 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 recognised 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 organisation 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 programme. How many times have you actually considered how accessible your architecture guidance actually is? I've fallen foul of this personally many times in the past and have seen many others fantastic sets of architectural guidance and their useful artefact simply be wasted as it wasn't accessible by those that need it. If we can't work out how to share the guidance readily, easily and at the very first point of need then it doesn't matter how good it is, how wise or valuable it won't get used. And that means we need to take time to understand who would benefit from using it across our entire ecosystem of partners, suppliers, customers and anyone influencing your architectural estate. The key point here is don't hide your assets under a bush. Make sure they are easily available and readily accessible to all as well as highly publicised and known about. Think about where you can publish them to, how those that need to use them can find them and refer to them, because without this your efforts could become the greatest asset your enterprise didn't know it had. Hello everyone and welcome to Toolkit Tuesday. I hope wherever you are in the world you're keeping safe and well but we appreciate you joining us here at Toolkit Tuesday whatever time of day or night it is for you. My thanks as ever to Paul Hermann for a great intro there. Accessible guidance that's what we all need isn't it? Great thoughts as ever Paul, thank you for that. And today our main focus will be on the Archimate modelling language. So before we get there though I will just remind those of you who have attended one of these before and tell those of you who haven't how we do the questions here at Toolkit Tuesday just a just one real housekeeping thing and that is please submit your questions for our speakers today through the Q&A channel in the WebEx tool not the chat channel. The Q&A channel if you don't know where that is or you don't see it on your screen click the three dots in the bottom right hand corner of your screen and that will give you the option to open the Q&A channel and please submit your questions there. I'd also encourage you to use the chat channel to communicate with other attendees at the event and we always love one of the things about Toolkit Tuesday here we always love you to tell us where you're joining us from in the world so use the chat channel for that and any other messages for attendees but questions in the Q&A channel please that makes it easier for us to watch them coming in and we'll get to as many of them as we can. So without further ado today's topic is the Archimate modelling language and in particular the Archimate 3.2 specification which is a new release of the specification that we announced just a few weeks ago at our event in Edinburgh and there's quite a lot of interest in it. Archimate is a modelling language that's great for doing enterprise architecture it works really well with Togath but you can also use it independent of Togath but a lot of the terminology is similar so it's a great a great way to think about using or a great thing to think about using if you are doing enterprise architecture and today to tell us more about the updates we've made in the 3.2 specification we have my colleague Kelly Cannon who is the Archimate Forum Director here at the Open Group and Kelly's focus is to lead teams to reach their deliverables while never losing sight of the customer and under her leadership the forum has completed the release of the 3.2 specification and introduced the Archimate user community that you'll hear a bit about. With Kelly today is Laos Mates who is the Product Manager for Archerepo which is an EA product with Dain and he is also the Vice Chair of the Archimate Forum. In addition Laos is involved with explaining the benefits of enterprise architecture generally to management in both government and commercial enterprises so a warm welcome for Toolkit Tuesday please to Kelly Cannon and Laos Mates over to you. Thank you Steve and welcome again everyone to what is actually my first time presenting on a virtual event and as Steve mentioned I will be walking you through what changes have been applied to the 3.2 specification and then I'll hand things over to Laos to talk about how his organization has implemented those changes. Okay so a few weeks back our Chair Jean-Baptiste Serity along with Laos along with I'm sorry Mark Langkors was we're at the Edinburgh event and they were announcing our new version and they called this presentation the tip of the iceberg because it embodied how our forum not only reached this deliverable but where we go from a forum and a practitioner community as a whole. So the first thing that we did was back in October 2020 we implemented the Archimate User Community and with that the forum decided to utilize this space to gather additional input from a broader community and receive feedback towards the next version of the specification. From that feedback campaign we actually netted about 74 comments and these comments were brought into our Coronado team which is a work group within the forum that were then able to go through and update each uh I'm sorry go through and provide meaningful feedback to each of those comments that were received and then we were able to provide feedback to either accept reject or place them on the backlog for a future release. As a team we knew that we were going to be putting out a minor release and because of that a few comments did remain on the backlog that were being too substantial for this update. With the success of the feedback campaign though we were able to manage and we