OWIS™ is addressing general systems management needs from an enterprise-awareness perspective.  A benefit of this approach is the ability to provide the OWIS™ Executive Agent - An automated business-intelligence agent yielding timely and relevant omniscience of enterprise value-chains (1, 2 ), giving people and mechanisms a technical capability for situational context awareness and physical independence, along with the Infrastructure to support it.  This is achieved through the application of Enterprise Engineering techniques developed by OWIS™ over the past 18 years.  OWIS™ Enterprise Engineering is an method of mapping and linking Enterprise value-chain systems across customers, suppliers, products, processes, structure, and culture within the Enterprise and around it.

OWIS™ Enterprise Engineering preceded, and now extends, the "Balanced Scorecard" and the Object Management Group's (OMG) Object Technology Group Interoperability Clearinghouse (OTG/IC) and is a  framework for building whole-enterprise information systems (WEIS) for any value chain (i.e., an enterprise in its environment).   It is designed to serve as a common foundation for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI, 1) of the functions of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Knowledge Management (KM, 1), Enterprise Resource Management (ERM), Requirements Management, Requirements Engineering (RE), Systems Architecture (SA), and several other non-integrated functions and fragmented management approaches. 

OCAM™ provides automated support of "situational, historical, and plan awareness"™ in the enterprise's constituents.  This "awareness support" helps move much demand for the constituent's time and attention into the background, to dramatically increase the time available for appropriate responses to change in their environment.  This also gives them more time for proactive and deliberate work, allowing the trade-off of work hours for other needs, such as family and social interaction, recreation, rest, and education.   The intent of the OCAM™ system is to increase the degree of automated support for strategic, program, and project planning and management; systems analysis and integration, value-chain integration, and business intelligence (corporate, functional, team, individual, and value-chain data warehousing and decision support).  By helping to increase and maintain relevant awareness about the enterprise and its environment, it supports better planning and control, and thus supports greater accountability and performance management.

The OCAM™ system capability integrates corporate metadata, document, database (legacy, ERP, departmental, data warehouse/mart), messaging, and network resources, using the OWIS™ Context Repository. This repository applies commercially available standards-based directory-centric, certified-permission (DCCP), and metadata management technologies.

Information on Applied Standards

The above WBEM capability is designed to provide a standardized way for enterprise management data to be presented and shared on the Web, and uses the CIM to achieve this.  The DMTF CIM’s goal is to model and manage all the various aspects of an IT environment.  CIM provides a standardized neutral schema that is designed to allow interoperability between IT management systems, providing a way of commonly formatting data about the IT "things" being managed by an enterprise.  It can exchange data between IT systems that share a consistent schema (object model). The CIM schema of a Core model, several Common schema, and several Extended schema.  The Core and Common schema in combination produce a generalized schema for managing IT objects of all CIM compliant participants.  The Extended Schema are provided by specific managed object authorities, such as for Windows NT systems, Sun Solaris systems, or ERP or Strategic Management software applications to capture the variances from the Core and Common schema. 

For purposes of Enterprise Engineering, OWIS™ describes "management data" as data about all enterprise Executive, Production, and Resourcing functions from the highest to lowest abstraction levels, while the individual WBEM, CIM, and XML references currently describe "management data" and "management systems" only in terms of "information" functions, processes, and resources (e.g., information technology management data or information technology management systems) at the lower and more tangible abstraction layers.  OWIS™ Context Awareness Management™, applying its General Enterprise Management™ model, expands on both the DMTF-CIM and OTG/IC to include the concept of Life Cycle management of ALL enterprise objects and their relations (as requirements), where these two OMG efforts focus only on Information Technology objects.  As an illustration, OWIS™ would apply WBEM and CIM as the root of managing the whole enterprise, while the DMTF is applying WBEM and CIM at the deep branch of the organization structure related to Information Technology management. 

OCAM™ provides the means for a General Enterprise Management (GEM™ ) capability by generalizing all aspects of an Enterprise to the highest abstraction model conceivable - the concept of Oneness Management™.  From this abstract, yet experiential, model of Enterprise, the more detailed implementation of integrated components such as management systems for planning, directing, production, resourcing, and performance measurement is greatly simplified.  In this sense, what OWIS™ is advocating is the use of a specific a GEM™ variant of CIM for whole-enterprise Context Awareness Management™. 

