 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. Welcome, everyone. Welcome. Whatever time of day or night it is, wherever you are, I very much appreciate you joining us for Toolkit Tuesday. I think this is number five now, I think. So we've had some great ones so far and today is no exception. We've got a good lineup for you today for the next 30 minutes. I'm not going to take up too much of your time, but I do want to make sure that you get the most out of your experience today. So we're using WebEx as a platform and it helps. If you go to the Layout tab towards the top of your screen, if you click on, you'll see a drop down menu and it will say Names in video and if you click on the automatically hide names when not speaking, you'll get a better view of the people who are actually speaking. So please do that and that will enhance your experience, I hope. And also, just to say, you will be notified when the materials from today are available. So you will get the presentations and the recording will be made available to you and because you've registered, you'll be notified of when that is. And one other thing to mention before we kick off today and that is a proud moment for many people. In two days time, September 30th, the open group is 25 years old and we intend to do a number of things to celebrate that, including at our virtual event next month in October. But I just wanted to mark it since slightly before the day, but we're all excited about that and watch out for what will be a great event and a retrospective next month, a global event, something really, really quite different. So look out for information on that. Talking about digital transformation and digital first. And key to that are the seven levers, as I would say, or levers from North America of digital transformation. So to present on this today, we have, as I say, a long time contributor and supporter of the open group, Mr. Dave Hornford, who is managing partner of Conexium and he leads Conexium's EA capability practice. Dave is based in Canada and works in a variety of industries, including financial services, oil and gas, technology and capital intensive industry. Typically helps clients develop and execute a roadmap to transform. Dave has been involved in the development of the architecture toolkit documents, including practitioners guide and the leaders guide, both of which are now TOGAF series guides. He's the former chair of the open group architecture forum and was a key contributor to the document structure of the TOGAF standard. Dave also serves on the board of trustees of the SEPSA Institute in the security space, an organization that the open group has a long relationship with. So a warm welcome to Toolkit Tuesday for Mr. Dave Hornford. Over to you, Dave. Thank you very much, Steve. With no further ado, I'm going to jump right into seven levers of digital transformation, which is a paper on the key aspects of what you need to do in a digital transformation. We are heavy consumers of the tools that are provided by the open group. And one of the things that we do as a participant is look for the right tool for our job that's at hand. And I got a picture there of two tires being changed. One of them is able to be lifted by a person. And for the 797 pickup truck from Caterpillar, you need 120 ton crane to lift up the body so that you can change a tire. The tire on the 797 probably costs more than two of the cars in the above picture. The concept of changing the tire is identical. The tool you use is different, and it's really important for us as architects or us as practitioners to reach for the right tool. And one of the things my firm does is we look first in the TOGAP standards, the TOGAP guides, the other open group standards. Because if there's something there, we get to move on. If not, then we have to invent it. And I know that my customers care about the destination, not the journey. And they don't really care about that we did a really cool and innovative tool that replicates things that already exist. 7Leavers fits into performing architecture. It fits into changing your organization. It fits into planning where you're going. And you don't reach for a particular tool because you're familiar with it. You don't reach for a particular tool because you're comfortable with it. You reach to a tool because it's useful. So if you are looking at a digital transformation, the strongest use of 7Leavers is when you're supporting strategy, when you are defining your change initiatives, when you are defining your portfolios, when you are defining your project outcomes. You can use it down lower. It just isn't as powerful of a tool. Staying in a different way. When you transition from providing direction to providing planning to providing execution as you move your way from thinking about where you're going. 7Leavers is also incredibly powerful and helps you understand what needs to change. It helps you understand the sequence of change and the dependencies. It helps you understand groups of changes. One of the things that whenever you adopt or pick up a new tool, you have to understand that that tool is written by someone who was solving a particular problem. The operating manual that comes with a jack for your car is radically different than the operating manual that comes with the 797. And what you need to do the very first time through is absorb the language used by that tool. Not convert it to your language because the people who wrote it, the people who designed it, were intending it to be helpful for a problem. And you need first to understand the problem. When you look at 7Leadippers, there's a core organizing graphic that's square with the two sets of concentric circles. That organizing graphic is designed to show you how the 7Leavers fit together. It highlights that in a digital world, your IT delivery is a hub. IT is at the center of a digital transformation. Now, it's not to say that IT leads it. It's if your IT delivery organization is not firing on all the cylinders that are necessary, you will not be succeeding. Around the outside business process, how do you do your job? How does your company? How does your organization? How does your public agency? How does your government department work? What is your digital product or service? Is it enhancement to an existing physical service? Is it a digital twin? Is it a pure digital service? What's your customer engagement? What's