are going to continue to manage what our backlog looks like from there. After that the Coronado team then developed the first version that would go into the uh Archimate forum to then receive their feedback. We then received an additional 84 comments that the same Coronado team worked through and we were able to put together a final draft as well as a technical core agenda in support that would then go into company review. A company review is the final stage of the review process within any standard of the open group and for those unfamiliar with a company review it is when a document is posted for all of the members of the open group regardless of the level to then provide input and feedback to the changes proposed by uh the authors or the forum that has put it forward. And finally we reached the finish line and we were able to publish both the standard and the technical core agenda. We were very excited as a team to reach this milestone because we were able to present it together at the Edinburgh event and it was extra special because some of us were actually able to meet for the very first time or at least the first time since COVID. So what's next? Just like with any other standard there are a number of updates that need to happen to be addressed in the overall ecosystem but the journey is never ending when it comes to supporting a standard that brings in users and certified individuals over time. So at the moment we do not have a set review schedule for when we will do another update however prior to the Edinburgh event I did release a short five question survey to our forum members to see where we go from here. Responses were then discussed at the face-to-face members meeting and with the members in the room we determined that there is a greater need for guidance documentation rather than releasing a new version of the standard so soon after this one. Some of the topics that we were discussing were related to Archimate modeling language in the use of solution, business, information, and infrastructure architecture while also providing guidance documentation on the Archimate user, Archimate modeling in for those that used AWS. Additionally we were also talking about a style guide for those that are going to be presenting models within their organization. There will be more information and opportunities for you to get involved in this coming soon. Okay, so let's jump into the changes of 3.2. We did not introduce any new concepts or relationships however you will find changes in the following key areas. The technical core agenda has greater details on each of these changes however in general most of them were either editorial and some more technical but there were some additions, subtractions, and overall improvements on clarity. One of the more noticeable changes that longtime users will recognize will be visual in nature and that was to update the consistency in the elements. As you can see the boxes are no longer three-dimensional with the exception of note. The intention set by the forum was to simplify the visual aspect of the overall models and as you can see here there are minor changes to the overall set for instance the icons that were not previously filled in with color are now filled in with the corresponding color such as the business actor in the person's head. The work package icon also was updated to be a clear circle with an arrow. The team also clarified some of the definitions such as the one noted here where there are some unclear terminology and that didn't make the definition very useful. One important note that I actually want to repeat from Mark Linkhorst when he gave this portion of the presentation is that it is very important that any user or practitioner should not just read the definition but also read and understand the extended explanation so you may best understand it and as you can see here the meta model was updated to reflect the changes made in the technology layer specifically you can see it reflected with the updated terminology and arrows. While the existing rules were not changed they were updated for consistency and clarity where necessary for formalization including restrictions on application. Grouping is the only derivation rule that was added and finally before I hand the rest of the presentation over to Leos I would like to introduce those of you who may not be familiar with the open group ARCHIMATE user community. This space is unique for the ARCHIMATE forum because it brings individuals who use ARCHIMATE in their organizations or maybe even just for fun together with members dedicated to the growth of the language. From a user perspective it brings novice and experienced practitioners together to discuss and provide assistance to a fellow modeler. In addition to mentorship board for individuals we are encouraging the use of sharing models and we know that this may be difficult due to some IP restrictions however if you do have a model that you can share with us please do so. It may help out a fellow a fellow novice modeler or at the very least it starts a conversation. Further if you are a content creator for ARCHIMATE in the way of blogs informational support documents or imagery that you would like to have shared with a broader audience we're happy to post a link in the ARCHIMATE user community to your website to showcase that. Please feel free to reach out to me and my final plug is going to be please be sure to share the ARCHIMATE user community on your social media. We need to get the message out far and wide in order for it to be adopted and we want it to be the resource and the community space that everyone goes to. So I would like to pull in Leo's now and he will speak to the changes of the ARCHIMATE model exchange file format and how Dain was able to implement those changes. Thank