Industry and government leaders from the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IEC Council) recently came together to collaborate on the common issues customers face today in their heterogeneous environments and develop a plan to resolve them. The Council was formed in June 2006, under the initiative of Microsoft, to address the need for software and hardware technologies from multiple vendors to work better together, and advise Microsoft on the steps that it and other vendors should take to address the most important interoperability issues today and going forward.

The council features more than 40 global members from governments and corporations representing a cross-section of industries including insurance, banking, financial services, transportation, travel, consulting, consumer products, retail and manufacturing bodies.

Through customer participation and feedback via the IEC Council, six high-priority areas have been identified that pose the greatest technical barriers to interoperability from a customer perspective: Office Productivity and Collaboration Tools; Developer Tools and Runtime; Systems Management; Security and Identity Management; Business Process Modeling; and Interoperability Policy.

GIC was invited to participate/be represented at a high level at the IECC Meeting in Redmond HQ, USA on May 25-26, 2010.

The Council included high level executives from Industry: (incl. Boeing, Carnival, Dataport, Howrey LLP, Medtronic,  Pepsico, Price Waterhouse Coopers LLP, Siemens), Government: (NATO, US Education Dep., Indian eGov Institute, Ministry of Interior NL), Academia & Research: (University Auburn, NC State University, FhG FOKUS Berlin, NCC UK, GIC/NTUA) and Microsoft: more than 20 representatives of product groups/divisions.

 

The emphasis of GIC interest/contribution in the IECC is summarized in the following points:

• Government Interoperability Frameworks, Enterprise Interoperability, Cloud Interoperability
• Interoperability Science (outlook from the ENSEMBLE project).  Possibility to have Microsoft deeply engaged in the new Scientific Domain development, as there is a need for formal description methods and tools.
• Interoperability Standards Management (metadata schemas, systems, etc). Microsoft Interoperability Group monitors almost 5,000 standards
• Federated eID demonstrators for businesses and governments
• Social Media Platforms Interoperability (outlook from the PADGETS project).

Moreover at a research collaboration level, explicit interest was highlighted for further co-operation with research institutes- also participating at the IECC- along the following directions:

• Common demonstrators for eGov / Interoperability Issues
• Collaboration in projects in the SEE Region
• eID and Cloud eSafe paradigms for Greek Government

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