I had the great opportunity to attend and actively participate in the Smart Grid SDO this week.  This particular workshop was hosted by NIST and EPRI,   and very well attended.   There were over 300+ people in attendance at the keynote this morning. 

The keynote speaker was Aneesh Chopra, who is the chief technical officer for the United States.   His message was clear with respect to the importance of industry standards for the Smart grid and beyond.   Invest in the building blocks of innovation was one of the themes for being successful.   During his presentation he talked about numerous opportunities and how other organizations and industries were leveraging industry standards for success.  

There is an initiative focused on open collaboration in Health IT data exchange.   Check out connectopensource.org.  Connect as an open source project (federal collaboration) focused at enabling secure and interoperable exchange of electronic health information between organizations.

Another interesting concept that demonstrated the proposition of delivering value through open standards is all the data sets that have been created and can be found at data.gov

The government focuses promotion of open standards and Spirit of Commonwealth to encourage entrepreneurs to lower costs for public services, many times through innovation and leveraging industry standards.

Dr. George Arnold commented on the keynote presentation, highlighting that Chopra electrified the audience.

Arnold emphasized the importance of standards and how standards are essential to the success of the Smart grid and information modeling and communication with other industries and other standards.  NIST is coordinating the development of a framework, and is therefore putting together a complete list of standards roadmap for total interoperability.  Not to be left out of the importance of testing and certification of the industry standards.

EISA importance really drives the value proposition of open standards. At the federal government level, we had the opportunity to be engaged by speakers Patricia Hoffman (DOE),  Seudeen Kelly (FERC) and Chris Kotting (PUCO  & NARUC).   The message there was the federal regulators really believe the importance of industry standards,  interoperability is the key for information exchange.

EPRI provided an update on the roadmap work,  with NIST being the keeper and owner of the roadmap.

From my personal perspective on the overall event:

There still seems to be a lot of great opportunities as the amount of SDO's that are at this conference are overwhelming.   There is a potential of a lot of overlap and  the opportunity for collaboration and consensus as we look for real opportunities are for the industry standards to be successfully adopted and deployed into real solutions.  

I am always concerned about standards existing for the sake of being standards,  and taking on a life of their own.  My focus is to make sure that the standards that the OPC Foundation develops solve the problems that our vendors and end-users want, as this is in my mind the best way for the technology to actually be adopted into real products and solution.  My vision for OPC, includes partnering and collaborating with SDO's that share the same philosophy of developing the best of breed standards/specifications and technology that will actually be adopted into real products and solutions.

Many of the SDO's here seem to have the backing of the government,  whereby the standards are mandated.  As OPC looks for opportunities to work with SDO's where their guiding principle is based on government and other organizational mandatation,  we will have to adjust our philosophy according.

A spirited discussion with several people that will remain nameless,  focused on a discussion about testing, validation and certification.   The model of OPC is about volunteer certification essentially,  whether you are a member of the organization or you are not.   The people from the SDO's that clearly had a federal government perspective and backing,  challenge the volunteer certification concept,  and insisted that there could never be a product, service or solution based on their standards that was not certified.    I also learned some of their certification processes,  are clearly designed to have a life of their own.   Typical certification for a vendor product must be done individually for the product,  as well as certified during actual deployment.  

In this global economy I was extremely surprised by the number of people in attendance,  and the surprising perspective that the actual date and logistics for the event was announced less than a month ago.   Obviously NIST, and EPRI and this whole industry in comparison to industrial automation places a lot more weight on the importance of industry standards.

There are many breakout sessions and trying to spread myself out with my other colleagues, Alan Johnston (MIMOSA), Katherine Voss (ODVA), and Charlie Robinson (ISA),  to facilitate collaboration of the standards and industrial automation to the Smart grid is the main focus.   Hopefully I'll give you a summary report after day two.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about this or other topics.