 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 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. So, the European Super League, where European football self-labelled big teams plan to create a breakaway league that guaranteed their inclusion no matter how well or badly they performed for over 20 years, has for now failed. A failed ecosystem. I will talk about ecosystems much more as it's fun. However, for now, let's look at the primary reason that that ecosystem failed, the fans. The clubs thought that they were creating an ecosystem amongst themselves but they failed to sense both that they're contextual environment and the fans were part of that ecosystem. An ecosystem just like any other systems in my eyes, in order to be viable, they need architecting. Welcome everyone, welcome to another Toolkit Tuesday. My name is Steve Nunn, I'm president and CEO of the Open Group and I'm delighted to welcome you today to the latest in our series. So, wherever you are in the world, I hope you're safe and well. Thank you for joining us. We have 30 minutes of great content for you today, mostly one session on government-related enterprise architecture, which is going to be great. Before we start though, just to enhance your experience with us today on the WebEx platform, the way that we will deal with questions for our speakers is through the Q&A channel. So you've probably seen a chat channel already there, but if you go to the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, you will see that there's the option to click on a Q&A channel. If you want to ask a speaker the question, then that's the way to do it please. And by all means use other channels for communicating with each other, letting us know where you're from. So before we kick off today's event, I just want to say some of you joining us today will have joined us last week where we had a global event for the Open Group's 25th anniversary. We were celebrating by moving around from eight different cities, about 38 hours elapsed time, some really, really great content. And if you've missed it or you weren't able to join, then do look for it because there's some really great stuff in there. And we had over so far, and it's counting, we had over 6,000 people join us over the course of the period. So there's some great stuff in there, go look at it and I hope you find it useful. So today we are focused, as I say, on the government side of enterprise architecture and we have a great speaker to take us through that today. My colleague, Dr. Palab Sahar, who is general manager for India at the Open Group, is also president of the Association of Enterprise Architects in India. And he's been identified as a thought leader by IBM Smart City Connect and featured by Forbes Magazine. He's a Metty NEGD senior lead expert in enterprise architecture and a visiting professor of digital architecture at the Indian Institute of Management. Dr. Sahar advises various ministries and states on matters pertaining to government-wide enterprise initiatives, architecture initiatives, and just a few months ago now became general manager for us in India. So there's some really great stuff going on in India in the enterprise architecture area. And you're going to hear some of it now. So a warm virtual welcome please for Dr. Palab Sahar of the Open Group. Over to you Palab. Thank you Steve. And good morning, good evening from wherever you're joining. And I'm very happy to be doing this session today. So let me quickly share my slides. I hope you can see the slides. And as Steve was introducing me, I'm going to talk about a very interesting topic that is currently work in progress in India in certain aspects. And I'm going to use India as a case study because it's also very important for us to, you know, talk in concrete terms rather than talking about concepts and theories. And therefore, you know, the genesis of whatever I'm going to talk about started three years back with the India Enterprise Architecture framework. Now I'm assuming that some of you would have heard about this through my various publications and blogs. I've also made a detailed presentation about the India framework in the Open Group conferences in London and San Diego a couple of years back. So without going into the details, you know, given the time I have today, I think you can make out that the India Enterprise Architecture framework is a national framework which consists of four different standards for different parts which you can see there at the bottom. So first one is the reference model. The second one, part two is the adoption guide. Part three is the digital service standard which focuses on how organizations which is both the ministries and the government departments and other agencies should be designing and provisioning their digital services. And part four is the Agile India framework which is inspired by the Open Agile Architecture framework. As I said, we don't have time to go into the details, but all of these four different parts are notified national standards in India. And now there are many ministries and many departments in many states in India, which are in the process of implementing this if you will. So that that's kind of a little bit of a background. What is more important from an India perspective is that it has a context. Typically, when we speak about enterprise architecture, there is a lot of emphasis on the technology element of it. Now, while technology is important, and we all understand that digital technology has democratized many aspects of architecture. What we have done right from the beginning is to ensure that the India framework takes India all the way from analog government to e-government to more towards digital government. And this is based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. You will see the benefit of creating a context around SDG because it provides the benefit and impact of architecture right at the global level. And you heard Paul, right, about the European Super League. We don't forget the fans here. And in this case, the fans are the citizens and the users. And that's the reason why the sustainable development goals are more important because it sets the entire purpose of what we are doing. The purpose is not to adopt new technology, but to make a difference to people's lives. And I'm going to share a few examples with you given the limited time we have, but I think you get the