 Hello, I'm Steve Nunn, President and CEO of the Open Group. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, where we highlight the various components and leading experts of the Architects Toolkit, a collated portfolio of the most pertinent technology standards for enterprise architects. During the series, I'll be calling on a number of recognized experts who will bring their particular insights on how to most effectively use the various tools in the Architects Toolkit. We'll have a mix of interviews, panel sessions and pre-recorded presentations along the way. While all standards of the Open Group are designed so they can be adopted independently of one another, the greatest value for an organization can be derived when they're used in unison. The sum of the parts should be greater than the whole. In the Architects Toolkit, we have collated a portfolio of the most pertinent ones for architects together, all in one place. For most of these tools, certification from the Open Group is also available, so practitioners can demonstrate that they have the skills required, and recruiters can take the guesswork out of the recruitment process, all backed up by our Open Badges program. I had the pleasure of talking at the Open Group's EA and Sustainability Conference recently. One of the things I picked up from there was the architectural challenge of balancing the environmental cost of measuring, recording and reporting on, say, something like a carbon footprint of something with the environmental savings that could be gained by doing so. In other words, our own IT, when we develop it and operate it, brings energy consumption. If the measurement overhead that we're adding to the equation outweighs the potential of what we could save, we're not helping, we're actually making things worse. So whilst it isn't really a shodding as cat or observers effect, it does suggest that we need architectural guidance as to how to estimate the environmental impact before we build something, which in an agile incremental development is going to be much harder than planned out efforts. Carbon footprint t-shirt sizing, anyone? Welcome, everybody, to Toolkit Tuesday. Welcome back. As the regulars will know, we are on a weekly cycle at the moment, so we're getting even more content out to you and I hope you're finding it useful. I hope wherever you are in the world, you're keeping safe and well and we're glad that you've chosen to join us today. Before going any further, my thanks as ever to Mr. Paul Holman of IBM for his EA minutes. He's always leaves us with much to think about after these things. So great thoughts, Paul. Thank you as ever. Before we start with today's topic, we're going to make a shameless plug. I'm going to make a shameless plug for the Open Group Summit, which is happening in London on April the 17th to the 19th. In fact, it goes on to the 20th for one or two of our groups. But April 17th and 19th, Westminster, London, lots of our groups coming together and we are having some great sessions on different topics, including an expanded session on today's topic, which is the portfolio of digital open standards. So I'll get to that in just a moment. But before that, just a reminder or a intro to the WebEx tool and how we ask questions on Toolkit Tuesday. We please do that through the Q&A channel. And if you can't see that, please click on the three dots in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. And that will give you the chance to click on Q&A and then please ask questions of our speaker through that. Do feel free to use the chat channel to communicate with each other. We particularly love hearing where you're all joining us from. That's become a Toolkit Tuesday and in fact a thing of the Open Group generally. We do have people joining us at these from all around the world and we're very proud of it. And please tell us where you're from in the chat channel. But questions, Q&A. So yeah, Q&A, Q&A for questions. There we go. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce our topic and our speaker today. So the topic is one that hopefully you may have heard of before, the portfolio of digital open standards, which we've been working on for a little while now. We have an MVP online for you to see. And I hope I'm not stealing too much of Chris's thunder when I go into this. But we're basically bringing together various established standards of the Open Group in a more cross-referenced and usable way together. So I'll stop there with the intro of the topic and introduce our speaker who is Mr. Chris Frost, who is actually one of the panel of experts we have here on Toolkit Tuesday. So it's a welcome back for Chris. Chris is based in the UK and has worked for Fujitsu since 2005 in a variety of technical leadership roles. At present, he is a principal enterprise architect within the Global Delivery Architecture Division, responsible for architecture standards and governance. That's his day job. Within the Open Group, Chris is co-chair of the Digital Portfolio Working Group, which is the group that is spearheading this initiative he will talk about today. And he is also a contributing member in several architecture forum activities. He also sits on the Open Group Governing Board, so very active inside the Open Group. Before Fujitsu, Chris worked for EDS, which is now part of DXC, on several large contracts for the UK Ministry of Defense. And in earlier years, he worked for Ford, Shell, and a small software startup called Shamrock Marketing, appropriate in the week of St. Patrick's Day. So a warm welcome back, as I say, to Toolkit Tuesday for Chris Frost. Welcome, sir. Okay, so thank you very much, Steve. And good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are. And thank you for that introduction, Steve. So as Steve said, I'm an architect with Fujitsu. And one of the things I really don't like doing is reinventing wheels and having to grapple with problems that it turns out that other people have already solved. And that's one of the reasons why I think this portfolio of standards that we're building with the Open Group is particularly useful. And as we go through the presentation today, I hope you'll understand why I think that's particularly useful, and hopefully you will find it valuable too. So first of all, what is this thing that we're talking about? The portfolio of digital open standards. In short, it's a combination of standards from the Open Group, making a sort of a comprehensive super standard of the digital business and digital