 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, that some 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. So, architecture is all about gaps. What do I mean by that? Well, we, as architects, catalogue and we model what is there and what we want to be there in the future, and then we concern ourselves with finding the gaps between the two so that we can fill them in. Musicians play the rest as well as the notes. That's what provides rhythm. Actors deliver the dramatic pauses between the words. That's what provides the flow. As architects, what are our rests and pauses? Is that space in our catalogue or our model an intended void, i.e. a rest between the notes that we need to keep empty and preserved, or is it a gap somewhere that we need to fill in with notes and or more rests, maybe, before we can perform and execute it? So, to me, that says we should look at architecture spaces and consider whether they are voids or gaps. Welcome to Season 2 of Toolkit Tuesday, everybody. My thanks to Paul Holman there, of IBM, for his intro on EA Minute, Architecture Spaces. I'm thoughtful as ever. Thank you, Paul. Say a little bit more about Paul and the EA Minutes in a moment, but I really want to welcome everyone to Toolkit Tuesday. We had a little break over the northern hemisphere summer. Anyway, many of you are not in that hemisphere, but had a little break for a while. We're back and glad to be back, and we have a great season ahead for you. And my purpose today is really to give a little recap or a refresh of some of the topics that we covered in Season 1 and remind you where you can get them if you missed them or you were there live, but never went back to see the recording. So I'll do some of that. And we also have something a little bit special for you to just give a tease for later in the show. Please stay tuned and ready for that. We love to see where you are joining us from. It's usually a number of countries that's into the 20s at least when we have one of these, and it's great to have people joining at all different times a day or night and from all over the world. And it's one of the things that makes this special. So without further ado, I'm going to run on to what I said I'd do is a quick recap on Season 1. And looking back on it, can you believe we had 21 episodes of Talk It Tuesday? We had a few planned when we started and thought, well, let's see how this goes. The response has been really, really fantastic. Very enthusiastic reception. And as a consequence, we've kept it going and here we are for Season 2. We made it through our dreaded first season and will we be brought back? Well, yes we are. We're here. And many of those episodes, just like today's, started with a video, a short video. It was either one of Terry's Talk It Tuesday tips from Terry Blevins or one of Paul's EA minutes. So unfortunately, we've lost Terry Blevins from our panel of experts as he's now enjoying a very well-deserved retirement. Terry was a very long-term contributor to the open group and in fact, many of you may not know this, but he was one of the very first small group of individuals who got together to work on what became the TOGAF standard. So we all owe Terry and his peers a great debt on that. So we won't be seeing Terry's Talk It Tuesday tips, but we will be. The good news is we will be having more of Paul's EA minutes and delighted to have those. And you'll hopefully have just seen the first one on architecture spaces. So we'll have a few more of those from Paul over the course of Season 2. One of the things we've had is to try to keep a bench or a panel of resident experts and Paul will continue to be on that. We've had Chris Frost of Fujitsu who will still be around and also my colleagues, Andrew Josie, Chris Ford and Sonia Gonzalez from the open group. They've all been part of the Ask the Expert session, which is one I think will recap or come back to, I should say, in Season 2, as well as a Q&A session. It's a good way of cycling back to some of the great questions that we don't always get time to in each episode. We try to limit the episode to 30 to 32 minutes maximum just to respect everyone's time and it doesn't always allow us to get to all the questions. So sometimes we cycle back during the season and have a session that's just dedicated to answering those questions. So I think you can expect to see that. As I said, we've had a lot of great feedback on the show on Season 1 and we love it. Please, it comes through through the chat channel. It's often when people are leaving, they give a brief comment and that's all we're really looking for, but it's great to do that if you have the chance before you leave any episode that you're on. Just leave us a few words. We collect it and we do read it all and it's valuable to us. And at some point we'll set up a more formal way of asking you for topics that you might want to see covered on Toolkit Tuesday. Anything that's particularly important or of interest to you, either as an EA practitioner or as somebody interested in the field, we'd love to get those. So if you have any of you on today, you have any then maybe put those in the Q&A channel and we can make note of those. But we'll set something up so that you can have an opportunity or a vehicle to suggest some additional topics for us. So what did we cover? Well, unsurprisingly, given that this is the Open Group Toolkit Tuesday, we covered a number of TOGAF standard related topics. We had EA Enterprise Agility with the TOGAF standard. We had a look at the TOGAF series guide on microservices architecture, principles for an EA framework and the importance of adopting the TOGAF standard. Several of those episodes and they were always very well attended with a lot of questions. And of course, near the end of season one, we had the exciting news of the release of the TOGAF standard 10th edition with a summary of what's new and different in that. And on that note, we have something interesting to share with you later as I hinted earlier, so we'll get to that shortly. Other topics we covered. Another sort of bucket, if you like, of putting the sessions into was the topic of digital transformation. I mean, that's who isn't concerned with that right now. And we will be for some time to come, I suspect. But we covered it in a number of ways, how to use the Open Group Architects Toolkit and our portfolio of digital open standards in supporting digital transformation. We covered both of those. We had a run through of the seven levers or the seven levers, depending on where you are in the world, of digital transformation, which is still one of my favourite white papers that we've published. A really great introduction to the kinds of things that you have to think through during digital transformation. Modelling. Some of you and a lot of people out there in the world are interested in modelling. And we covered that in a couple of ways. We looked at how to use modelling for strategic decision making and real examples of using the Open Group Archimake Modelling