The OWIS™ GEM™  schema (shown below in the "Dynamic Object"™ diagram) uses the industrial standard metaschema underlying the CIM. 

Definitions:  Generalized from the DMTF Glossary

schema

A collection of class definitions that describe managed objects in a particular environment.

managed object

A system component that is represented as an instance of a class. Information about managed objects is supplied by data and event providers, as well as by the Object Manager.

metamodel

A model component that describes the entities and relationships representing managed objects. For example, classes, instances, and associations are included in the metamodel.

metaschema

The metaschema is a formal definition of the model. It defines the terms used to express the model and its usage and semantics.

To illustrate, consider this pictograph

CIM metaschema > CIM Core schema   > CIM Common schema(s) > CIM Extended schema(s)

CIM metaschema > GEM™  schema            > GEM™  Superclasses           > GEM™  Context

The equivalent terms between the CIM metaschema and the GEM™  schema are:

CIM metaschema                                            GEM™  schema                                     

Object =  Domain                                           Object = Thing Managed = Nouns in Enterprise Lexicon

Class = Type                                                  Class/Superclass/Subclass

Instance                                                           Instance

Association = Relationship                               Association = Relationship = Verbs in Enterprise Lexicon

Property = Characteristics/Features                 Attributes

Methods = Behaviors                                      Methods = Behaviors = Business Rules

The standardized metaschema of the CIM is consistent with the earlier OWIS™ Dynamic Object Model shown below, so future maintenance and revisions of OWIS™ documentation will shift the older OWIS™ terminology and concepts into the newly standardized CIM metaschema.  This will result in the OWIS™ GEM™  model being positioned as a OMG CIM metaschema extension, as an "Enterprise" class.  This will allow the DMTF and DEN IT CIM schema and the objects managed by it to be a subset of the whole-enterprise GEM™  schema.

The CIM metaschema terms are defined in the DMTF Version 2.0 XML Encoding Specification.  This specification is used for encoding the CIM metaschema and schema in XML rather than the binary MetaObject Facility (MOF) format.  To paraphrase from the DMTF "XML as a Representation for Management Information - A White Paper, Version 1.0, September 15th, 1998":

The mapping between the CIM meta-model and an XML vocabulary, allows the representation of any CIM management information in the form of one or more XML documents. Allowing CIM information to be represented in the form of XML brings all of the benefits of XML and its related technologies to management information modeled using the CIM meta-model.....In order to make the use of XML to represent management information truly useful, an XML Vocabulary must be defined and agreed upon. The XML vocabulary for management would be produced by defining a DTD that dictated the structure or meta-model that all "valid" XML management documents must adhere to....Once the mapping is defined, anything that can be currently be modeled using CIM, ... would then be capable of being represented in XML using the CIM XML Vocabulary....and the reverse is true.... 

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is now accepted as a mechanism to manage and interchange CIM data.  This XML Encoding Specification also contains the metaschema definitions that will be used to define and build the GEM™ . Thus GEM™ , in conjunction with CIM, through the use of XML, would let systems such as database management systems (e.g., strategic management systems such as balanced scorecard and context management) and applications (e.g., ERP), messaging management systems, network management systems and networks, mainframes, and other disparate systems access and exchange management data in either message form or interactively via the WBEM methods.

Context Management information is stored and controlled within a CIM-based OCAM™ Repository, a type of extended metadirectory, which can be implemented in a variety of technical network environments using a variety of distributions.

The multidimensional OWIS™ trademark is evolving and will include images of:

a tree of Objects, a star of Object Profiles,  and an arrow of Object Change,

which are analogous of the concepts underlying the OWIS™ endeavor.

If you envision a tree, the OWIS™ CIM-metaschema compliant GEM™  represents the soil, roots, and trunk of the tree; while any GEM™ -based functional applications and infrastructure represent the tree's subsequent branches, stems, and leaves; while information products from these applications represent the tree's blossoms and fruit.  The GEM™  model serves as the common foundation of all the application-branches, whether new or existent, and what they produce.