products, digital transformation and the like. As Steve mentioned, we've recently released an MVP and you can see on the screenshot on the right-hand side there, what the front page looks like and the URL for that. That's out there now. And our goal with it is to make this portfolio, portfolio of digital open standards, the best source of standards for digital business. Now, we've been evolving this for something over a year now. The MVP that I just mentioned was released back in October, 2022. And the current status with it is that we've got the top level view, as you can see it there. There's a comprehensive cross-standard search facility, which is a very powerful thing. And within the framework of the portfolio, we've currently got a number of the Open Group standards loaded into it, DPBock, IT for IT, OAA and the TOGAF standard. And there's plenty of work in progress right now. We're working on adding more content. So we're hopefully going to have the contents of the ARCUMATE standard added in very shortly. We're working on improving the integration between those standards, the user experience of using the portfolio. And we are doing some joint activity with the Open Group Security Forum to work on some additional security content. So we're constantly working to evolve this portfolio and make it broader and more powerful. But my theme here is help for architects. So let me talk a little bit more about specifically how this helps architects. So within this portfolio, we've got a number of the general architecture standards from the Open Group. We've got TOGAF, the World Front Standard EA framework. We've got the OAA, the Hagell architecture standard. And as you just heard, very shortly, ARCUMATE. We've also got a number of broader digital business standards. So we've got IT for IT, reference architecture to digital product lifecycle. We've got the DPBock, which is all about competencies and open fare. But I guess many of these things will not be so familiar to all of you. It's quite typical through membership of the Open Group that you perhaps come in because you're interested in one of the standards in particular. For example, you join the architecture forum because you're interested in TOGAF. But maybe don't see so much of some of the other standards. So I'm just going to take a real quick tour through these things and then come back to sort of look up, all right, so what does that mean for you as an architect? How can you use these things to help you in your work? So let's start with TOGAF, probably one of the better known standards from the Open Group. TOGAF is, the TOGAF standard is an enterprise architecture framework. And at its core, you've got the three parts, the ADM, the general purpose architecture development method. You've got the content framework, which you can think of it really as just a map of the, all the different parts you need in an architecture description. And you've got some pieces on capability and governance, which is really dealing with all of the people's sides of an architecture organization. You've also got a rich set of guides as over 20 TOGAF series guides, covering a whole variety of different topics, additional guidance on setting up teams, guidance on business architecture, reference models on government business, for example, there's a whole host of different topics in there, and many other guidance documents and white papers. So although it's called an enterprise architecture framework, I really would say there's something in it for all architects, not just those with enterprise in their title. There's also the OAA, that covers architecture for digital and agile enterprise transformation. And it's designed to complement frameworks, agile frameworks like safe and less and all of these other agile frameworks that I'm sure we will have heard of. And essentially it consists of a core plus some building blocks. And that the core introduces the fundamental concepts and the structure of the OAA. And sort of talks about this need to do a dual agile and digital transformation, sort of making the point that if you're doing a digital transformation, you really are also doing an agile transformation of an organization. And then as I mentioned, you have the OAA building blocks, which goes into the topics in greater detail. For example, agile strategy, agile organization, software architecture, and many other topics. You can see some of the building blocks in the graphic on the right-hand side of the screen taken from the OAA standard. Archimate is a graphical modeling language for enterprise architecture. And essentially it covers a standard specification of a number of shapes, icons, line types to enable us to model all of these aspects of enterprise architecture. So business strategy, business architecture, and so on, you can see the wall on the screen. And so it describes the sort of symbology, standard symbology to model all of these things. And you can see an example on the screen on the right-hand side there. Now, I haven't got time in this presentation to go through it all in detail. But essentially what you're looking at here in this example is this part up here with the chevrons is a value stream in Archimate, business value stream, and these objects underneath with the little sort of square symbols, these are business capabilities. So it's sort of showing you how the value stream is made up a number of business capabilities. But I have to move on. So next I want to cover IT for IT. And that is a reference architecture that covers the whole range of IT business and digital product lifecycle. It's divided at the top level into a number of functionality groups as they're called. And those are the things in the sort of dark blue on the slide. So these things called plan and build and deliver that you can see in the dark blue color. Plan covering all of those things to do with planning a digital strategy and your portfolio build, essentially to do with the construction of digital products, deliver, deploying those and allowing customers to consume and run covering all of the sort of operational things around detection and correction of issues. There's also at the top level a number of value streams. And these are the things you can see in the graphic in the gray arrows. So you've got seven top level value streams that cross through these functionality groups, evaluate, explore, integrate, deploy, release, consume, operate. And you can sort of understand, I'm sure, from the words, how they sort of walk through the