 Mark Fulton, who is Associate VP of Technology, Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide. Mike joined Nationwide in January of 2017 and during his time leading the technology innovation team, they've built prototypes, leveraging technologies like mobile devices, cloud, AI, chatbots, voice assistants, blockchain, smart contracts, augmented reality, 360 video, virtual reality and internet of things. A lot of stuff been going on there. Mike's also an adjunct faculty member at the Ohio State University teaching, managing digital and serves on the governing board of the open group as an elected representative. And Mike's joined by his colleague from Ohio State, Dr. AC, I've been advised to call him, but John pronounced it perfectly earlier, but his professor in management sciences at the Fisher School of Business. Aravind's research investigates innovation, learning and knowledge creation issues in a variety of areas, including high tech, R&D, manufacturing and healthcare delivery. In recent years, he's begun to study the challenges involved in developing patient centric healthcare models by conducting field experiments in collaboration with several physician and nursing leaders. Aravind is the academic director of the master of business in operation excellence and executive master's program preparing leaders to drive, build and sustain continuous learning culture in organizations. In the session today, they will discuss the journey to bring the Digital Leadership Academy to life and executive education program at the Ohio State University inspired by the open group digital portfolio. So I'm guessing you're leading off Mike, but welcome, warm welcome from the open group to, again, Aravind. Thank you very much. AC, can we hear you okay? Yes, can you hear me? Yes, we got you. Thank you. All right, so thank you everyone wanted to thank you for this opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the work that AC and I are doing at the Ohio State University. One of the things I did want to do for the conversation today is set a couple of ground rules. So just so we're on the same page. Ohio State is new to the open group where we're coming into the open group for the first time as we engage with the digital portfolio and are trying to leverage that digital portfolio as we try to educate the learners that Ohio State and what it means to be digital going forward. So we want your help in trying to understand how we can have the biggest impact. We also want to make clear that as you go through this conversation today that you understand that this is a vision that is emerging. And so we would love any and all feedback. As we go through this conversation, whether it's in the QA panel or the chat and we'll try to we'll try to tackle that today. If we have time for Q and A, but before we jump into kind of what we're we're in visiting, I want to have AC just sell a little stage for us around what executive education is at the Fisher College of Business. Thank you so much, Mike. Good morning everyone and good afternoon wherever you are. Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity as Mike mentioned. This is a unique opportunity that Ohio State and Fisher College of Business, which I belong to, is partnering to really understand and manage the needs in the digital space. So I was just listening to a wonderful presentation the previous time where they brought in certain challenges that are very unique in the IT digital space. Let me tell you a little bit about Fisher College of Business, primarily the executive education, which might set the stage for the conversation that Michael is going to lead forward. So as you as you might know, Fisher is a part of the business school is a part of a larger university or Ohio State University, which has about 60,000 students and several hundred thousand alumni all over the world. Now in the executive education side, we are our programs are primarily oriented towards a couple of important groups. So one would call us like practicing leaders who are actually practicing what we call as top level operational capabilities and then aspiring leaders who want to get there to actually be one of those practicing leaders. So so we have had programs orchestrated into three or four different buckets that actually allows us to educate them to achieve whatever they want to achieve. So in particular, there are a couple of programs I was listening to the previous start, but we talked about operation value streams and how do you really manage it value streams. So we have a program called the master of business and operational excellence. And I'm proud to say that that's one of the our institutions along with MIT to some extent is being recognized as one of the top institutions in developing curriculum on operational excellence. So so the way we think about this is how do you really understand value streams from a customer? How do you really think about making changes in your organization? How do you really then make those changes and how do you sustain those changes? Because in this time and age, as you think about making changes, changes happen every day. But how do you then like really like sustain them and actually like evolve through the journey. So most of our programs are actually having the same philosophy be it our executive MBA program. We have several analytical certificate programs that are part of our MBA offering. And then our executive education where we very closely work with several organizations both locally in the US and also globally. So we have strategic partners in India. For instance, we work with groups like Tata where we actually work closely with their training centers to train them all on the philosophy of creating learning by doing. So one of the most important thing that Fisher and executive education is it's very easy for us to teach something. But it's very hard for them to really absorb and apply until you have some learning by doing so we base all our curriculum and offering based on our research. So being a part of a land grand mission university Ohio State is one of the top institutions and really the top institution in this area of operations and operational excellence. So we actually rely a