Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
for new domains; this can be seen from its use in the telecommunications,
government and health sectors.
16.6 Coda
Since the RM-ODP was first published, many people have experimented
with the approach, and there are now many competing frameworks aiming
to satisfy the requirements of different communities and industrial sectors.
Indeed, there are now enough of them for interoperability between frameworks
to become an issue, so that, more than ever, users need to understand the
underlying concepts.
We hope that this description of the ODP architecture and the way it can
be used will help readers to understand the benefits of using such a framework,
and the importance of maintaining a clear awareness of the need to serve the
various stakeholders in the design process. The growing power of the tools
we use is opening the way to a much more clearly articulated separation of
concerns while, at the same time, ensuring coherence and consistency.
The use of a robust and consistent framework is essential when positioning
new technologies and planning their deployment to serve existing enterprises.
The ODP reference model can be used to analyse the implications of new
ideas, such as cloud computing, social computing and mobile computing. It
can help to distinguish what is genuinely new from what is simply differently
packaged, and help the understanding of new claims, as it has done for ser-
vice orientation, leading to a clearer comprehension of the significance of new
initiatives.
This is the way forward to the generation of flexible and evolving informa-
tion infrastructures that stand the test of time and do what their users really
need.