Language, actually for real. That was a popular one too. As well as a session, not directly on modelling, we had a session on automating analytics with EA Road Maps and the use of tools. And one of our most well attended sessions, which was a slight surprise to me, not because I knew the speaker and the content wouldn't be great, but I didn't realise the subject matter would be quite so popular, was how to develop a MOSA or a modular open system architecture, reference architecture. That was a great session. And we had quite a bit of interest in our data integration toolkit and public digital platforms. And we also had a session that caused a lot of follow up and questions afterwards on our EA Academic Initiative in India called the Initiate Program. And you can find out more about that and many of these things on the Open Group website. And we covered actionable supply chain security as well, some real life lessons. One of the things that goes through many of these sessions and many of the topics when we have a longer event at the Open Group is the idea that what people want is case studies. What has worked well, what hasn't worked so well and how can we learn from the great decisions or the temporary mistakes of others? So we try and include as many of those as we can. And kind of the final bucket, if you like, of topics that we covered was and it's something that's dear to our hearts here at the Open Group is the topic of professional development. So we looked at, we had a topic on the future of architects and innovation and digital transformation. And also an introduction to the Open Agile Architecture Certification. So different from Togaf aimed at a different use but works very well when used in conjunction with the Togaf standard. And of course, we started actually with a guide to the Open Group Library which is where you can find all this great stuff that we talk about. And within the Open Group Library is the Togaf Library and that was a useful guide through that to make finding it as easy as possible. And don't forget that the sessions that we've had so far they're all available on the Open Group YouTube channel and you can also get to them from our website. And so as far as season one is concerned I'll repeat my thanks to all our presenters and experts in season one but to most of all any of you who attended any of you here today who were in attendance for season one thank you. And we've been delighted with the levels of participation and the great questions. So long may it continue. So looking forward now to season two what can you expect? Well among the topics planned we have EA and Blockchain in fact that's the next one that will be two weeks today. EA and Blockchain. We also are going to cover Zero Trust Architecture which is a topic that we played a big part in our last in-person event at the Open Group in July and we'll get information on an overview of updates to the Archimake standard and the significant progress that's being made on the Open Group portfolio of digital open standards. More on digital transformation and the role that EA plays within it of course. Some highlights from our Togaf user groups and inevitably due to the level of demand more Togaf standard related content. So on that note let me move to today's topic and this isn't intended to be a deep dive into the topic it's more of a teaser but the topic is really our latest approach to Togaf standard certification and you may recall that when we published the standard the Togaf standard 10th edition of April we promised updates to our certification program in the coming months and we've made quite a bit of progress on that front and here today to give you a brief look into our thinking is my colleague the Open Group vice president of standards and certification Andrew Josie. Andrew are you there? There you are, right on cue. So you open season one the first episode of season one with the library and here you are on the first episode of season two so there's a theme here. So what can you share with us today about Togaf certification? Okay Steve, I've prepared a few slides so let's just see if I can get those sharing okay. Hopefully you're seeing the right set of slides. Looks good. Yeah. Okay, so thanks again Steve for that introduction it's good to be back again I'm going to say always a series opener that's my lineup that's what I do. As you know we released the Togaf standard 10th edition in April this year it's obviously times blown by a little bit but some of you may be familiar with this diagram from the 10th edition website. I want to spend a few minutes just thinking about our approach to certification so this is the if you can see the diagram there it's sort of in the get certified area I'm going to be talking about this in a lot more detail at the open group Edinburgh event so a little plug for the event there. As we highlight on this diagram what we see with the Togaf standard 10th edition is a refreshed modular structure and that makes it much easier to apply the Togaf framework to different kinds of organizations and also styles of architecture. This is the set of documents that we released in April as you see it's quite a large set we have six what we call the Togaf fundamental content documents that are in the bottom sort of left after this screen and 20 Togaf series guides. We actually expect this set to grow over time this set can be and has been packaged in a number of ways so you'll see that we've got the digital edition we have PDF downloads and we also have the hard copy so just show you a quick glimpse of the hard copy for the hard copy obviously we decided we couldn't print you know all 20, 26 of the current documents so we selected I think it was about 15 documents packaged them into actual sort of again little subsets and we published seven hard copy documents. Now with such a breadth of available material we've had to consider how best to manage that for our training and certification purposes so the approach that we've actually decided on is to define a number of bodies of knowledge drawn from the standard. What do I mean by body of knowledge? Well a body of knowledge is something that defines the content for a certification and a body of knowledge is something that defines what is examinable so you know what will be the topics for the exam. So where does this lead us? So for the Togaf standard 10th edition we're going to be defining multiple bodies of knowledge each of them related to a specific skill set or competency drawn for the standard so this will lead to multiple certifications and certification credentials being available. It will also allow us to have a stable and targeted certifications and permit the standard to grow because we expect the standard to continue growing and this will include new learning paths both for people who are coming to the certification program for the first time but also those who are Togaf 9th certified. And where can you find out more? As I say I'll be talking at the Open Group Edinburgh event in October. I