lot on those learning where we work very closely with top organizations and then really understand their problems and actually like try to understand and then deliver programs. Now, how does it all apply here as Michael is going to lead the next few sessions. We realize that digital is one of the spaces that we have not yet really paid a lot of attention. That's why this partnership with open group is extremely critical, but we know our strengths. We know that even in the digital space, you're going to deal with process, you're going to deal with people, you're going to deal with change management. So all those things are something that we are very proud of in terms of our academic as well as practical relevance. So where we are going in the next few months primarily thanks to Michael is how do we take the next step and into the digital space. So that's where we are and I'll turn it up to Michael who actually is going to walk us through some of the things that we are thinking about in terms of programming in our executive education. Michael. Yeah, thank you AC and what I would say is this, this vision that we're going to talk through here is inspired by a couple of things. One, it's inspired by the, the, the priority of digital across organizations. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that today because I know that all of you here on this call are very, very familiar with how important digital is and the impact. It's having on our businesses on consumers lives and basically everything, especially post pandemic here. It's just transforming the world that we live in, but it's also inspired by the, the history at Ohio State and the executive education program and that operational excellence program that AC talked about the strength and being able to deliver a conversation around leaner or conversation about by streams. When we look at digital and we look at the digitization of companies internally that it has been doing for 4050 60 years. What we're now calling digital is is really trying to bring forth to leverage some of that expertise that we have been using internally to digitize the operating models of companies and now to impact the, the business unit. I'm sorry, not the business, but the business models and the customer experiences that companies deliver to their customers. And so we feel like we can leverage and utilize some of that same knowledge and expertise that the MBA program brings to the table. The second inspiration that I wanted to talk really quickly about is the open group. There's two pieces of the open group that provide inspiration for this program. The first is the work of managing digital and DP box. The, you may remember a year, maybe 18 months ago. Charles that's and the Dean over at the University of St. Thomas stood on a physical open group stage and shared the story of how the digital practitioners body of knowledge is being leveraged education in in the University of St. Thomas and that was an inspiration for me to bring the digital practitioners body of knowledge to the Ohio State University and and to leverage it to teach managing digital here at Ohio State for undergrads. But what we really saw was the opportunity to take that to the next level to expand on that to really try to have an impact on it professionals across the industry and help to reskill not skill. All I keep professionals for the digital age, leveraging that third inspiration, which is the full open group digital portfolio, leveraging not just DP box, but reference architectures like it for it. The Rob talked about in the previous presentation, leveraging architecture methodologies that can help with the digital transformation that can help with the creation digital products like potentially toe gap for the Azure architecture framework. These elements of the digital portfolio that the open group brings to the table really inspired this program and the full scope of what we think we can deliver as part of this program. Now we think there's a fairly big opportunity here, but at the end of the day, that opportunity is based on having an impact on re skilling up skilling people. Digital transformation is not a technology issue with a people issue. And today, I would argue that the vast majority of people whether they are people that are in the enterprise, who have to live and breathe an additional enterprise, or whether they are, and you can see some of the statistics here that talk to the, the folks that are inside an enterprise. Or they're the people that are actually going to create the new digital products, leveraging new practices and new capabilities, or whether it's the leaders that are going to help define the digital enterprise of tomorrow. We all need to reskill enough skill for this new digital age and we believe that there's a fairly significant opportunity. According to the World Economic Forum, they believe that there's there's some good progress. But as you see this chart, we believe that IT is kind of leading the way, but we're still early in that journey. We're still experimenting with what the new practices look like. We're still learning the new capabilities that we need to be able to deliver. And our leadership teams are still trying to figure out what this looks like. So what we're trying to do here at OSU, the Digital Executive Education Program, we've created a very simple framework that we're trying to drive the conversation prams. It talks about the vision. It talks about understanding what your blueprint for a digital enterprise might look like. What are the building blocks of your digital enterprise? What's the value to your enterprise of becoming a digital enterprise? We talk about transformation. We're recognizing that your enterprise is not digital today, but that you have that digital vision and you want to get there. But what are the methods? What are the approaches you need to get that digital transformation journey? And then execution. Once you become a digital enterprise, there's a whole set of new capabilities and practices that you need to be able to run that digital enterprise day to day and to be able to deliver new digital products to market successfully. And so we're trying to create a curriculum that will support