whole of the product lifecycle. Now, you might think, okay, you can see any number of reference model diagrams like that if you just go out onto the internet and maybe Google reference models and things like that. But the real power of IT for IT is that it provides quite a lot of deep detail behind all of those things, behind the functions and the data that you need to flow across them to make that entire digital business and digital product lifecycle function. And next, OpenFair. OpenFair is a framework for information security risk analysis. The standards has basically two parts. There's the ORA, open risk analysis, as it's called, which is a method for analysis, systematic analysis of information security risk. And then to go with that, there's a part called the ORT, that's the open risk taxonomy. And that describes the standard taxonomy. So it's essentially a standard sort of dictionary of terms that you use to describe risk management as information security risk management because when you're doing these things with a degree of formality, you do need to be a little careful of your terminology and a little precise in your terminology of how you analyze and manage the risks. And then within the OpenFair material, there's also a number of other guides and examples such as how to apply OpenFair within the US NIST framework and an example of using OpenFair in how to do cyber risk analysis around some network connected medical equipment. And you can imagine there's some obvious cyber security risks to think about if you're going to network connect to some medical equipment. So you can think of it as sort of a synthetic case study on how to apply OpenFair. And then completing the tour through these standards that I'm going to cover here today is the DPBOC, the Digital Practitioner's Body of Knowledge. Now that provides an overview and gives some guidance around all of the competencies needed by a digital practitioner. And the way it's organized is according to the scale of a digital enterprise. And so if you imagine starting off a new digital enterprise initially as a sole founder and then growing it up to become first of all a team and then teams of teams and so on. These are what in the DPBOC language are called the four contexts. And it starts off with that founder level. So it looks at the sorts of things that a solo founder needs to be competent in when they start off with some new digital product. So you can imagine Jeff Bezos in his garage just starting out to Amazon. And the sorts of competencies you need there, you can see them at the bottom of the diagram here with this founder context. You need to know obviously a little bit about digital fundamentals, understand a little bit about digital infrastructure and application delivery. But at that point that is pretty much your entire world. Then as that organization grows, you get a few more people gathered around you and now become a team. And now you need to add a few more competencies. So now you've got a team of people you perhaps need to think a little bit more formally about your work management. You know, sort of planning your work, organizing your resources, that sort of thing. Operations management. Now you've got more people involved in looking after this digital product, whatever it is. And of course, product management. Then as we continue to grow, the next of these contexts as the DPBot calls them, we grow into the team of teams. And now we're layering on things like portfolio management because we might have more than one product at this point. We need to think a lot more about how we coordinate across our growing enterprise and the sorts of processes that we'll be following. And organization and culture starts to become significant. And then finally, when the company's grown up to be a large, long-lasting enterprise, the enduring enterprise as DPBot calls them, that's when you need to think about some of these things like governance, risk and compliance, architecture, of course, now becomes much more important. Now we're organizing at a much larger scale and so on. So the DPBot covers these 12, as they're called, competency areas. You can see them listed here on the diagram, which were arranged into these four contexts, as they're called. And just outlining all of those competencies that you need as you go through those sort of stages of growth of a digital enterprise. So that was a really quick tour through some of the standards within the digital portfolio. But just to sort of come back to this theme about help for architects, how does this help you as an architect? Well, if you think about creating the architecture for some digital product, then I've got straightaway, I've got Togoff and OAA just giving me general architecture framework and architecture guidance about how to do my job as an architect. I've got Archimate that helps me describe for me how to do the diagrams, for example, the diagramming my BDAT, business data application technology, architecture domains. I've got IT for IT that gives me that framework for the total lifecycle of product introduction and product support. And that means that as I'm going through developing the architecture, it gives me a reference point to make sure I think of all of the things necessary, not just the sort of core business functionality, but all of the things that I need necessary to make sure that I understand how I'm going to release their product, how users consume it, how they can subscribe to it in all of those things I'm blogging and access management and all of those things. Then all of the things also needed in day-to-day operation. So IT for IT helps me make sure that I design a complete, consumable and supportable product. I've got the DP box and that helps me understand the sorts of people I need, the sorts of competencies I need within my overall product team. All of the people and with all of the skills, the competencies I need to conceive the product, design, build and operate that product. And then finally, of course, I've got the open fair to help make sure that I have secured that product. So to summarize very quickly, this portfolio is, I think a great source of material for architects and some really useful things for you to use as you're going through developing the architecture of digital products. It is something that's under development at the moment. It's growing and improving. We welcome feedback. And if you go to the portfolio, you'll see in the top right-hand corner of it, there is a feedback button, please use