your customer experience? How do you fit into your ecosystem and what's your business model? That's what drives around the hub your digital transformation in the context of your organizational culture and in the context of your strategy. Graphics complicated because we also put numbers on it. We put a sequence one through seven. And those sequences are not an order that you do it. It is building your skill and experience and understanding. If you are not able as an organization to change your business process or understand your business process, leave for one, digital transformation is difficult. If you don't think about your customer experience in the context of your business process, it gets harder. If you don't think about your digital product and the value proposition of what you're offering in the context of your customer engagement, in the context of your business process, you are already in the ditch. So when you didn't go in the ditch on process experience and engagement, you now have to fix probably radically change your IT organization. And your IT organization now needs to be a primary value chain provider and it has to live head to head in competition with your customer's alternatives. And that is a scary novel place for most IT organizations, which is going to drive change in your organizational culture. Leave for five, we're already in the context, is going to enable you new levers in terms of how you move forward and how you engage as a business and how you define a strategy. And interesting, we come back in for lever seven. Lever seven, doing your ecosystem, understanding who your partners could, should be, understanding whether you lead or follow in your ecosystem, structuring an ecosystem or adapting it. You need all the other levers thought about them, preparation about them in order to excel there. The graphic tells you right there, here are two ways seven levers of digital transformation are going to help you through this journey, just from the organizing graphic that we put together. My favorite graphic in the paper is this one, Consequences. I spend a huge amount of time at my job helping people understand consequence. Consequence is what comes from when you do not do a good job. It's where you create risk, uncertainty, and failure. You don't have lever one set, business process. You are flying blind. You don't have lever two set, customer experience. You are going to damage your customer engagement. If you don't have lever three set, value proposition product, not lining up to your value proposition. Lever four, low agility, and imprudent technical decisions. Your culture is dependent on your ability to exercise change. The worst thing you want is highly skilled, incompetent people who cannot move yourself forward. Strategy, are you tone deaf? Are you able to look at your world, at your reality, and define the path forward? And last, your ecosystem. Are you losing synergy by partnering across your ecosystem? Given that, let's walk our way through the seven levers. Got all seven? What's the purpose of each of them? Let's walk our way through them. First, business process. First, business process. You don't have search and rescue. You undertake a business process change. Your business is changing, and you can all of a sudden start to fail. And what we're chasing here, is understanding the future. Understanding where you're going, and understanding what you are trying to accomplish, so that you can move forward, so that you can build the internal approach that lines up, lever two, your customer experience. You want a happy customer. Other day, I was trying to buy something online. And it was a fairly expensive thing, and you couldn't just store it. You had to talk to them. So I clicked Chatbot. And the Chatbot came up and asked me 11 questions to tell me that although it was 11 p.m., 11 a.m. Pacific time, the store hours were only 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific time. So I'm in their store hours, and it says, I'm sorry, you're calling outside of store hours. What's that customer experience? I even got the product. And I'm already having a negative experience. I'm already on the left of that graphic, not on the right. Value proposition. Who's your target customer? What is it that you are trying to deliver? Who do you serve in your process, in your practice, in your digital product, in your digital service, in your government service? What are you doing for them? What gain are you providing? What pain are you removing? Are you building a digital twin? Are you building a digitization? How is that lined up to a value proposition? Not the cool thing that you could do with technology. What is the cool thing that delivers value to a customer? IT delivery. One of the most common areas we run into is working on digital transformation work, is having to rebuild IT delivery to be in the forefront. IT is so used to being in the background and having a lot of excuses for substandard behavior. When you are the product, when you are the sales channel, you don't have a choice but to excel. And that changes dramatically IT delivery. Now I want to be really clear, a lot of people read this and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, why is IT at the center? IT is at the center because a digital product is digitally delivered, which means it's delivered by IT. And if they are not prepared to compete head to head, you are hurt. Your culture. Your culture is your brand. Your ability to change, your ability as an organization, thinking about continuous learning. The moment you enter the digital world, you are going to tighten your cycle time. This isn't, we are going to invent a product, we are going to design a factory, we are going to do this, we are going to do this, and all of a sudden we have a 3, 4, 5 year launch window. Digital products come and go. Digital products are continuously refined. Digital products have new challenges. Years ago, Y2K was working with a telephone company. And the Y2K office wanted to, you know, we have to lock all our IT systems down. And the mobile guy said, yeah, no problem. We agreed to a lockdown of all of our customer facing systems and all of our brand products. On December 31st at noon. Because if there is a change in the market, we will react at any point in here because we are head to head in consumer products. We will not change. And that is our culture. Are you a customer service