that. And again, inspired by an vision by the open group digital portfolio. We're moving fast. This whole program actually was inspired and initiated by some thinking that was going on in early Q1. But the need has been dramatically accelerated by the global pandemic that we are all experiencing. Every single organization is rapidly waking up to the need to drive this digital transformation to transform how they interact with their customers in a post-pandemic world. And so we're moving fast and we're going to launch 2 programs here in fall of 2020. An executive guide to managing digital and a practitioner's guide to managing digital. An executive guide will be focused on trying to really define for leaders of the organization and for people leading transformations. What it means to be a digital enterprise? What are the building blocks of a digital enterprise? And how do we define digital delivery? If we talk about what we're envisioning, we're envisioning this being rooted in academic research from MIT. You may, if you're familiar with the digital space at all, be familiar with Tini Ross's book Designs for Digital and the 5 Building Blocks of a Digital Enterprise that are outlined in her research. We're going to leverage that. But when we get to some of the elements that we're going to include, the elements of digital delivery culture and mindset that are not necessarily a part of her framework. We're going to leverage some key open group material. We're going to leverage reference architecture like IT for IT to help us better understand what are the capabilities and information needed to really drive seamless digital delivery. So I think that's a real important component of what we're going to be bringing to the table. And then the practitioner's guide to managing digital. And for those of you that have been around the open group for a while, this should be very, very familiar. This is weaning heavily on the digital practitioner's body of knowledge. And it's really following that same learning progression of founder concerns like digital value, digital infrastructure, digital product development. Team level concerns like product management, work management, operations management, and so on and so forth as we go up the BP Box learning progression. And so we think there's tremendous value in having those two frameworks as foundational elements for our whole program. But we are looking at a program that's more comprehensive because it's key that we're identifying those really important roles for the future of a digital enterprise. Roles like a digital product manager, a digital architect, or a digital, digital executive. And so we're designing a series of role based certifications that will include foundational courses like the ones that we talked about in a few others. For example, topics like digital ethics, but also some role specific courses. Horses that might drive conversations around business model transformation, innovation, design thinking, agile and DevOps, agile architecture. All of those kinds of things will be elements of these role specific courses that we plan to offer. And then in order to really bring this learning to life to really add the significant values so that it's not just knowledge, but it's all also some element of practical experience. We're going to incorporate custom projects in our, in our digital certifications so that every single one of these folks that goes through this certification will have experience with a real life project that brings everything together. And helps them understand from that role based perspective, what are the things they need to do to work in a digital enterprise. And finally, it's important that we include an element of community into this program because we need to learn from each other. We need to inspire each other digital is a transformation that the entire world is undergoing and if we're going to be effective, we need to be in conversation about the best ways to do that. So that's the vision for what we're planning to. As I mentioned, strong, strong alignment to the digital portfolio from the open group. We're going to weigh heavily on the digital practitioners body of knowledge. We're going to weigh heavily on the agile architecture framework and IT for IT. And then as part of the capabilities and practices, we're going to leverage the open groups thinking around business architecture. Business architecture in my mind is absolutely critical to digital in a way that might be a little bit different than applying technology to the internal operating model of an organization. If you're, if you're going to really transform that customer experience transform that business model, you have to understand and have the capability to have a business architecture. So that's going to be a core piece of what we incorporate in our program. So that's really what we want to talk about and share today. I went kind of a mile a minute. I know we're just trying to catch us up a little bit on time. But as, as we kind of come to a close here, our ask of you and I didn't have time to pull Q&A questions as we go, but what's the, what's the feedback you have? What's your reaction to this? Do you feel like this is that the right set of roles? Do you feel like this is the right set of topics? Do you feel like this is the right sort of program that's needed to help us as an industry re-skill and upskill for the digital age? And as we look to that, does incorporating and banking in open group certifications right into the middle of an OSU certification make sense to you? Is that something that you, you as a potential learner might be interested in? So that's what we want to talk about today. I've got maybe a couple of minutes. I know we're right up against a rake, but maybe a question or two, Steve, if we've got them. And then if anybody has other questions, feel free to leverage the URL here to learn more, to submit a question to us, or even to get some information about the pilot that we're going to be running here in September. Mike and AC, thank you both very much. Warm virtual round of applause for that and for making us up some time as well. But we do have a couple of questions. So first point that came in, what's