The Open Grid Forum recently tasked a tiger team with determining the OGF stakeholders and figuring out how OGF efforts are syncing with their priorities. As a result of this project, the standards body is doing some priority shifting and organizational restructuring to best serve its community and to become as efficient as possible. GRIDtoday asked a team of OGF leaders about what this means, and here is what they had to say.

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GRIDtoday: Why did OGF embark on this strategic process?

OPEN GRID FORUM: From time to time, all organizations need to take stock of their current situation and reevaluate their priorities. While the organization has been relatively stable, and one could argue more productive than ever, some of the primary sponsor organizations have been shifting priorities. This motivated the OGF board of directors to task a "tiger team" with answering the following questions:

• Who are the stakeholders in the OGF?

• Why do they build/support/supply grids?

• What are their greatest pain points?

• To whom do they go to overcome these pain points?

• How do OGF's existing efforts map onto stakeholder priorities?

We felt that answering questions such as these would help us understand where we are as an organization and where we should be going.

Gt: How has the stakeholder profile of the OGF changed over the past few years? Who currently comprises the OGF?

OGF: Surprisingly, the stakeholder profile has remained pretty consistent since the launch of OGF. Our event attendance and group participation trends tell us that our working core is very stable. The respondents to the stakeholder survey aligned pretty well with those we see engaging in our work. About 55 percent considered themselves either from e-science or infrastructure providers (mostly serving e-scientists) and another 35 percent considered themselves either vendors or enterprise end-users.

Gt: Where and how did the interests of your core working members and your organizational sponsors begin to diverge?

OGF: The survey showed that there is a gap between the working core of the OGF community and OGF's traditional sponsors, specifically hardware and software platform vendors. This is true in three areas:

• Goals -- While achieving network scale is a broadly shared goal, the working core sees inter-organizational collaboration (and thus the tools and standards that enable it) as being far more important than the sponsor stakeholders.

• Pain points -- The working core sees the development of scalable applications as its greatest problem, followed by a concern about immature technology and then interoperability. The latter reflects the high priority given to the desire to enable inter-organizational collaboration. However, the platform providers, a key subset of OGF's traditional sponsors, were far more concerned with manageability and integration.

• Providers of solutions -- The most telling difference however was with respect to where the various groups look to get this work done. Specifically, the working core looks externally to their communities of practice and to open source, before looking internally to standards bodies and then, finally, to vendors. The platform providers do almost the opposite or say their customers do almost the opposite, looking internally and to other vendors before looking to external communities and standards bodies. And this maps very closely to the enterprise user stakeholders.

Gt: How will this new understanding of your community affect the organization's activities going forward?

OGF: OGF is a community that comes together because we share some set of common problems or experiences with respect to grids and we want to give others the benefit of our experience and help each other solve our problems. We are an open community and welcome all who want to participate, whether they are academics, high-performance computing specialists, enterprise end-users, platform hardware and software vendors, funding agencies, partner standards organizations, etc. The output of the community is driven by the needs of the community and can take the form of best practices, standards and so forth. Prioritization will be determined by the community based on participation and on stakeholder surveys such as this.

Gt: Will OGF continue to push vendor and commercial interests, or will your focus realign around the e-science and technical communities?

OGF: The people that engage in OGF and the problems they bring and show leadership to solve are the interests that OGF will support moving forward. As a "volunteer army," OGF can and will address issues wherever there is critical mass in the community to do so. OGF has enterprise activities that seek to engage the commercial community. We hope that OGF will continue to be a place where commercial work can get done, but it will largely depend on who is engaging and willing to do the work.

Gt: What, if anything, do these findings imply? Anything about the decision to merge the Enterprise Grid Alliance and the Global Grid Forum? Might the needs of both organizations' members have been better met had the two entities remained separate?

OGF: The decision to merge the EGA and the GGF was taken by the organizations' respective members. In the case of the EGA, these members were, in fact, generally members of both organizations. The overlap in interests, output and membership was such that having two organizations was confusing to the broader community and resulted in spreading resources too thin. Thus, maintaining two organizations was, and still is, untenable. The OGF is structured to ensure that the work of both pre-merger organizations can continue if the membership chooses to. This has in fact been the case, as evidenced by the continuing work within the Enterprise Community and the ongoing development of the OGF Reference Model (once the EGA Reference Model).

Gt: How will any realignment of goals and strategies affect the organization's presence in the overall IT picture? Will we still see the OGF out promoting its work, as well as grid computing in general, at various trade shows and conferences?

OGF: OGF's mission is still about accelerating adoption of grids by providing an open forum and by producing open standards. So, in that sense, OGF will continue to promote both the technology itself as well as our specific deliverables in the broader industry. OGF also has an increasingly strong message around the delivery and availability of some very useful standards for grid interoperability. Adoption of these standards is gaining significant momentum and you'll see additional promotion around these standards and other work products of OGF in the future.

Gt: What steps, both strategic and institutional, has OGF already taken in light of these organizational findings?

OGF: While there are several outcomes, many still in the early stages of definition and execution, the primary step is to prioritize and focus our efforts on those activities that OGF is best equipped to do and about which our stakeholders care the most. As a result, we are looking carefully at the spectrum of groups and activities and making sure they are highly relevant and appropriately manned by volunteers. We will continue to embrace all the work done in OGF, but we also will be giving priority to those activities that are most likely to make a positive impact. After we complete some prioritization work, we expect to simplify our organizational structure, which hasn't been visited since our merger two years ago. We will also be simplifying our messaging, including reworking our Web site so that visitors can see immediately what we are doing and what we have produced.

Gt: Looking forward, what can we expect to see from the OGF? How will the organization's look and feel evolve in the years to come, and what types of work will drive its existence?

OGF: The answer to these questions lies in how the broader grid and distributed computing community chooses to use OGF's open community to get work done. Technologists in HPC and related environments clearly see the benefit of engaging and working within OGF so we expect this work will continue to blossom. We would like to see more technologists who build and manage grids and grid applications in commercial settings benefit from doing their work in OGF. We have had excellent conversations with IT people in several industrial sectors who know their problems and need a productive environment to solve them. At the end of the day, however, it will be up to them to bring their problems and their expertise, along with others who share the problem and are committed to solving it, to leverage the global community OGF offers. In short, the work done in OGF will be determined by those who bring their problems and their technical talent to solve them.

Gt: Ultimately, what kinds of results can the grid community (users, vendors, providers, etc.) expect from the OGF, and who will reap the benefits?

OGF: Our standards efforts have gained considerable momentum over the last two years and the community can expect this to continue and to expand into areas, like application APIs, where a slightly different set of technologists will benefit. In addition to standards, we believe growing numbers of practice documents will be produced that help organizations "work around" key grid challenges in the short-term. Finally, our research activities will continue to provide guidance on how grids fit into other technologies and approaches like virtualization, clouds and Web 2.0.

Gt: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

OGF: As we started off saying, strategic efforts like this have to be done from time to time to optimize alignment with our stakeholders and to maximize the results of upcoming opportunities. As an example, something that we're very excited about is the OGF-Europe project funded by the European Union. This project is specifically targeted toward increasing awareness, engagement and adoption of grid technology in Europe. There will be a series of events over the next two years around specific technologies and industrial areas that OGF-Europe will organize in coordination with OGF "Global." All in all, this is a very exciting time for OGF and we feel very positive about the future.