 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. I was recently asked how do enterprise architecture and business architecture fit together? It's a puzzle I thought. Sadly in my opinion there's too much in the architect world of made of trying to divide architects up. Enterprise architecture versus business architecture versus solution architecture etc etc. There are differences, different approaches, skills, views but the debate can become more important than the outcomes in my experience. Essentially I personally come at things from an enterprise architecture point of view and without business architecture my EA is incomplete. So I see EA has to include business architecture or else I'm just not doing it properly. I also know there are many people who practice business architecture as a discipline in its own right and to me that's a very important specialism. I once did some architecture work with BA systems in their manufacturing which included design guidance for overalls, health and safety work in practices, apprentice training plans and we presented this at OpenGrid conference. Many liked the story but the audience was divided as to whether it was enterprise architecture or business architecture. In truth it didn't matter. The results did. Welcome everybody to season three of Toolkit Tuesday. When we started this we didn't necessarily expect to get to season three but the demand is there and we appreciate you taking time out of your day to join us. So welcome to a new season and great way to start there with Paul Holman. It absolutely doesn't matter how we categorize things as long as the results are there and value is demonstrated through the use of architecture. Wise words as usual and congratulations Paul once again on receiving the OpenGrid presidents individual award this year for contributions just like that. Anyway welcome wherever you are in the world. We're glad to have you and just a quick housekeeping note on how we do questions here at Toolkit Tuesday. Please submit any questions for our speaker today on through the Q&A channel which you will find if you can't see it you will find it if you click the three little dots in the bottom right hand corner of your screen that will give you the option to click on Q&A. Please use that to submit questions to our speaker today rather than the joining from today. Where in the world are you? Let's get that going on the chat channel if we can. Other than that I will dive straight in and our topic today reflects the fact that the Open Group is partnering with Forrester this year on the Forrester 2023 technical awards and we're delighted to be part of it and partnering with Forrester and to tell us a little more about it and why it's important and what we are looking for in those awards. We have no better person to speak about it than Charlie Betts. Charlie is from Forrester. He leads the Forrester's Enterprise Architecture Priority providing guidance to EA professionals worldwide on evolving a relevant modern and valuable architecture practice. He's deeply engaged in researching the transformation of the IT operating model, in particular the impact of agile DevOps and product thinking. He's previously led Forrester's DevOps and Enterprise Service Management Coverage and Charlie has been a long time contributor to the Open Group in various forums including the IT for IT forum and more recently our work in the Digital Practitions Work Group. So a warm welcome back to Charlie Betts and a warm I think first time on Toolkit Tuesday, Charlie. Yeah, that would be true and it's great to be here Steve. Thanks so much for having me. So once again I want to thank Steve and the Open Group for having me present today. It is indeed an honor that the Open Group and Forrester research have decided to partner on Forrester's annual EA awards and I'm going to share a little bit about Forrester research and our approach to Enterprise Architecture Coverage and the awards now in this time. So briefly up front, obviously we are in very dynamic, one could almost say, chaotic and turbulent times. We have a lot of uncertainty. We have new customer behavior. We are still coping with the wake of a global pandemic and the ripple effects continue to challenge IT and digital organizations worldwide. Forrester research is actively seeking and producing and publishing information and guidance and insights across a wide variety of topics digital and IT of course is where my background is but we provide services to marketing professionals, to sales professionals, to leaders of many organizational functions. One highlight is our annual survey research. We survey more than 700,000 individuals every year and I'm actually honored to own one of those surveys, the state of modern technology operations. We work in all of the major geographic markets and across most of the major verticals. You might say that we are research with a consultative approach. Sometimes people will lump us in with consulting but actually companies like Deloitte and Accenture we see more as partners. We start our feedback loop with qualitative and quantitative research that leads to us having the ability to tell certain stories, develop certain narratives because there is always a narrative that our customers find valuable and they turn to us for insight and assurance that they are on the right track. It's an important part of our value proposition. This provides us with access and feedback which then informs further qualitative and quantitative research. As we analyze the data that we have both qualitative and quantitative and we have leading statisticians who are well-versed in technology techniques such as factor and cluster analysis, we have established repeatedly that customer obsession is absolutely a differentiator for the modern enterprise to whatever extent it is digital. We also see that customer obsession plays out internally as well as externally. We're not talking purely market facing. We're also talking about questions of internal customers and internal customer empathy and sentiment which is I think very important for the enterprise architects out there. We see clearly that customer obsessed firms grow, they grow faster, they're more profitable and not surprisingly they retain their customers better. We also see that there are clear segments that we've developed models and we see the models continually reproducing themselves and reflected in the customer research. We see that there is a movement from traditional technology approaches, technology as a utility, an order taker, focusing on efficiency and modernization, still using operating model approaches such as waterfall software development, very functionally siloed. Then we see a broad emerging modern response and then a much smaller subset of companies that we would say are truly future fit where technology has shared accountability for business outcomes and we see the companies that become truly adaptive, creative and resilient as kind of the highest order value propositions we now see in the modern digital enterprises. Toward that end we developed the Forrester outcome-driven architecture model and I will take responsibility for this. You might just say well this is just a architecture but we put considerable thought into it. Yes it's not a precise metamodel but over and over again we've heard