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Subject: FW: OASIS DITA-SIDSC value proposition


SIDSC members;

The email thread below is put forward as recommendation that we refine
our Business Justification
(http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-sidsc/download.php/24
148/DITA_Semiconductor_Specialization_Business_Case.pdf) and link to the
bizcase from the charter (perhaps as a sub-head of Goals @
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Semiconductor/Charter). then, as Don Day
has suggested, we might provide it as fodder for other subcommittees'
business case justification.

Please review my thinking-out loud comments to Matteo of OASIS and reply
with your thoughts. I suggest reading the thread from the bottom up to
get the context in which the comments were written. I've redacted most
non-OASIS member names to protect their anonymity.  

Regards,
Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: Don Day
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2007 2:22 AM
To: Beims Bob-RWBC70

Thanks, Bob. If you rewrite the business arguments, it would be nice if
we could provide links to it from the DITA TC's home page near the list
of existing Subcommittees. DITA specialization-related SCs have a very
specific value proposition for their participants, and I believe these
are fairly universal concerns and benefits.

<snip>
 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Beims Bob-RWBC70
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:35 AM
To: Don Day

Don;

I didn't include you on the cc list, but thought you might be interested
in the thread below. I don't think this discussion belongs in the SIDSC
email archive, although I might repurpose some of it to strengthen the
business case documents. But you might file it away somewhere as a
source of thinking to help other nascent SCs to draw from.

Regards,
Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: Beims Bob-RWBC70
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:32 AM
To: Matteo Pederzoli (OASIS)
Cc: Mary McRae (OASIS); Patrick Gannon (OASIS) <snip>

Matteo;

This is great news, as the DITA-SIDSC is beginning to get some important
work done. As the membership page
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=dita-sids
c) shows, we've got active participation from four major semiconductor
companies (Alex Bejan is with ST Microelectronics, although he's joined
as an individual while they work through the OASIS corporate
membership). I believe Infineon is working through the process of
joining OASIS, as is Qualcomm. I've had discussions this week with LSI
Logic, and they're starting the process of joining OASIS in order to
participate in the SIDSC.

That last sentence regarding LSI is directly related to <snip>'s concern
regarding alignment with SPIRIT's IP-XACT. The reason LSI is joining is
because of my continued communication with folks in the SPIRIT
consortium regarding such an alignment. In fact, the first work that the
SIDSC has been doing (identifying register documentation elements) has
been borrowing heavily from the IP-XACT 1.2 standard because one of our
top goals is to enable data interchange between the two standards.
Another member of the SIDSC, Jeremy Ralph of PDTi, is an EDA tool vendor
who has implemented IP-XACT compliant tools, and is thus very interested
in making sure we create interoperable standards.

(For those at OASIS who may not be familiar with the SPIRIT governance,
Gary Delp of LSI is the Technical Director, and I've had many
face-to-face, email, phone and webinar conversations with him. And, ...
Freescale now has a directors seat. So I'm maintaining fairly close ties
with SPIRIT as I lead the SIDSC efforts, and I see those ties
strengthening as we move forward.)

So, I believe this answers <snip>'s first concern in the affirmative.

The second issue should be addressed by several of the public documents
produced by the subcommittee:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/24148/DITA_Semiconduct
or_Specialization_Business_Case.pdf
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Semiconductor/Charter
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/Semiconductor/RoadMap

All of these documents refer not only to specializing DITA for content
creation and delivery purposes, but also to SPIRIT and IP-XACT as
important sources of "foreign" information to be merged with a DITA
information set for delivery. Such an information flow presupposes that
a company is using *both* IP-XACT and DITA within various parts of the
organization in order to leverage the capability to transform
information between the domains in an automated manner. The market value
of such interoperability falls into two categories: internal and
external.

INTERNAL MARKET VALUE

If we assume that all a company does with the deliverables from the
SIDSC is to make their internal processes more efficient, the benefit of
participating in the subcommittee is, I believe, clear: to leverage the
collective experience and resources of people across the industry to
create the specializations needed to enable the cross-domain information
flow between various parts of their company. If a company doesn't
participate in the SIDSC, they'll either have to create their own
specializations, or wait until the SIDSC is done with our work and then
adopt the open standard once it is published. By participating in the
SIDSC, a company will reduce their own in-house work *and* be able to
leverage the work of the subcommittee much earlier in the development
cycle.

EXTERNAL MARKET VALUE

While the internal market value might be sufficient justification for a
company to participate in the SIDSC, I believe the stronger ROI will
come from information interchange with external partners. As the
semiconductor industry continues its move toward "coopetition" where
each company develops intellectual property (IP) within their particular
sphere of expertise and then licenses that IP to others, the need for a
standard technical documentation interchange model becomes much more
critical.

Imagine five years from now when two partner/competitor companies are
cross-licensing IP blocks to each other. If both companies have
implemented an IP-XACT design environment *and* DITA-SIDSC information
development flows, they'll be able to interchange both the IP
implementation package and the functional description of the IP in an
automated fashion. The IP-XACT package(s) will fit right into each
company's design environment, while the DITA information libraries will
fit right into each company's information development environment. With
no human intervention, and with full revision and configuration
traceability *between the companies*! The alternative scenario where one
(or both) of the companies is not using an open standard for the DE and
ID files is pretty ugly and requires significant human intervention,
with its attendant loss of quality, to execute the exchange. Which is
exactly the situation we're all in now, and what we're trying to solve
with SPIRIT and the SIDSC.

Hopefully my rambling addresses <snip>'s second concern sufficiently.

Respectfully,
Bob Beims

Applications Engineer, Staff Principal
Microcontroller Solutions Group

Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.
6501 William Cannon Drive West, MD: OE49 Austin, TX 78735-8598

This e-mail, and any associated attachments have been classified as:
 [X]Public
 [ ]Freescale Semiconductor Internal Use Only
 [ ]Freescale Semiconductor Confidential Proprietary

-----Original Message-----
From: Matteo Pederzoli
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 4:50 AM
To: Beims Bob
Cc: mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org; patrick.gannon@oasis-open.org

Hi Bob,

I spoke with <snip>. He and <snip> would like to have <snip> join OASIS
as long as (1) the work of dita-sidsc parallels that of SPIRIT (?) and
(if 1, then 2) would need to better understand the market applicability
of 1 from the end-user standpoint.

Please advise,

Thank you,
Matteo

<snip>


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