The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 134 - 15 Dec 2014
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In This Issue
Holiday Schedule
Cutter 2015 Forecasts
Selling Cybersecurity to Employees
Race to Exascale: Japan or China First?
BA Guild merges with Business Architects Association
OMG Meeting Highlights
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Happy Holidays  

We wish a happy holiday season to all our readers. To give you a chance to recover from the New Year celebrations, issue 135 of the KIT will only be published on January 5, 2015. Issue 136 will appear on January 19, and we will be back on our normal schedule by February 2.

Cutter Consortium's 2015 Forecasts 

It is crystal ball time! The Cutter blog already has eight entries in the annual "Cutter Predicts" category, including an entry by Claude Baudoin on the increasing maturity of the discipline of business architecture. Feel free to comment or to submit your own prediction.

Selling Cybersecurity to Employees 

The ACM Learning Center is offering a Webinar entitled "Getting Cyber Safety Through to Employees (and anyone else)" on Thursday, December 18 at noon EST (17:00 GMT). The presenter, Ron Woerner, is Director of Cybersecurity Studies at Bellevue University. Register here.
Exascale Race: Japan or China?
In the last issue, we wrote that "if not the US, then it will probably be Japan" that will deploy a machine capable of exaFLOPS performance by 2023. One reader questioned why we didn't predict that China would win the race, given that it currently has the fastest supercomputer.

Our statement was based on what Japanese technologists said during the SC14 conference: their plans for a machine in the 250 to 600 petaFLOPS range by 2020 is consistent with one exaFLOPS by 2023. But of course it is quite possible that China is working with less publicity toward a machine that will reach the goal faster.
The Business Architecture Guild Grows Stronger
The Business Architecture Guild announced earlier this month that it is absorbing the Business Architects Association (BAA). All BAA members become part of the BA Guild, which will have more than 1500 members after the merger.

The BA Guild's purpose is to "promote best practices and expand the knowledge base of the business architecture discipline." It does that through the collaboratively authored Business Architecture Book of Knowledge (BizBOK™), the Summits and Information Days it organizes in conjunction with Object Management Group meetings, and various webinars and seminars. Membership is on an individual basis, costs $125 a year, and provides various benefits including access to the BizBOK, the webinars, discounts for BA Guild events, etc.
News from the Object Management Group
There were several interesting developments during the OMG's quarterly meeting, held in Long Beach< Calif., on December 8-12:
  • The work done by the BA Guild (see above) is likely to be one of the inputs into a proposed business architecture metamodel. Other inputs will come from the LEADing Practice, which offers enterprise architecture reference materials generated by the Global University Alliance.
  • Several modeling tool suppliers are likely to submit proposals in 2015 for a UML Profile for ArchiMate�. ArchiMate is the Open Group's graphical language for the documentation of enterprise architecture. A "standard UML profile" will allow a UML tool to produce ArchiMate diagrams that can be exchanged with other tools.
  • The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) met at the same time, and some IIC members are promoting initiatives to combine the OPC-UA (OLE for Process Control - Unified Architecture) and DDS (Data Distribution Service) standards. One possible outcome is the specification of a gateway between systems that use those protocols. Another outcome is to allow OPC-UA to use DDS as its transport, leveraging the quality of service controls and performance of DDS.
Seen Recently...

"The next stab at killing passwords is turning them into managed tokens."

-- Alex Barkan, on Twitter (@unbuffered), referring to the

beta release of an automatic Password Changer by Dashlane

 

"Amazon's price list is the equivalent of 'quoting the price of a car without the wheels included'."

-- Negative publicity by Atlantic.Net, provider of Virtual Private Server hosting