point. Now, what we have also done, as you have seen in my first slide, the India framework is based on TOGAAP. So we have mapped the critical factors to the TOGAAP ADM. I'm sure all of you are familiar with the TOGAAP ADM. So there is no need to go into the details. But what you see here are the different segments. For instance, you can see the strategy and motivation which is driven by the SDG, as I mentioned in my previous slide. Then we have the business layer, the application and data layer, the technology layer, and the implementation and migration layer. So we have identified 15 different factors which are important for us to implement the enterprise architecture as per the India framework. And you have seen this picture shows you how these 15 different factors are distributed across the entire life cycle of the architecture that we are all familiar with. Now moving forward, one thing that we have to keep in mind is that India, as you know, is a very large country with a diverse population. We have 36 states and territories. And of course we have the multiple ministries, the different departments and agencies. So it's a humongous size of government. And constitutionally, we are a federal structure. So right from the beginning, we had taken into consideration that we had to incorporate, if you will, we had to integrate the federal structure into the architecture. So we have used the toga partitioning approach in terms of identifying how the entire national framework would be rolled out across the entire country. Because one of the one of the pushback items that we typically get when you talk of enterprise architecture, especially at the national level, especially at the whole of government level is that it is pushing towards centralization. So we wanted to debunk that myth and this picture on the, you know, shows you how we have partitioned the architecture. So on your left, you can see the national frameworks right on top. So you can see the India reference architecture. So the digital service standards, agile India, so on and so forth. That now has been, you know, I would say split into priority sectors. So the priority sectors typical for any government would be health, education, agriculture, rural development, smart cities, so on and so forth. I'll show you the priority sector. So we've identified the priority sectors. And each of these priority sectors will have or is in the process of launching digital platform, which is basically basically the crux of the topic that we are going to discuss today. And in the bottom, you'll see the building blocks, the reusable building blocks that we keep using because it's important the word is reusable. So those foundational capabilities don't have to be repeated. So whenever a public digital platform is being launched or designed, we also look at the archive of the reusable building blocks so that we don't reinvent the wheel. So that is the basic approach of partitioning the entire India framework so that it works for the entire country. So that in a nutshell is how we have structured our architecture journey from a roll out perspective. Now, moving forward, as I said, one of the key things that we are doing is creating public digital platform in the priority sectors. I've shown you some priority sectors listed in the previous slide ranging from agriculture to education to health and rural development so on and so forth. And there are certain reasons why public digital platforms are becoming more and more popular because here it positions government as a enabler rather than an end to end solution provider. It creates better services, you'll see the results of what we are doing in one of my slides later on. And as I said, constitutionally we are a federal structure which means the sub national government, the state governments, the territorial governments have a lot of autonomy and they would like to retain that autonomy and, as I said previously, our whole of government enterprise architecture definitely does not look towards centralization. It's to maintain that federated approach. So these are some of the key factors driving the public digital platform. And incidentally, it's also consistent with the, it's also consistent with the, you know, the architecture maturity model as defined by MIT, CISR, Center for Information Systems Research. So you can see this picture here which actually clearly shows you how countries or enterprises actually, you know, I would say, you know, move into the maturity journey and the final stage, which is stage five is creating digital ecosystems where you create an entire platform where the different stakeholders of the ecosystem can contribute both as a consumer and also a service provider. And you will see some of that example later on. Now, typically, if you don't know what a digital platform is all about, so this is one slide which provides us some summary of what a digital platform is all about. It consists of digital services and shared APIs because you need to interact with stakeholders who may or may not be part of the government ecosystem. You have certain registries. So for instance, in the health domain, we have registries of doctors, we have registries of hospitals and other facilities, registries of pharmacies, so on and so forth. We have reusable building blocks. You can see some of the reusable building blocks and I mentioned that previously as well. And because it is an open digital ecosystem, the concept of trust and identity is very, very important. So all of the participants so to speak of the digital ecosystems need to have unique identifiers so that they can participate either as a consumer or as a provider based on whatever is the governance model we are specifically talking about in that specific instance. Now, these are the different digital platforms currently rolled out in India. Okay, you can see one in health one in urban innovation stackers and smart cities. One in education, there's one for state government and there's one for agriculture. Now there are other digital platforms which are also currently in progress. You can see the other areas are the sectors so to speak they have power and energy woman and child skills and employment logistics, transformation, industry consortium, criminal justice system and tourism are other priority areas that are being launched even as we speak. So this is, as I said, a work in progress, but I think we are doing good