that the modern architecture organization needs to be grounded in a foundation of operating principles and these aren't necessarily architecture assessment principles in fact we're going to rename that bottom layer to architecture foundation but these are the values, the precepts that the modern chief architect would be well advised to keep in mind as they strive to deliver value and also stay out of the dreaded ivory tower syndrome. Architecture needs to have demonstrable value. It needs itself to be agile and to be deeply conversant with what agile development means. It needs to be pragmatic, influential, continuous and accountable. We've written and discussed all of these things. In the interest of time I won't elaborate further and that foundation then supports key capabilities such as people, practices such as the methodologies and frameworks that we love to talk about and debate. The whole question of artifacts and I'll always point out that the first three things you see in that capabilities layer architects love to talk about those three things but what does any of it matter if you don't have a clear engagement model? The engagement model is the means by which architecture actually delivers value in the context of your operating model or it is the operating model for architecture itself and this is where I challenge the modern EA practices and the modern EA leaders. It's not about the methodologies, it's not about the artifacts, it's about how you are making a difference towards the ultimate outcomes of projects, products and services that are adaptive, creative and resilient that deliver top line, bottom line value that reduce your risk and improve your customer satisfaction. Towards that end we have been sponsoring the enterprise architecture awards and I have been compiling the history which had not been done before. As it turned out these awards started in 2010 with partners in academia and media they have been unbroken ever since. We now have a combined a compiled list of 64 unique winners 71 total across all regions of the world. I'm very honored to now be stewarding this program and we are just delighted that for the first time this year we are partnering with the open group on these awards. These awards certainly do reflect the Forrester outcome driven model. We look for results, we look for value, we look for engagement. We might also query what methods and framework frameworks you're using but it must be in the context of ultimately are you creating those valuable outcomes for your business? Just briefly here I believe this is being recorded. We obviously won't have time to go through but here's a list of all the winners and this will be published on a blog that will go live I believe later today on my own blogging site at Forrester. Now if you're interested in participating in the awards I'm easily found online. I would simply either you can take a quick screenshot of the URL there to my blogs where there will be in the most recent blog a set of links for how you submit to this year's awards or I'm just a Google search away as we like to say and with that hopefully we've gotten past our minor technical glitches and I'd love to chat a little bit with Steve if we have the time. I hope so too Charlie thank you very much for that and yes repeating we're very much looking forward to the awards and what we hope and absolutely expect is that we'll get some great examples of how architecture is really delivering value and I don't know if you caught Paul Hohman's one minute EA said at the beginning and you know it kind of doesn't matter what we call it as long as it delivers. I love that I love that statement it was just so crisp and to the point it really doesn't matter what we call it. Yeah yeah no it's great so so thank you for that thank you for that overview and one of the things we see a lot in in architecture is this it's is it in fashion is it out of fashion whatever you call it it kind of comes and goes a bit but it seems to always reemerge and it's kind of I guess a consistent reason why it appears to reemerge is is economic challenges driving it. Yeah I mean any any thoughts on that or sounds like you agree with that yeah absolutely we see it all the time I mean when times are good you know people tolerate sprawl and you know why do we need the architects when times get a little more difficult then you have to cut and you have to prune and there's basically three ways that people will seek to rationalize the portfolio to cut costs they can do it completely command and control senior leaders just go in and based on just very initial perception they make a series of decisions and of course they're operating without sufficient context in too many cases and these are complex systems and when you impinge or jolt complex systems they tend to react in really unexpected ways and maybe you might have not saving money not having their outcomes you thought and then the the other way the other dysfunctional way we see is the rationalization happens but it's opaque it's the whisper network it's the old boys old girls clubs and this starts to demoralize the rank and file it starts to and again there's a lack of context and you know decisions are made and you know at least in the first case you know that the senior leader just pounded the table and said done we're getting out of that business well at least there's accountability and when the in the second mode decisions are made in the passive voice and it's also not a great way to run a business from my perspective so what's the third way transparent and rational and I would submit to the listeners if you have a transparent and rational approach for rationalizing your portfolio I don't care what you call it you're doing architecture because you're thinking systematically about your capabilities whether you use that word or not you're thinking systematically and it is the whole idea of having a systematic approach that is as transparent as possible in in in business environments and then that results in reasonable decisions that are clearly justified and hopefully take into account the necessary context of these complex systems so that you get the outcomes you're looking for in your rationalization journey right right great and you know in a similar vein Charlie you know if we agree that that things come and go there's this kind of architecture pendulum which which has to be a negative thing overall you know overall in an organization disrupt it you know it is terribly yeah yeah any thoughts because it we can trace we can trace several depending on what you count we can trace several examples of this back over over several decades now any thoughts for how we kind of stop the pendulum yes very much and this is this was the pendulum was top of mind for me as we did that the Forrester outcome-driven framework the idea that the number one and I've had numerous client conversations where senior ea's chief ea's have really latched on is accountability how is the architecture group itself held accountable how are its outcomes measured now we can't put in place six Sigma style you know high volume statistics the measurements might be anecdotal they might be case-based and that's fine Forrester we have a balance between qualitative and quantitative but at the end of the day you need to draw a line of sight and I have