organization? Are you focused on where you need to go? Are you able to continuously improve? Number six, strategy. My favorite thing is where I spend most of my time is helping people develop that roadmap, develop that strategy on where we are going. And a strategy is all about act. It is all about action to change things. One of my favorite quotes from a TV show, House, Dr. House says, people think time changes everything. Well, in reality, time changes nothing. People change things by doing an action. What are the changes you need? Are you prepared to make that coherent set of changes through your organization? When you nail this, you have good ability to execute. You have a thoughtful sequence to execute. You understand what are your underpinnings. And it is not going, oh, we could develop a digital product as you have seen through this business process. What is your customer experience? What is your value profit? What is your value proposition? You do not know those things. You are dead on the gate. Or you even get to where we are going to go and how we are going to execute. Because digital transformation is about changing your organization fundamentally. Why it has got the word transformation. And I know right now it is cool. And the word digital gets slapped on everything. The word transformation gets changed on everything. Let us move ourselves forward so that we are in a position to excel. Last, your ecosystem. Create synergy. Are you building an ecosystem that others play in? Or are you playing in an ecosystem that others are dominating? Both are valid. A lot of the stuff that we talk about is like, oh, you got to have a platform. Oh, maybe. Are you seriously going to go head to head with Amazon? Or are you going to find a niche that you can compete in? Are you going to find the partners who deliver? Because one of the natures of digital is it is so much easier to string together a value chain. Of other participants in your industry instead of having to do everything yourself. That plays back to culture. Are you prepared to continuously innovate? And are you prepared to partner? You don't have that. You don't get to build a good ecosystem to move yourself forward so that you can cultivate the approach. That's successful. What was enough? This is all about the right tool. This is all about using the right tool. This is my favorite picture because I do a lot of backpacking and camping and things. I have a titanium magnesium flint and steel. It is able to spark and light something up no matter what. And it is fundamentally no different in concept from what the very first humans used to light a fire. It generated a spark. Generate a spark in your organization. Use the tools in the toolkit. Use seven levers to frame your thinking. Use seven levers to understand this is the core challenge I have to hit head on. Build your approach to change. Focus your attention on the hard bit. Focus your attention on the challenge. There's my quick summary introduction to seven levers. It's one of the shortest things I've ever written. Compared to like leaders guide which is I think a trillion pages. So it's far more approachable but it's designed to give you a conceptual structure to think. And I believe at this point Steve you have some hard questions for me. Well we'll see Dave thank you very much for that. That was a real whistle stop version of what is a great document and I know I've seen a longer version of a presentation in the past too but really valuable stuff and right on message for toolkit Tuesday. It's all about the right tool to join us. So I'm going to ask you some questions but I'm going to make it even harder for you because joining us for the questions is my colleague Chris Ford who is CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects but also VP of Enterprise Architecture in the open group as well as his responsibility as general manager for Asia Pacific. So welcome Chris. Before I dive in for questions on Dave I'll surprise Chris and ask him one. The reason we asked you here today was you actually did a toolkit Tuesday presentation recently and you called out this paper The Seven Leaves of Digital Transformation as a very significant document. Why that one? Well you know it's a great question. I just I'm not the only person that thinks that way. I'll give you by example there is a fusion standard in China for a technical committee 573 which is integrating all of the national standards around digital transformation and they outright referenced the document that we're talking about today as a seminal piece of work to guide their thinking about what approach might be taken for China's digital transformation. So the reason that I think that the document is valuable and I call it out on a frequent basis is that we publish a lot of standards that are as Dave said earlier there are a lot of pages you know this document I think if you remove the front matter and the reference material at the back end is about 21 pages you can get through it in 15 or 20 minutes and get a lot of value out of it. So that's the fundamental reason it's a short read there's some very significant material in it and it's quick time to value from a concept standpoint in my view. Great example of less is more. Yeah absolutely absolutely. Okay Dave so one of the things that I always remember when I go back and look at the document and consider it is you stress that this is about taking control and you can't skip a lever. You have to do them all. Really? Do you actually have to do them all? No if you get to skip customer experience and value prop all day long because it really doesn't matter. And there's no point at all in worrying about how your organization does business so processes you can you can toss that under the bus. Organizational culture no having a backwards looking organization that has dreams of its prior glory go for it. Planning your action and your transformation skip the strategy you're good to go and last of all you really want to continue with an IT organization that can't meet deliverables and is worried about a raft of non-customer facing things. So you get to skip all of them. All you have to do is choose to live with the consequence. All about the consequences. So I'll take that as a yes you have to do all of them Steve. Okay so I'm about to do all of them. What can I expect to be the hardest ones do you think Dave? Which in your experience do people struggle with