progress from the results that I'll show you in my final slide and to get as you know continues to be the most popular framework that we are adopting. So all of the stuff which is which I'm showing you here is based on to get and I've already elaborated to you how we have used the partitioning structure of to get to, you know, kind of design and conceive all of these public digital platforms. Now when talking about a digital platform, we identified three things. First is we create a digital platform canvas. Some of you I'm sure are familiar with the business model canvas BMC. So this is basically a variation of a BMC but this gives us a nice 60,000 feet view of what the digital platform is all about. You can see all of the key questions are being put here but on one page. So that kind of, as I said, this is a very nice communication tool and design tool to identify what the digital platform should look like. So that's the first thing. The second one is we have a reference architecture for the digital platforms. These are all the domains, if you will, I'm sure all of you are architects, you are definitely aware of the architecture layers or domains. You can see the users participants access channels business data application infrastructure governance and integration so you can see the reusable building blocks that we have used. So as I said, even as we move let's say from health to agriculture to education to rural development to tourism. We looked for reusable capabilities so that we do not reinvent the wheel so whenever we are building a digital platform we take care of the initial design through the canvas. Then we look at the reference architecture and finally, we take a systemic view of how the digital platform should actually work PDP there stands for public digital platform. So this is a systemic view for us to understand the dynamics of the various aspects, various important aspects of digital platform, so that we know that it will work so for instance one of the one of the very successful digital platforms today it's in use in India is the UPI which is the unified payments interface it's a payment platform. Now because of the success of the payments platform today India has become number one in number one in the world globally, in terms of the digital transaction right so it's more than 25 billion transactions that is it's as much as that is the number of volume. So obviously to make a platform work there are many things that come into play we have identified some of the key factors in this and showed the linkages between those key factors in this systemic view. I think you all understand all of you definitely you know fully realize the importance of data and data governance and digital platform so what we have created here is the data governance, you know, view so to speak of public digital platform again this is a common platform, common data governance view and as you can see we have used our commit so you as you know Steve was looking at all our standards are independently very useful but if you use them together you get a lot more benefit. So we use the, you know, actual formal notation to create some of the models, you know, obviously from to gap onwards to the archie and argument so this is an argument model in terms of how we look at data governance you can see the different entities which are important from a data governance perspective you need data security data owners data custodians auditors application owners and how they interact with one another is what is shown on this slide. This is a use case diagram I don't intend to go into the details of this but again this is an example of a use of Archie made a formal notation in the as reusable building blocks you can see how we use reusable building blocks but important is the top two is going back to the sustainable development goals you can see the goal number two and hunger and achieve, you know, achieve maturity in that so there is a target to that and how the use case is actually playing out when you talk of the actual, you know, actual platform that is being provisioned by the public digital platforms that in a nutshell are very summarized view of what we are currently doing these are some of the real on ground benefits of public digital platforms it's improving access to digital services it's encouraging inclusiveness it's encouraging data driven decisions it's increasing the coordination and linkage between programs when I talk of programs it means between ministries between departments. It is reducing gaps and duplications it is anticipating needs it's encouraging innovations and entire digital economy is being built around architecture and it is improving the internal capacity. These are real observed benefits right, the most important thing is these are being mentioned so this is the statement by Prime Minister Modi on 7th of September 2021. I will take a brief pause here but you can see how he is articulating the benefits of platform digital platform public digital platform. Basically here the context is the digital education architecture but I've highlighted the key points that are important from benefit perspective. So, this is an example of how we are moving from doing architecture to making architecture work for the country and you can see some of the key points which I've highlighted and put in bold there, which are being, you know, talked about in this speech by the Prime Minister. Okay, so nothing much to explain here he focuses on flexibility, you know, using the own assessment approach, providing transformational change, eliminating inequality, creating a super integrator and providing quality education. So the message and takeaway from this slide is when you articulate the benefit of architecture, it has to be in terms that people can understand. In fact, we are doing all of the methodology we are doing all of the notation we are doing all of the platform at the end of the day this is what matters to the real leaders and to the decision makers for the country. Now this is my last slide as I said how is India fairing and again coming back to what Paul was saying you know European Super League they forgot the fans we did not forget the citizens here so there was a survey done by BCG we all know who BCG is. You know, our digital services are doing and as you can see it's a user satisfaction survey, and India is doing quite well of the 26 different areas India is ranked number