Over the last half decade, Rik has emerged as a leader in the emerging Smart Grid effort for our national electric grid. His current leadership efforts are with new Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Governing Board which he was elected as the representative of the Testing and Certification Vendors category. He is also chairing the Smart Grid Testing and Certification standing committee within SGIP.

Rik is also a current member of the GridWise Architecture Council. In his is two and a half years as the original chairman of the GridWise Architecture Council, Rik guided and shaped the Council as one of the primary advocacy bodies for a smart electric grid. He remains an instrumental member in advancing the benefits of improving the interoperation between automation systems needed to enable smart grid applications. Rik demonstrated the courage to rally the thirteen members of the Architecture Council around notions of interoperability and the need to develop a crosscutting electricity community of people and organizations representing industrial system, buildings automation, home automation, and economic and regulatory policy in addition to electric service providers.

The concept for a "constitution" of interoperability principles, the interview process to engage a larger community and the GridWise Constitutional Convention originated with Rik. This work has been captured in the GWAC Interoperability Constitution Whitepaper. Rik was also part of the GWAC team which created their Interoperability Context-Setting Framework (v1.1) document and their Interoperability Path Forward whitepaper. Through his efforts with the GWAC, Rik was awarded the Smart Grid Award for "Outstanding Leadership in the Advancement of a Smart Grid."

In his work with Drummond Group, Rik has a front seat view of enabling software/firmware vendors to develop and work together in the goal of interoperability, his "hands on" knowledge is immensely valuable. Drummond Group today provides interoperability certification for machine to machine (M2M) or business-to-business (B2B) standards which are used for the Fortune 500 financial information backbone, representing billions of dollars exchanged per year.

His company also provides world-wide interoperability certification for other organizations such as KANTARA for Identity information exchange for the US government and the global leaders in identity. Major supply chains in retail, financial services, pharmaceutical, consumer product goods, automotive and petroleum industries rely on the Drummond Certified program to provide a wide selection of software tested for compliance and interoperability.

Rik was the chair of the IETF WG which produced the AS2 standard (RFC 4130) that allowed the transmission of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) to move from VANs (Value Added Networks) to the Internet, saving companies millions of dollars in transmission fees. Today, AS2 is the "workhorse" for the Fortune 500 Internet Messaging and is one of the most widely implemented messaging standards around the globe. Rik also chaired the initial version of the ebXML Messaging Service (ebMS) work group. ebMS is widely used B2B standard in the US, Europe and Asia.

With Drummond Group's certifications programs involved in identity management, data synchronization, secure messaging, web services, and business processing, Rik offers a fresh neutral approach for industries challenged by many stakeholders and political agendas. With a keen eye on driving adoption of common standards to build the necessary technology to support interoperability in industry and without bias towards an end result, he has experience with many industry groups to engage them in a collaborative process to drive interoperability.

Beth Morrow
DGI Co-founder and President
Beth Morrow is co-founder and president of Drummond Group Inc. (DGI), a leading global consultancy which drives the adoption for standards by focusing on the technological benefits of interoperability and conformance testing.

Morrow has led marketing initiatives and coordinated industry pilots while building alliances with the standards community, global software vendors, research partners, press and industry analysts. A member of DGI's executive board, she is instrumental in the development of corporate strategies to catalyze growth in a changing technology landscape.

Since co-founding DGI in 1999, Morrow has provided an expert's insightful guidance on B2B e-commerce and built strong alliances with early adopters in multiple vertical industries. She has spearheaded the planning and execution of numerous interoperability tests conducted in a vendor-neutral environment that encourages interaction between test participants to deliver greater benefits to end users.

Morrow has been responsible for driving leading-edge sales and marketing initiatives at DGI, including consulting and publishing related strategic research that fosters e-commerce growth for various industries such as retail, grocery, health care, transportation, government and automotive.

Prior to joining DGI, Morrow facilitated the development of e-business initiatives at CommerceNet and Internet nonprofit consortiums. In addition, she has held management positions in sales and marketing, and served as principal in two design firms.