you Kelly. As mentioned the changes made during the 3.2 update were minor and therefore the changes to the ARCHIMATE model exchange file format were minor as well. So here is the inside of a tool vendor. At first let's talk about something in between the tip of the iceberg and what lies beneath the surface. The ARCHIMATE exchange file format has been here for years and it has proven to be extremely useful for interoperability. Not only because it allows architects to share models between tools but also for the exchange of data outside an EA model. So let's go ahead and what's happening behind the scenes. The MF update is now in development and we expect to release it during the first quarter of 2023 but to do it right we decided to take several actions before before we will release it. We will continue to work with the tool vendors and forum members for their for their guidance and support but also those in the community that have submitted feedback on two issues on board. There are currently three vendors who confirmed that they are ready and they have implemented the first stage of the 3.2 updates. We have been in touch with other vendors and they have committed their support as well which is where the quarter one delivery comes in. Next please. What is important to tell as I mentioned few slides before are the visual changes to the notation. With that being said because we did not make any major changes such as adding any new elements to the notation the use of 3.1 tool is still completely acceptable. The tool vendors will need to decide if they will support box icon or both notations and of course the other changes in xml. What we at ArchRepo have determined to be most beneficial for our users is to extend the specification with alignments and the box icon notation options so that every user in every tool receives almost the same visual feel of the diagrams. Also we will continue to keep up to date with whatever changes comes from the forum and the user community even that the changes has to be minor for this release. Anyway the major ones are tracked either for other releases in the future. Next please. So from the perspective of a tool vendor maybe we have some advantage as we do not provide any client application to install instead we are 100% web based. Our focus is on maintaining the model and the collaboration instead of core modeling although we do support that also so the changes were easy for us to apply. We also kept the 3.0 certification of the tool as there were the only minor changes. At ArchRepo we are focused on supporting enterprise architecture and the ArchMate modeling language which we strive to be great at as opposed to uml and many other standards. Therefore we decided to keep the standard box notation for now. So what I want to give you is now a brief walkthrough about the changes and how they are represented in our tool. On the right side you can see the new version of ArchRepo which uses 3.2 standard and on the left side is old version with 3.1 specification. So as we start with the meaning the meaning has been unified to box notation. In the old version it was represented with a cloud which you can now find in the icon notation itself as you can see now. Then the contract well it's still a rectangle now with an icon. In the old version it used to be presented in a different way as you can see in a minute and the old interpretation of application component which you can see on the right the blue one has moved to icon notation which the new 3.2 has an icon instead of rectangles stepping out of the big rectangle. So you will see on the left now and for example a gap the red one has not changed the visual but the color to better reflect the implementation layer and in case of device it's also now represented with icon in rectangle as you will see no difference we didn't kept the exact notation in 3.2 either. So maybe we predicted the changes few years before to be ready for the new version of standard. We have the interpretation the same. So for us these changes to the standard did not cause any trouble when it came time to implement because we represent enterprise architecture in many other ways as you can see on the structured look on the left the power BI reports and the object view of closest elements on the right. So we know that the core is how to handle the data which are objects now the table and we consider this to be the strongest advantage of Archimade which all users can harvest. So next slide please. So as you saw Archrepo along with the base design and Archie are ready for the users. We support the activities because we all see the value in easily exchanging model between tools. The market has shown that when enterprise architecture comes to the front the universal tools are moving to the back and also we hear from our customers that the icon notation and specialization where you can add any icon you want may be more sexy when presented to the management level as you saw on the slide before. I think this this ability is a good direction in which we are heading with the standard because all of us met with the with the response like I don't know what these kind of rectangles mean. So the changes were designed to support you the practitioners and your communication with management. We all believe that enterprise architects should be involved at the highest level of the decision-making process. So that's it. Thank you for your time with us and handing back to over to Kelly for a wrap up and Q&As if you have some questions to discuss. Yes and just one final comment so this is just a call to action. Please take a look at our latest version. It is published in the Archimate Library on the Open Group website. Also check out the Archimate user community and thank you to Laos and Dane for being able to provide us