 Hi, this is Miles Sewer. I have multiple hats. I facilitate the CIO chat. I have a column in CIO magazine and I also work for Dell Boomi. And so I'm really thrilled to be able to talk with you today. And with me is Charlie Betts. Can you give an introduction to yourself? I am also wearing multiple hats. I am a principal analyst with Forrester Research. But my work with the open group is a service activity conducted by my affiliation with the University of St. Thomas where I am an adjunct faculty. So Charlie, one of the things that Jeannie Ross spends a lot of time in her new book is talking about how digital transformation has changed. So in the old days it was about taking this analog process and making it a digital one. And I like to think of something like Concur, where I used to have to do a manual thing and it had all this pain associated when it became a digital thing. But now she's talking about there being digital companies. You know, companies that are not necessarily optimizing a business process but instead what they're doing is creating new revenue opportunities for the top. So when you look at it at Forrester, are you seeing this emergence of truly digital companies? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean the first 50 years of computing was all about digitizing. And you know, we would take hundreds, thousands, probably millions of feet of file cabinets, put them on hard disks and put computers up and actually be able to sort and slice and dice all that data. And this was an efficiency play. Very powerful, but not the same thing as what we saw with Amazon or Uber. You know, these are truly digital native companies that were enabled by the existence of digital technology. But it's very hard to look at something like a Google Maps and say, well this is just an efficiency play. It is something totally different. And I think that there is a key point that keeps coming up for me more and more lately. It's the move from systems that are merely complicated to systems that are truly complex. And the difference is that the complicated system, it's like an assembly line. Sure, there's a lot of things, a lot of moving parts, a lot of things that can break. But at the end of the day, it's just going to still keep producing a car. But the complex systems have emergent behavior. And this is what we're struggling with from digital transformation. Yeah, it's amazing these legacy businesses. You know, I keep hearing, some day Forester's going to have to get me some numbers, but that it's 20 to 50% of run the business spend is just connecting everything. And when you've got that kind of load factor, it's got to prevent a company from being able to be on the cusp of technology change. Yeah, integration has been a huge headache. And it's been one of the problems of IT. There's a number of reasons why IT was the gang that couldn't shoot straight for a long time. I mean, the Keystone cops choose your golden era, come be of choice. But integration was an enormous challenge. Now, on a technical level, and I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole, that's getting better. A lot of things are getting better. I mean, I'm hearing a higher level of respect for IT and the IT function in the context of digital transformation because we've solved some of these blockers like integration with technologies like Reston, JSON, and we don't need to necessarily go there, but it makes it easier. I mean, once you've got that, what Jeannie spends the time saying is, well, all of that stuff, which by the way, 72% of companies still need to fix, that's kind of table stakes now. The companies that are innovating that 28% of legacy businesses are all those startups, they're really focused on building digital offerings and digital in the vernacular of open group digital products. Are you seeing that emerge? Oh heck yeah. I mean, I was at the DevOps Enterprise Summit last week. The project to product transition is in full steam. And I'll advocate for the DevOps Enterprise Summit a little bit here. It's run by Gene Kim, I think you know Gene, a legendary individual and just a dynamo of energy. Gene doesn't let Facebook, Netflix, Google, Apple, they're not on the stage at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, you know, who was on the stage? BMW, talking about its transition from project to product management. Optum Health, I mean, one of the biggest IT companies out there. I'm a customer. And then the closing keynote? US Bank. Everybody talking about the transition. So this transition is happening quickly. And so, you know, what really needs to happen is you need to get your app together according to Genie, build your APIs to connect things and then start building these, you know, very efficient small teams. I mean, we've talked, I mean, there were a bunch of talks today. I was amazed. I thought we were going to be on the hairy edge here at open group, but there were a lot of talks about organization like AXA and others who are moving to these autonomous teams. I mean, I was just amazed to hear how many people were starting to say, no, I can't compete the old way. Are you seeing that as well? Absolutely. And I think what I love about Genie's work is the fact that she's highlighting the question. There still is a question. How do I keep these teams aligned? And I think that this is the next phase because these are semi-autonomous teams. They are not fully autonomous teams because at the end of the day you still have an enterprise, you still have an overall vision, product strategy and overall customer who cares about the value proposition of the bank or the insurance company or what have you. Yeah, she and Martin and Cynthia, who's the third author, have basically talked about the chartering of teams. It's not, they're out on their own. They actually have to be working with some coordination with architecture and things like that. What I love, and I know we only have a limited time here, but what I love about the new model is, and we heard it this morning from HSBC, it's not about reviews and approvals, it's about trust and verification. And so we're moving from a glass box to more of a black box from an engineering perspective. What we're saying is you make certain commitments and then there's guardrails and forcing functions that basically you're going to be held accountable for the commitments that you make. And this is something that also derives from how Amazon governs, but we are not going to be looking inside your process and trying to govern it from a stage gate, phase gate, toll gate, whatever, choose your gate perspective. We can't do that anymore. It introduces too much friction. Right. This has enormous impacts for governance because we're dealing now, so here's where it's coming back to me and my roles and analysts. We're coming up against decades of policies that are based on stage gated governance. What are we going to do with those? There's so much more to talk about. No, there's more to talk about, more to think about here. I guess what we should end with is just a brief discussion on, you know, what is Open Group doing to help these enterprise architects figure out their new role and enable these digital businesses to be created. Well, I think Open Group is doing a lot and I've really value my ongoing relationship with the Open Group because it is such a, you know, you get to a certain point where being of service becomes very important to one. And of course the IT for IT forum, which gives us a reference architecture for the business of IT, TOGAF, the Architect Standard. But more recently we have the Agile architecture framework and then me personally, I've been involved in the digital practitioner body of knowledge, which derives, I'll be closing the loop back to St. Thomas, derives from the textbook that I wrote for my class there when I realized that I couldn't find any textbook that suited me for what I wanted to teach people about Agile and Digital and DevOps and Cloud Native and all the rest. And so now we have the digital practitioner body of knowledge. It is completed. There is the certification exam. Is it going to be online next week at Pearson View? That's amazing. So if you're just getting started and you're trying to figure out what's this journey going to be like, there's a lot to learn from Open Group. Absolutely. And you can be successful at creating your digital business. It's going to require a different type of architecture. And we did talk about that. I guess that's what we should end with. It's not where you control everything to the my new digital. So the Enterprise Architects are going to have to change a little bit in this. They are. They are. But I'm optimistic for the future of Enterprise architecture and I've had some wide-ranging conversations with very senior people at vendors and systems integrators. Enterprise architecture is in a bit of a holding pattern. The way I characterize it is in a bit of a penalty box right now and I've had a deserved reputation for slowing things down just a bit. But we need architects. Now, as we look at the scale of these platforms, the scale of digital systems, you have to have people who are everyday tasked with the Big Picture View. You can't just rely on emergence. And I'd just like to end with a great example that I and Jeannie Ross' book and I got to meet the head of Enterprise architecture a few weeks ago from them. A DBS Bank, which is in Singapore, it built an API catalog for the internal people and external people. One of the things they created as an API was their ATM application. Who would have thought? There you go. But somebody came along and innovated from that. They made an app so that you can walk into a convenience store and pull cash out of a cash register. That's the kind of thinking that winners are going to have. Innovate where you can inside but innovate on the external side too. And there's a lot more to learn, but we're going to have to leave you today and we hope this was useful to you.