a an impact map that I use based on some extremely valuable mentoring I got a long time ago the I was at a reception and I tried to engage a senior leader in conversations and I was younger at the time and as one does at younger ages I went a little too technical a little too quickly with this senior leader who listened politely and then politely excused themselves and I was left there holding my drink and one of my mentors happened to have half an ear out and pulled me aside and gave me advice I've never forgotten he said Charlie it's very simple top line bottom line risk if you can't break down your conversation into those terms do not approach somebody at that level and being Forrester we add customer experience and I think Peter Drucker would approve you know creating a customer is why we have businesses so I have an impact map artifact a job aid call you want where I walk architects through and I say okay so you're governing the technology portfolio and architecture gets a lot of grief for trying to control the diversity of technologies it's not a bad thing it's it's something that reduces risk but how does it reduce risk how does it make things more efficient there's a missing layer of value that architects struggle to articulate for example if I have a smaller number of technical products I have a smaller attack surface to secure which then changes my staffing dynamics if instead of having 15 different flavors of relational database I concentrate my spend on two one or two flavors I now have more leverage I can say to the vendor I'm giving you all my business what are you gonna do for me right that's a conversation that's been around since commerce was invented right this is why we do these things is to seek these classes of value they are longer horizon value propositions harder to measure but not impossible so what I am my mission right now is to help architects just it's just this little hop you know to get to that top end that the top-end value propositions and not just be muttering things about well efficiency or something right you know which doesn't quite do it you know with the CFO sure no it'll make all the difference in the world to get something something more tangible yeah absolutely absolutely so a couple of questions well one question specifically about the about the awards came in and is there a deck or website for that will help people see what the criteria for choosing the winners are yes well I mean they should download the packet and they can infer that the packet asks a variety of questions based on the outcome based architecture model and then you can the questions will then be judged by a panel of judges from both Forrester and as you know the open group which is one of the reasons one of the concrete ways we're partnering here there will be a rubric rubric has not been not been publicized but in any event one might just simply look at the packet and say well you know they're going to compare the responses across these eight or eight or ten questions I'm sorry I should know off the top of my head but it's not a hundred questions and it's not three so that's great and in fact thanks to my colleague Lauren who's posted the the link to where you can find more information about the awards and back it as well so thank you Lauren done in real time that's a good question about Forrester research are there any plans to extend Forrester research to other geographies like Latin America or does it already operate there we have some operations and we call it the Americas I would say that Latin America and Africa both represent significant opportunities for us we do have substantial operations in Europe and in the industrialized APAC areas but Latin America and Africa remain areas where we have have more work to do we have some presence there I'm not the best qualified to speak in detail about it right understood all right thank you for that so I think we have time for maybe one more question Charlie and it to some extent it's an old chestnut but given your your responsibilities at Forrester include Agile and DevOps the question we hear a lot how can Agile and architecture coexist great question I have a lot of thoughts I think number the number one I'll just give I'll just I'll go real pragmatic here architecture standards should be baked into development platforms they should be baked into development pipelines now this doesn't solve all the questions about things like allocating systems of record and so forth you still need careful thought about these things and you need some kind of a process but certainly the at the technical and solutions level and secure even security having architects running around with checklists checking stuff off all of that should simply go into the CI CD pipeline as part of the platform and then architecture is in a whole different set of conversations so the question for the architect is strategically becomes what are our major approved platforms and do they reflect architecture standards and do I have a seat at that table and the architect actually should be driving those investments you know saying this is the golden path paved road platform if you deploy here you are architecturally compliant along you know 20 different dimensions and I'm not even going to bother you know coming after coming having a conversation with you because it's all enforced by the platform and then that then that frees up architecture to then also play a key role in the initial chartering of product teams much of the agile conversation and friction comes at the point of the product team has been formed and is trying to deliver in the architects trying to get in their way architecture should be upstream of that you know how did the plaque how did the product team come to be I think is is the the key question for the architect and then architecture also has much I think it has a strong relationship with something like site reliability engineering any given product will hit certain crisis moments and need assistance and guidance and what do you call that architecture SRE it's the need for a consultative capability what in team topologies is called an enabling team there are other ways where we can draw that line of sight but I would say get out of anything resembling stage gated approvals where people where the architect is blocking somebody's progress figure out some way to not do that and there's still plenty for architecture to do absolutely good good a good note to finish on Charlie and I thank you for your for your time today and your work with the awards we look forward to those being a great success and hearing some really really good stories of value delivered through through architecture so for today thanks once again to Charlie Betts thank you Steve thank you so we are just about done for today we try and keep these two 30 minutes folks so just a mention of next time around two weeks time June 13th I strongly urge you to join us again that day we are going to be joined by vision Wang who is going to be talking to us about architecting interoperability with argument promise to be promised to be a great presentation so please join us on June 13th if you can meanwhile thank you for taking time out today and for your questions and wherever you are keep safe and well and see you next time I'm Steve Nunn this has been talking Tuesday