Hi Hanz,
Thanks for the link to the SCOPE document. I would have responded sooner but it took some time to go through it.
The document jumps into and tries to marry many different discipline areas (Enterprise Architecture, Knowledge Management, Integration, etc.). I think most people would agree with assessments that every silo has scope, covers some subset of everything, and that they all have “perspective(s)” that influence their existence and performance. However, I would stress that technology has changed significantly since 2008, along with the massive growth in data volumes. Such advancements have changed how (and how fast) we look at interoperability of silos. For example, one significant limitation with SCOPE is that it only allows adjacent Silos (I.e. “one degree of separation”) to be directly compared against each other, in order to find their scopes and their potential for interoperability. It does not, for example, allow you to see that Silo D may be very important to Silo A only if Silo D is first coupled to Silo C, and then to Silo B, where Silo B and Silo A have comparable scopes and potential for interoperability that would allow you to combine their data for higher order analytics and knowledge discovery. In other words, “multiple degrees of separation” are critical, in this day and age.
However, that being said, I do agree that SCOPE is an interesting attempt to allow for the comparison and assessment of silos, for the purpose interoperability.
My Best,
Frank
--
Frank Guerino, Chairman
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)
http://www.if4it.com
1.908.294.5191 (M)
Frank, Robert: You might also be interested in the NCOIC SCOPE model document: https://www.ncoic.org/images/technology/SCOPE_MODEL_VER1.0.pdf More work is being done regarding the SCOPE model, but this first version is a pretty good attempt at characterizing the dimensions of a silo and the scales that might be used to quantify the size of the silo along those dimensions. SCOPE is an acronym (Systems/system of systems, Capabilities, Operations, and Enterprises), but the “S” in SCOPE could just as easily have stood for “Silo” (and the “O” for Ontology – with a little bit more work). The key point is that Silos (and domains, enterprises, ontologies, etc.) have scope, i.e., they cover some subset of everything, and they do it or represent it, from some perspective(s). And they use a multiplicity of frames of reference and units of measure for describing/representing their subset of reality. Furthermore, they typically don’t make their scope or perspective(s) explicit or easily discoverable, especially over a network connection. SCOPE provides a way to assess and quantify the scope of some silo and compare it to the scope of some other silo and thereby highlight potential interoperability problems, including data interoperability, should there be some reason for the two silos to interact with each other (interoperability context), with varying degrees of coupling – depending on the interoperability context. One of the SCOPE dimension sets characterizes the degree of coupling along multiple sub-dimensions, like degree of joint ownership/control, lifecycle alignment, organizational flexibility/rigidity, risk aversion, and the like. Hans Polzer https://www.ncoic.org/images/technology/SCOPE_MODEL_VER1.0.pdf
|