Highlights from Sridhar Iyengar´s talk (MOF, XMI,…)

Sridhar Iyengar is an IBM distinguished engineer well-known for having led the definition of OMG MOF and the XMI standards and influenced most of the other core modeling standards at OMG.

Yesterday, Sridhar gave a talk at the École des Mines de Nantes as part of the Jeudi des Modèles conference series.

The title of the talk was “2010 A (Meta)modeling Odyssey : Future of modeling, metamodeling, tools integration and the semantic web” . As expected, the talk was very interesting so I thought I could share some of its highlights with you (DISCLAIMER: what follows is my interpretation of his talk, and thus, my interpretation may be wrong and not represent Sridhar original message):

• IBM is trying to bring the business and IT aspects of the organization together.
• We need models to understand the business (not only to implement its software systems). We have proposed the “Component Business Modeling” language with the idea of replacing spreadsheets, powerpoints and other tools used so far for this purpose. The idea is that using business models (even if the users are not aware they are indeed working with models) facilitate the indexing, traceability,… of business decisions
• Going from these Component Business Models to an architecture (e.g. SOA) is very complex but using metamodeling techniques helps in the process
• UML should be transformed into a smaller set of loosely coupled languages
• MOF has not significantly changed since its inception in the 90s
• Drawing models when not in the context of an architectural framework is problematic. We need an architecture that defines how to link the models together
• We should aim for a Component based modeling: highly decomposable and loosely coupled models
• We need to make models and modeling languages work separately together
• Modeling is not going to take over the world but it’s part OF the solution
• We need TO combine models (AND metamodels) + an architectural framework + process/methodology. The process IS the most difficult part TO standardize
• FROM 95 TO 05 we focused ON enabling IT flexibility (MOF, UML, XMI). Now we ARE focusing IN enabling business flexibility (BPMN, BMM, SBVR)

He finally encouraged us TO bring modeling TO the cloud by USING Jazz

Btw, the summary OF a previous talk AT the Jeudi des Modèles by Ivar Jacobson can be FOUND here