a little bit of insight into Archive repo and be sure to check them out as well. So over to you Joanne. Thank you very much. So we do have a few questions that have come in. Let's see how long did it take your development team to implement the changes for this update? Well I think it's on me so the implementation was really quick in a couple of Mondays. Of course it depends on each tool vendor how wide or how complicated the software is. We have the advantage as we are a web tool so the changes are made and deployed quickly but at least if the vendor implements the basic minimum I don't think it's a big deal. We are hoping that most if not all the other tool vendors will be updated by the end of the year maybe in the first quarter next year. Great and let's see we do have another one. When do you expect to release Archimate 4.0? Well you know we are we're pretty proud of the fact that we've reached the level of maturity that we have with version 3.2. You know we try not to put out too many new releases of a major version because we don't want to disrupt the certification program as well so we do need to take that into consideration but ultimately it is going to be up to the users and what feedback we get into the Archimate user community. So if the users or trainers put in enough meaty issues into the feedback board then the team will then take those on board and decide from there whether or not it is something worth a minor release or a major release. Yeah that's right we are reviewing the submissions to the issues board and the discussion board all the time. There are some inputs that may be more relevant but extending the language to more specific stuff will kill the adoption so we want to keep the Archimate language as generic as we can and of course we all usually find out that in the specific cases if you want to model something exact we find out that you could already existing you could use already existing elements to express your intents and intentions so and there is also something called specialization and other stuff so that's that's it. Okay let's see one came through the chat channel and it says let's see when will the two certifications foundation and practitioner be aligned with the version 3.0 instead of 3 I mean 3.2 versus 3.0. So usually it follows in about six months after any new release of a standard we saw that with the TOGAP release and we'll probably see that same timeline here depending on what the certification authority deems what the timeline will look like we can always provide updates as that changes as well. Okay let's see we've got another one let's see how useful were the suggestions from the community? I would say they were very useful a lot of them were editorial and we were able to easily make those changes and accept a lot of them some of them were topics that we as a forum have discussed previously and the team had already made a decision to go in one direction or not in another so we were able to kind of go through a lot of those issues that were suggested rather quickly and then provide the feedback to the contributor. Let's see okay we've got room for one more question what are the main benefits to moving the conversions from the LinkedIn group to the argument community? Sure so LinkedIn is a great tool and we're definitely not saying to move away from LinkedIn completely we do have 13 000 users or interested parties on that LinkedIn site one of the main benefits and drivers to using the argument user community is to be able to recall some of the conversations that were already happening so if we have an issue that is posted in the discussion board that is talking about derivation rules for example we can then have a catalog discussion and if someone has further feedback or wants to contribute something else later on a couple months or a year later they can either go back through read through the conversation that has already happened or continue on that conversation and then the other added benefit is to share models which you can't really do through LinkedIn unless you want to start sharing your personal information and then that way you can send them offline LinkedIn here if you post them up on the argument user community other people will be able to have access to that and we can create a really good catalog great great anything else to add to that leo so we get anything you want to add to that yeah and we have also good working search function in in our community github so that could be also the difference yeah all right kelly leos thank you very much for your presentation and your time today we i've went ahead and captured additional questions that we could address maybe on the back end but thank you for today and we are on for our out show from steve nun thank you thank you thank you kelly thank you leos for a great session and thank you to the audience for your participation and to my colleague joe alvarado for handling the questions today so that's it for this particular episode of toolkit Tuesday but please join us in two weeks on november 29th where my colleagues sonia gonzalez will be giving us an update of the portfolio of digital open standards and some of you may have heard about this before and seen an early explanation of what we're trying to achieve here which is basically making it easier for our standards to be used together at the open group making them more readily accessible and be able to search across them all sorts of pretty cool stuff and we have made a lot of progress and sonia is going to be joining us to update us on that and give us a demo of how it looks today and how you can how you can use it already so that's where we're at in two weeks time november 29th please be here again for toolkit tuesday meantime keep safe i'm steve nun thank you for joining Toolkit Tuesday