hope you'll join us to find out a little bit more well in fact a lot more about this then. Back to you Steve. Andrew it's great thank you very much for that whistle-stop guide to the thinking behind certification so as I said before and it's not intended to be a deep dive today it's really welling people's appetites for hearing more in a few weeks time at our Edinburgh event but obviously unsurprisingly the questions that come in are around there's a lot of interest let's say in what we're going to do with certification so if I am Togaf 9th certified will there be a way to is the question I know that we've had before and answer before but will there be a direct way of upgrading my certification? Yes Steve there will be a number of ways in fact for those people who are Togaf 9th certified who want to sort of refresh and update to the latest equivalent certification there will be what we call a bridging path so there is a bridging syllabus that will be being defined and there will be a bridging exam that you can take to qualify for that there will also be a number of other learning paths because as I mentioned there's going to be more than one certification there will be multiple certifications also what we call certification credentials which are actually smaller chunks of your learning so we've looked at the new standard and we've been able to define some new areas specific skill sets specific competences that we want to address and if you've got Togaf 9th certification you can recognize that as one of the prerequisites to come into those new learning paths that we're defining so basically if you're thinking about doing Togaf 9th certification right now it's a good move carry on do that and there will be upward paths for you as we expand what we're calling the Togaf certification portfolio to encompass also the 10th edition standard You answered the second question before me asking it which was you know I'm part way through studying and now I have to so yes go ahead it's always been our message do go ahead with the Togaf 9th certification that's going to still be worthwhile and the structure of the new the new program will be will be quite different but you'll be easy to see where your path or choice of paths will be that's great and another question that's come in Andrew which I know you can answer this easily is how can we download the Togaf 10 document series OK if you just either go to the open group site and I think on the right that says the Togaf standard 10th edition is available and you just follow the links but where you will end up in is the open group library look for Togaf in there and there was also a link on your slide I noticed earlier there was the digital edition go to I think it's www.opengroup.org Togaf 10th edition although I can't spell that quite as I think it's 10th edition I think that's the URL it's right to follow great stuff well Andrew we'll leave it there for now as I say you'll have triggered some interest and you'll hear more about where we're going with certification at our Edinburgh event which is coming up quite soon next month it's I'll give a shameless plug Andrew give a slight hint but a shameless plug I'll give it's October the 17th to the 19th at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre and we also have a conference hotel which is the Sheraton Grant Hotel and Spa so there are some quite a few of the people attending will be staying there but not obligatory but yes the Edinburgh International Conference Centre is the venue our main theme for the event this is basically over three days but our main theme is EA and sustainability and digital open standards so those are the main themes crossing the three days we'll also along the way have a Tegaf user group and an open professions workshop open professions is a program in the open group certification program a lot of people know about the knowledge based programs like Tegaf, Archimede, IT for IT, OAA etc but the open professions is more of a skills and experience based program and we'll be having a workshop about that and I think we can expect a session on that at future Toolkit Tuesday too because it's something that as people learn about it they tend to be very interested in from a professional and personal development point of view we also have meetings in Edinburgh for our architecture forum our Archimate Forum IT for IT forum and the digital practitioner work group so if any of you are members your organizations are members of the open group and our members of those forums then it's be a great opportunity to meet in person with your peers in those forums and we'll have some great speakers from our open footprint forum as I say EA and sustainability is one of the main topics and we'll have some really great speakers speaking on the topic of sustainability which is something that we're all obviously coming across every day and needing to find some answers for so the registration information is available on our website in fact we've never done this before but a very special offer today the first person who is attending Toolkit Tuesday today who signs up for our Edinburgh event using the special Toolkit Tuesday code which I hope will appear or has appeared in the chat sign up using that code and you'll get a free pass to the event I realize that some of you attending it's a long way away and there'll be more local events for you in the future but if anyone was on the fence thinking about it make sure that the first one registered and you'll get a free pass to the event and I should say as well not something we do very often but every few years or so usually in Scotland in fact always in Scotland we're hosting the open group golf event today which is at the Torrance course in St Andrews so if that clinches the deal for anyone thinking of attending the event then please do join us we have limited spaces but we do still have a few available for that and that's on the Sunday before the event so that's really it for today's topic and talking about certification and you will hear more obviously as you've as you've gathered in the coming well next month at our Edinburgh event and I'm sure at some point we'll hold more detailed sessions on this in Toolkit Tuesday in the future but for now that's it for today's topic don't go away just yet though next time around we will have a great session it will be Rick Ross who is the director of consulting blockchain emerging technology at EY and our very own Jim Hitella the open group vice president of business development and security they're going to be exploring the intersection of blockchain and enterprise architecture and that will serve as a kickoff for actually a whole webcast series on the topic various topics relating to the use of VA in different blockchain use cases so if you want to know what blockchain is all about if you know already and want to know more see you in two weeks time meanwhile thank you for joining us on our first episode back for season 2 of Toolkit Tuesday I'm Steve Nunn thank you for watching