one among the 36 countries surveyed in 12 of those groups so out of 26 12 we are number and 23 we are within the top three, which is very, very good performance so given our complexity diversity and continent sized population. I believe we are doing quite well this is still early days but I think this is very encouraging. The second survey which I'd like to, you know, refer to is the World Bank of tech maturity survey again India has been ranked number one. India has been ranked within group a top most quadrant in terms of using the text of government technology in terms of providing digital services. And one of the key mentions that we find in that World Bank report is the use of government wide enterprise architecture, which is India which was the first slide I presented today with this I think it gives us a nice bird's eye view of what is currently going on in India and I present I end my presentation and as he was, you know, introducing me, we do have a government enterprise architecture work group we are looking into some of these areas, and we intend to create guides and best practices around this topic of public digital platform because this is being rolled out across not just that other countries are showing a lot of interest so if you're interested in working in the government enterprise architecture work group please feel free to get in touch with me with that I finish my presentation and I'll be happy to take any questions. Thank you very much. That was a great job, a great run through the topic and an important topic to all of us. We're all citizens. We all like to think that we can get some high quality services from from our government and it's clearly an area that India is taking a lead in and from what I know that's not a surprise given all the work that's been going on under the covers on these various digital data platforms and enterprise architecture generally. So it's great to see that that effort and that work and that foresight and leadership in India is taking fruition and thank you once again for taking us through that topic. So a big round of applause, virtual round of applause please for Dr. Palab Saha of the Open Group. Thank you Palab. Okay we're going to stick with a similar theme but switch gears slightly for one of Terry's Toolkit Tuesday Tips and right on the topic there's still the topic of citizen centric government services. Terry Blevins is going to give us a short tip today on empathy, the importance of empathy in doing government EA work. So over to you Mr. Terry Blevins from EnterpriseWise, over to you Terry. Hi, my name is Terry Blevins with the Toolkit Tuesday Tip. When done right enterprise architecture can enable significant change. When applied in the government sector, that means change that affects citizens and we are all citizens. So this Toolkit Tuesday Tip is about empathy and its importance in how you as an enterprise architect approach a government project. Empathy is about understanding the perspectives of others. In the case of a government EA project, we are talking about understanding the perspectives of the citizens as well as the sponsoring organization. Since we are citizens we can use our own perspectives minimally as a sounding board. The key is to put yourself in the shoes of the citizen. Empathize. A specific area where this is an in play is testing assumptions. When you empathize you realize that every citizen doesn't have the latest technology or maybe any technology at all for that matter. You realize that every citizen doesn't have technical savvy. You realize that accessibility is more important than you originally thought because citizens have unique needs for access and unique capabilities. Another area where empathy is important is when you think about the user experience. In this case the citizen experience. This shouldn't be too hard because we all have had the experience with good and bad government provided services. So think about those great services and bring to the table what made them great. Think about those bad services and bring to the table things that avoid those things that made them bad. Empathizing with the citizen is indeed critical. However, we can't forget those that are developing. That is those that are building solutions based on the enterprise architecture and those that are governing and managing the enterprise. If you are already an enterprise architect, I'm sure you already are familiar with the pain points of builders and governors. The key is to make sure you understand the specific needs and the specific scenario and analyze what should be done to best balance between these three perspectives. Which will be challenging, but rewarding when done right. So do not be afraid to use your inner voice to augment the data that is driving the effort, but of course always validate. The Togaf standard covers multiple tools and techniques that can help you with understanding user needs. Using techniques like the business scenario method and design thinking in conjunction with using your empathy will help you develop an enterprise architecture with the right focus. For more information, please check out the Togaf library. Keep architecting for enterprise value. Thanks for watching. Terry, thank you very much. Thank you very much for that Toolkit Tuesday tip. Great insights as ever and empathy. Well, I think we could all show a bit more empathy in our daily lives, couldn't we? Not just when we're doing government related EA work. So a bit of empathy would improve the world I think. So great message and very on point for today's topic. So there, but almost before we know it, we have the end of another Toolkit Tuesday. My thanks to Paul Holman for his EA Minute to Dr. Palab Saha for our main session today and of course to Terry Blevins once more for his Toolkit Tuesday tip. Please join us in two weeks time, November 16th, when we will be joined by Anash Shahi, who is one of the trainers in the ecosystem of trainers around Togaf standards. He's with EA Training LLC and he's going to be talking to us about strategic decision making using formal modeling. So wouldn't be surprised if we get into a bit of the archimage modeling language in there as well as the Togaf standard. So please join us again. Thanks to everyone today and most of all, thanks to you all for taking the time out to join us. This has been Toolkit Tuesday. I hope you've enjoyed it. I'm Steve Nunn. Bye for now.