Does the concept of Con-Current Licensing have a place in modern Operational Solutions?

Concurrency licensing has always been a request for clients, especially in reporting and view clients. Allowing the “pooling” of a set of licenses that are used on a first come basis. Often a very effective way of buying licenses at usage cost.

This makes a lot of sense in the transitional systems and architectures where people really only accessed the system when at work and within the 8 to 5 pm working day.

But a discussion last week with a customer who struggling with the shift to people being connected “all the time” thru their mobile devices and even connected when at home. Even if they not working, the new generation under 45 expect to be able to go online, and connect to the plant, system and access some “insight” to make or support a  decision. They do not expect to go online and find a message that there are no available licenses, wait for someone to free up a license.

The IT department is still asking for con-currency as a cost effective way of buying licenses, but the operational officer I talking with was struggling with the reality that they needed the “Named User” license allocated to a person no matter where he is and allowing the user to be connected to multiple devices at the same time.

Another challenge with the traditional licensing he is finding is that the users do not logout, or disconnect before leaving work, so their desktop at work is still connected, but now they are remote in the plant, or outside the plant and need to access thru their mobile. So the modern approach needs to apply of allowing multiple connections for a user at any one time.

What fascinated me was that this was reality, we have been going down this path for a while, expecting the change, and it was interesting that this customer wanted to talk about new models, to suite the new world.  

Food for thought as you design the new "operational System". 

The Benefits if Using TOGAF with ISA-95

Blog by Stan Devries:

ISA-95 is the strongest standard for operations management interoperability, and its focus is on data and its metadata.  ISA-95 continues to evolve, and recent enhancements address the needs of interoperability among many applications, especially at Level 3 (between process control and enterprise software systems).  One way to summarize ISA-95’s focus is on business and information architectures.

TOGAF is the strongest standard for enterprise architecture.  One way to summarize TOGAF’s focus is on business architecture, information architecture, systems/application architecture and technology architectures.  When considered with this perspective, ISA-95 becomes the best expression of the data architecture within TOGAF, and ISA-95 becomes the best expression of portions of the business architecture.  Central to the TOGAF standard is an architecture development method (ADM), which encourages stakeholders and architects to consider the users and their interactions with the architecture before considering the required data.  The key diagram which summarizes this method is the following:

The circular representation and its arrows summarize the governance features.  One example is the architecture vision (module A in the above diagram).  This vision could include the following principles as examples:

•          Mobile will be a “first class citizen”
•          Interaction with users will be proactive wherever possible
•          Certain refinery operations must continue to run without core dependencies
•          Take advantage of Cloud services when possible

This framework provides a better language for each group of stakeholders.  The following table, which is derived from the Zachman framework, maps these stakeholders to a set of simple categories:

The categories of “when” and “motivation” enables the architecture governance to consider transformational requirements, such as prevention of undesired situations and optimization of desired situations.  In this context, ISA-95 adds value in Data (what) and Function (how), for all of the stakeholders, but it doesn’t naturally address where, who, when and why.  Furthermore, ISA-95 doesn’t have a governance framework.  In this context, “where” refers to the architecture’s location, not equipment or material location.

TOGAF lacks the rich modeling for operations management, especially for equipment and material, which is provided by ISA-95.  The combination is powerful and it reduces any tendency to produce passive, geographically restricted architectures.