Adaptive Information Improving Business Through Semantic Interoperability, Grid Computing, and Enterprise Integration

Chapter 11. Adoption Strategies

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Developing an organizational competency in modeling should be a priority.

• Be ready to change the engineering lifecycle.

• Be ready to change architecture approaches.

• Adopt a formal modeling methodology for guidelines.

• Avoid modeling myths and follow best practices.

Every few years a paradigm-shifting technology comes around that challenges IT departments to change the way they do things. We experienced such shift with the move from the mainframe to the client server architectures; we experienced it again with the move to the Internet. In each case, adopting the new technology meant acquiring brand new skills and new tools and establishing new organizational roles, new methods, and processes. Semantic technology represents such a shift.

Semantic, ontology-based technologies show great promise for the next generation of more capable information technology solutions because they can solve interoperability problems much more simply than before and make it possible to provide certain capabilities that have otherwise been very difficult to support. The way to fulfillment of the vision will be paved by pioneers in large enterprises, in organizations that can reap the fastest bottom-line returns from large-scale semantic integration. But despite the clear advantages of this technology, there are still major obstacles to be overcome before the potential of semantic interoperability will become a reality. Technology managers wanting to take advantage of ...