the danger of having IT investing and implementing technologies without a business vision? Isn't this the catalyst of technical debt? Wouldn't starting with the Y, i.e. a vision be a better place? Absolutely. Absolutely it would be. And so this isn't about IT starting with a technical vision. This is about a digital vision for the enterprise. And I would argue that that's what's different about digital. Digital is all about how we're going to transform our business organization, our business model, our customer experience, and then how are we going to leverage technology to help us do that in the most effective, transformative way possible. Technology has been able here here, but it also is opening up new what's possible. Things that we have never been able to do before, ways that we've been able to interact with people that we've never been able to do before, assumptions that we've had historically about how we had to interact. In fact, I'll give you a really good one from my day job, right? As we talked about, I'm doing this from an Ohio State perspective where I'm an adjunct faculty, but my day job, I work at Nationwide. And in our world, we interact with our customers through an independent agent. And this pandemic and our push towards a digital enterprise here at Nationwide is making us rethink what is the role of technology to enable Nationwide to interact directly with our customers versus always forcing us to interact with agents. What's Nationwide's role in interacting with agents differently, leveraging technology? And how do we support agents with technology in new and different ways? So it's absolutely being driven by a business conversation, but it's also a new set of capabilities that we have to really rethink what's possible because of the technology capabilities, the new digital capabilities and practices that are coming to the forefront. Yeah, there's some fundamental business model and design issues there that are going to be impacted by this. Question, maybe this one for AC or all you might, but how are other universities or centers of academic excellence focusing on the same area? Or are you aware of doing so? Yeah, so I can add that, Michael, I do think again, if you think about it, the concept of digital enterprise, digital work is not new. I mean, this has been going on for a long time that I even as far as I know as a researcher, I've studied my own research past, I've studied how companies actually have to involve in digital work and manage time zone barriers when they're operating all over the world. But what has happened is again, just because of COVID-19, there has been an increased emphasis from all universities, given that they're also teaching online, to think about how to engage with our audiences, be it students or executives differently. So where I see, I think there are so many different universities. I think we've already talked about a few MIT being one. I know Austin, UT, Austin, Texas, they've done some work along these lines. Carnegie Mellon has done some work. So I do know that there are some proceedings to it. But what I want to make a point, I think going back, tying it back to the previous question is this cannot be a be all and end all. And this is like a way to think about our work differently. And how do you now align everything? The way we do work, the way we communicate, the way we actually coordinate, the way we understand customers, the way we design, the way we iterate back and forth, the way we experiment, everything has to be thought through differently given that now there's a new form of communication. So given that, I think there is so much push from other universities and other institutions, great institutions all around the world on this, but it's nothing new. That's what I want to say. It's nothing new, but there are some existing things that aren't there. Right. And some increased urgency on getting it done, obviously. Absolutely. Okay. Will this program underline the fact that the functioning EA is critical? Yeah. So to your point, I believe that enterprise architecture is a critical part of, and one of the best practices to enable the digital transformation. I've always said architecture is the bridge between strategy and execution. And if you remember the framework I outlined, you may remember that our framework is vision, transformation, execution. Well, without saying it overtly, there's a pretty big spot in that framework for architecture. So, yes, architecture will be part of the messaging, the vision elements of our framework, and our roles for digital executives. Architecture will obviously be a critical part of the transformation and our role related to digital architects. And then an understanding of architecture and the importance of it will also be a part of the digital execution elements that we'll bring to the table too. Great. And thank you for that. And a final question, because we are eating into the break. Do you see digital architecture replacing enterprise architecture? And do you see differences between them? Great question. And I am not going to try to answer that right before we go to a break because that'll take far too long to answer. Right. In short, I believe that there are some new things that we need to think about and consider in the context of digital transformation and digital enterprise. Whether you define that as enterprise architecture or digital architecture, I think is maybe not even a valuable part of the conversation. I think the more important piece is what are the specific capabilities and practices we need to effectively drive a digital transformation. And I don't really care what you call the toolbox you pull the tool from. Right. Right. And just a last final real specific question. We talked about other universities doing things in this area. Are you aware of any other universities developing courses specifically around the DP box in the open group? The only one I am currently aware of is the University of St. Thomas. Right. There may be others that I am personally not aware of. But and actually Ohio State has one already available with more to come. Right. Gentlemen, we'll again, a big thank you for your for your time and and your. Thank you for having me.