

2. OSLC - what's working.

OSLC addresses critical integration needs - decoupling domains, providing relatively light weight standardization of key resources, and a discovery mechanism. Resource previews and delegated ui for understanding and connecting resources. Powerful traceability scenarios are supported, and impact analysis is possible through navigating linked resources, even (especially) resources that were created in different tools.

Development tools leveraging OSLC specifications are successful in the marketplace, and enabling customers to successfully develop their products.

OSLC has communicated a compelling promise that resonates with those who have heard it.

3. OSLC - challenges and opportunities.

Each of the positives above have a corresponding challenge.

With promise comes interest and expectations for more and better. The promise of simplicity and openness collides with a perception of complexity in implementation. The promise of community collides with the expectation of a broad ecosystem - many vendors and tools adopting OSLC (where is tool XYZ?); many developers providing toolkits and support for enabling customer development environments (e.g, oslc4js). The ecosystem is growing, but not at apace to support these expectations. [OSLC is experiencing a common reality of open communities: each individual has their own motivation and goals, which are usually not OSLC centric. Recognizing where the energy is within and nearby is a useful in deciding what to harness.]

With marketplace success, OSLC has reached a local plateau of satisfaction. There is a recognition of value, and an associated willingness to pause, looking for incremental enhancements. The challenge here is to understand how to applaud the achievement, recognize the desire for stability, and guide future work (for this part of the community). [There is a corollary to this challenge related to today's market dynamics: customers are more motivated to invest in end user value over development environment improvements. This is likely somewhat cyclical, but reflects today's reality.]

Following the integration solution is also a desire for more. In the area of configuration management, there are initial steps of progress, but more adoption and evolution is needed. The vision articulates additional value that can be explored (including integrating toolchains with publish/subscribe and truly supporting federated shared information). There are gaps with unresolved questions in security - authentication, access control concerns, tunneling through firewalls. Additional approaches, outside of OSLC are blooming also (e.g., API gateways, cognitive analytics). [A challenge here is understanding what and when to connect to. There is a market expectation for technically grounded business value. Just technology appears to be a playground; just describing business value begs the question of how - combining the two delivers tangible value. Integration patterns is a way to address the sweet spot. Integration patterns also enables OSLC to talk about additional approaches, instead of appearing to require everything to be pure linked data.]

4. Steering Committee (StC) - what's working

The StC is an active body - regularly engaging, and providing a single point of conversation on OSLC direction. The StC has a good mix of viewpoints (tool platforms, tool vendors, customers, analyst) in a cordial, apolitical, low conflict environment.

The StC has been reasonably effective at partnering with other integration efforts, especially in Europe.

OASIS provides a strong backplane for standardization, tolerable infrastructure, and helpful support for community engagement.

The vision work addresses a gap, and provides an anchor for moving forward.

5. StC - challenges and opportunities

Although the StC is active, it is difficult to quantify significant impactfrom these activities, beyond "keeping the ball rolling." The StC has not been particularly effective at increasing awareness, vendor adoption, or community participation (although not for lack of trying).

Given pre-existing high level goal alignment, and acknowledging the effort invested to date, I hesitate to share further advice. However, I'll include a few comments for StC consideration, that may either be useful or better yet, trigger further insights from the StC:

Less process in StC interactions. Administrative concerns should be predominately handled off-line, leaving the StC meetings to be focused on steering the community. When voting is required, document the specific topic to enable effective (and possibly off-line) balloting.

Listen. Recognize when the StC is leading with an answer (supply side) or responding to a need (demand side).

Shared big picture. There is a chasm between high level goals and how those goals are achieved. Spend time exploring, understanding, and aligning on what's important. (The vision is a good start, but the StC needs to collectively own it.)

Bitsizesuccess. Take on specific activities at the size the StC can succeed that the StC cares about. Then follow-through and succeed. Learn from the success for future undertakings.

Recognize achievement.It is easy to get defensive about things. Don't! Acknowledge specific contribution and overall progress.

6. Reference

Listening in on April and May StC meetings. Written and phone interviews with StC members and support team. Personal experience and opinion.

This assessment reflects the personal opinion of the author, for the StC to use (or not) as it desires.