it. And finally on this, if you want to find out more, please join the Open Group Conference in London. As Steve mentioned before, April the 17th of the 20th, and we'll be talking a lot more about this. And finally, there's the URL again on the screen. And that's all I had to say right now, except of course, I think it's time to pass on to questions. And Steve, if you want to come back and help me go through any questions that have been asked. Absolutely. Thank you, Chris, for that great overview. Thank you very much. And we do have some questions, but there are gonna be, I mean, one of the things we get asked a lot is, you know, it's great that we have this initial MVP and I really do encourage people to go and see it on our website and just have an explore in there. But, you know, we've got some standards in there and it's great to pull together things like TOGAF and OAA and ITFT, you know, is the group working towards having all standards added to the portfolio? All standards of the Open Group, obviously. Yes, yes. Do you know, I mean, over time, yes, we plan to add more and more of them. Would we ever get to a point where they're all in there? I can see there could be some reasons why some may remain separate. As you will know, well, Steve, if we look across all of the standards within the Open Group, there are some that have particular restrictions around them of access with particular kind of rules around them as to who can get involved. And so they might be tricky to sort of bring into this highly integrated framework. But I think in general, the theme is, yeah, we'll sort of gradually expand and expand that out of the sort of core of the common sort of architecture and digital product standards that we've got at the moment to gradually get wider and wider. Great, thank you. And questions come in along a similar vein. Well, no, I guess it's slightly different vein. Will the content in the portfolio of digital Open Standards be the place to go for information about them or like the only place to go? Or will the individual sources of standards still be available from the Open Group website as they are now? Yes, very much so. There's no plan to, for example, withdraw the Open Group library as it currently stands and all of the other things that are on the website. So yes, you'll still be able to go to the library to download the PDFs because sometimes, you know, that's useful to be able to take that offline download. But what this gives you is a much more sort of interactive, web-friendly way to see these things. And although I kind of skipped over it a little bit when I was talking about the portfolio, I mentioned search. You know, one of the really powerful things you can do within that portfolio, but with the search, is it enables you to search right across all of those Open Group standards that are loaded within the portfolio. And, you know, in a really simple clickety-click way, you just go through, oh, you know, here's a piece in TOGAP about such and such a topic and here's a piece in IT for IT and here's a piece in DPBARC. And that's really difficult to do if all you've got is separate PDFs. But the portfolio makes it really easy to do. It's one of the really powerful things about it. Great. And I mentioned at the outset, our global participation in the Open Group and one of the questions is really around that, which is, you know, there are many translations and glossaries for Open Group standards into other languages, but right now the portfolio seems to be just in English. Any plans for that to be different in the future? I mean, again, you're right. Right now we're focusing on loading up all of the English language versions and that's probably going to remain the first priority. But certainly the language translations in TOGAP, for example, I don't know how many languages it is, but TOGAP has been translated into many, many standards, as have some of the others, many, many different languages. So, yeah, just like a lot of web presentation things, you could imagine putting some sort of language button somewhere in the top of the standard framework and allow you to then automatically pull up the different language translations. So, you know, I can't give you a date for that now because we are progressively developing this thing, but it's certainly something we've talked about in the, we've just started, in fact, a stream of work that sort of looks particularly at the user experience, the customer experience of using that. And it's all of those sorts of things that we're thinking about in there, about how it's used and the sorts of features that we want to build into it. So, yeah, the sort of different languages is certainly one thing that's on the agenda. Great, thank you, Chris. I think in the interest of time, we will leave it there. There is another question just come in, I've seen, which is about open fare, which I'm not sure you're in a, well, give it a shot. Why is open fare still foundation and there's no practitioner part to it? You know, I see that in the Q&A. Yeah, I'm sorry, I have to refer to some do's in the security forum specifically about the certifications there. Sorry, I couldn't answer that one. No, absolutely. And there are, I mean, the security forum is going through revamping the certification in conjunction with the open group certification team, revamping the program. So watch this space for more information about what that means for the open fare certification. So we will, thank you for that question though. We will end it there, Chris. Very much appreciate you contributing and sharing what's going on, as usual. And it's hard to do in 20 minutes when there's so much to talk about, but we try and keep these nice and short and to the point and respect for everybody's time, not least your own. So thank you very much. Next week, folks, we are coming back again, as I said, we're on a weekly cadence at the moment. So March the 21st, we will have my colleague Andrew Josie, who is VP of Standards and Certification at the Open Group. And he will be talking, he'll be coming back to talk further about the Togaf Standard 10th Edition and the Togaf Certification Portfolio. If there's something that we get more questions about than anything else right now at the Open Group, it's that topic. So if you're interested in that in any way then, please join us on March 21st next week, same time, same place, and we'd love to have you with us. Meanwhile, keep well wherever you are. I'm Steve Nunn, thank you for watching Toolkit Tuesday.