RM-ODP: The ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing

As software technology becomes a core part of business enterprises in all market sectors, customers demand more flexible enterprise systems. This demand coincides with the increasing use of personal computers and today’s easy access to local and global communication networks, that together provide an excellent infrastructure for building open distributed systems. However, the specific problems of those large systems are currently challenging the Software Engineering community, whose traditional methods and tools are finding difficulties for coping with the new requirements. Furthermore, current IT departments are also facing serious problems to keep up with the new emerging technologies. A recent analysis by ComputerWorld (dated November 10, 1999) shows that 85% of IT departments in the US fail to meet their own companies’ strategic business needs. There is no similar study for the Spanish IT departments, but we are sure that the situation is not much better here.