In order to facilitate the development of standards for sharing data across different platforms within the value stream, a new technical committee has sprung up from within OASIS Open, which is an open source and standards consortium.
According to the committee, organizations typically employ a number of different tools to measure software performance in order to maximize innovation, drive growth, and add value.
Led by Helen Beal, chair of the Value Stream Management Consortium and chief ambassador at the DevOps Institute, and Kelly Cullinane, director of energy and federal services at Copado, the Value Stream Management Interoperability (VSMI) Technical Committee aims to bring increased interoperability between these tools. This will enable a more secure approach to sharing data across platforms.
According to Beal, value stream management (VSM) is the next evolution of DevOps, and “pivotal to that is the DevOps tool chain and at the Consortium, we talked about the need for a common data model,” she said.
She said that one challenge to getting companies to adopt VSM is the complexity of getting data out of the toolchain.
While value stream management isn’t necessarily a new concept, Beal said it is going through a bit of a renaissance as companies try to use it with the massive amounts of data they have.
“We’ve never had the ability to access data and make data- and insights-driven decisions like we can now,” said Beal. “For example, value stream mapping has traditionally always been a very physical manual exercise with a group of people in a space, very opinion-driven building, you know, visual collaboration of the work that they’re doing. What we can do with DevOps toolchains now is effectively automate the value stream map, or actually abstract that to another layer, and automate insights into the value stream map. We’ve not been able to do that before.”
As the VSMI is still in its early stages, much of the current work to be done relates to actually getting together and developing these standards. Cullinane explained that this includes things like defining the key components of a value stream, or looking at the tools companies are using and figuring out what is the same and what is different.
Companies can get involved by becoming members of OASIS, which is open to all.
“When you’re developing language and terminology and common vocabulary, it’s really important to have people from different industries as well as different types of vendors or government, academia, and consultants,” said Carol Geyer, chief development officer at OASIS. “And so we are actively trying to welcome new members into Oasis. I’m actively looking to companies to let them know this is going on and encourage them to be part of this, and have somebody on this technical committee. I think standards are always stronger when everyone has a seat at the table when we are trying to make that happen.”