most? It depends on your organization. It depends on where you are. It depends on are you ahead of the curve or are you being is your industry being transformed? As a rule a great number of IT people have a lot of difficulty with the with the IT delivery as the hub because they aren't prepared for understanding that they're going to be front and center. I remember years ago working with a very large e-commerce player and their fundamental rule is no developer can close the store. I remember talking to a guy who was working on a transformation at a global financial services player who said we have been in business for 125 years. We will be in business for the next 125 years. We will knowingly pass on short term things to move ourselves forward. So that organization would have very different challenges than somebody who is a small organization. And all of the levers exist and you need to approach them all but you need to look at your organization and where you've got difficulty or where you have the challenge to move forward. What is the barrier to your organization being excellent? Okay, another question. Let me start with you, Chris. What do you think is the single most important issue in digital transformation? Well, Dave just answered that in the sense that it depends. I would not argumentatively disagree with him because we have a lot of discussions about this sort of thing. I would say that in the end culture eats strategy for breakfast. So the soft stuff, so to speak, that you need to get into in order to make this type of thing work is really, really important. And that's a very complex issue. There's a question in the chat channel asking about what size of organization, minimum size is important for this paper. Well, actually all of them are. If you look at the digital professional body of knowledge material, it has a step level model going up from founder up to an enduring enterprise level. And it makes heavy use of the concepts from this paper as well. The issues that we're talking about here are applicable to a foundational entrepreneurial enterprise as they are to the size of enterprises that Dave was just referencing. This is fundamentally what you need to do to operate a business, whatever size the business is. The scale of the problems may be different, but the nature of the problem is not necessarily different. So I'd answer it a different way, Steve. You are CEO of the Open Group. Your organization spans the globe and is shockingly small for what it does. You don't have very many staff. Which one of those levers is the most important? You are undertaking a digital transformation. You are changing how you do conferences. You are changing how people engage with the Open Group. You are changing how the members develop and collaborate. Which one is an important? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way of coming back to the previous question. They all are. Yeah. Can't miss them. Okay. Well, we are running short of time, but I do want to take at least at least one more question. And I'm looking at the chat as well. There's some things coming in which I probably won't be able to get to. I'll try and build it into one, but can you give any examples, Dave, of where you've used the seven levers approach or where you've heard of it being used successfully and maybe mention some of the metrics that you've seen used for whether it's working or not? One of the most important metrics that we use is the ability of the organization to change. How hard is it to change? Digital transformation means that you are there is no difference in a digital transformation to the very first industrial revolution transformations. All we're doing is tightening our time cycle. Right. And I've been spending a lot of time on the projects that we do looking at the ability of an organization to change. The ability to enter or exit a market. The ability to enter or exit a service. How quickly can you do that? The enterprise agility. And that tends to be the most significant one. And the other one that's in the chat that I wanted to comment on is customer experience is incredibly difficult for the public service. The idea that you don't need to engage and you and Bish were talking about the pandemic while I live in Canada, we've been going through a whole thing on registering for vaccines and they have had to release multiple platforms for us to register on because of the difficulty of the customer experience. We're first trying to register my 96-year-old dad and the only way you could do it was online. My sister went over to help. He didn't have a computer. Took her smartphone. User interface. My sister and my dad couldn't figure it out. They couldn't get him registered. One of the common systems in customer experience is those simple things about are you even able to deliver your service if you don't have customer engagement and customer service? And it is as applicable to the public sector as it is to anybody else. Absolutely. In fact, as you know, Dave, because you've been very involved, we've got a work group in the Open Group, the government EA work group, trying to address that issue and help the public sector catch up in that sense. So great stuff, gentlemen. We're going to have to leave it there in order to respect people's time. We've got people joining us from all over the world, including Chris here in Shanghai and you, Dave in Canada. So thank you both for joining us today and take care and keep safe. Thank you very much. Thank you. So before we end today, just a quick mention of what's going on in two weeks' time. October 12th, the next Toolkit Tuesday, we are going to have an Ask the Experts session. So more time for questions, no main presentation, basically just questions of some of the experts that those of you who've been joining us on Toolkit Tuesdays will be familiar with now, Terry Blevins of EnterpriseWise LLC, Chris Ford, you've just seen, Chris Frost of Fujitsu, Paul Holman from IBM and another of my colleagues Andrew Josie from the Open Group who will be known to many of you, with a specialism in his case and standards and certification. So they will be a panel in two weeks' time for you to ask questions of. So please join us. It's a great opportunity to get some questions asked and answered. And please join us in two weeks' time. In the meantime, wherever you are, please keep safe and well. And thank you for joining us today on Toolkit Tuesday.