 my name is Chris Ford. The title of my presentation references the mythic digital enterprise and my intended audience is primarily the architecture practitioner in those aspiring enterprises. I will cover some considerations for navigating your learning needs and the needs of your employers or clients. Many but not all of the enterprises that compose the membership of the open group are global companies. They're headquartered around the world. They've got access to considerable resources and with significant EA practices. For those of you who are architects in those organizations, you are likely being provided with a well-defined role, a career path, learning opportunities, mentorship and other support. Some of you may be in an organization undertaking an enterprise transformation and being asked to lead aspects of the transformation. Some of you may be looking around and asking what is all the fuss about. Thinking that nothing much seems to be good changing but I've been told I'm on my way to a career train wreck. So here enterprise architecture I've asserted as a management discipline for dealing with complexity and delivering value and the model on the right summarizes some of the dimensions we as architects must consider when architecting, strategy, culture, ecosystems and business models, business transformations. We as agents of the transformation are architecting for the delivery of products and services to customers via changes in strategy, operating models, technologies and operating efficiencies. The current competency demands for architects listed here are substantial and we just heard Steve announce and Mark talk about the Toga standard 10th edition. There was a lot for you as architects in version 9.2 and there's even more for you in the 10th edition. All of this Toga material is relevant to the competency demands outlined here. The Glass Door Survey for 2022 of the 50 best jobs in America estimates that about 14,000 openings exist for EAs in the USA market at this time. Now this shortage has actually been an issue for many years. It's not limited to the USA. There is a chronic global shortage of available architects. The Glass Door Survey also identifies the number one ranked best job in the USA for 2022 as the enterprise architect. Average EA salaries are currently 145,000 US dollars a year with a job satisfaction rating of 4.1 on a scale of one to five. Also the Certification Magazine survey for salaries in 2022 places Toga as the leading EA certification commanding a similar average salary. So for individuals, if you're aspiring to build the competencies listed here, how might you approach doing so? And for employers, it's important for you to be locating people with the potential to develop those competencies and begin developing them because they may not be available in the marketplace for simple hire or contract. So with those average salaries, is that all that matters to architects? Now this survey by McKinsey and Co and the Henley Business School on EA and Digital Leaders is available in a special edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture from the Association of Enterprise Architects. I've chosen one dimension to highlight here from a 28 page report and to paraphrase the analysis, enterprise architect's long held reputation as a mundane field with limited room for advancement can create challenges when it comes to attracting top talent. How is that true if it's the best job in North America currently? And there's been a chronic shortage of talent globally. Survey results indicate that enterprise architects generally seek interesting challenges, recognition from peers, and learning opportunities and structured career paths. So the reality is that EA is an important role but the perception of it for potential talent isn't lined up with the actual reality currently in the market. Enterprises identified as the digital leaders offer additional opportunities to attract and retain high caliber talent for their EA practices or departments. And respondents from those digital leaders are more likely to cite those areas of peer recognition, education, and well-defined career paths as features that appeal to their people and to themselves. So I want to emphasize again that there is a macro supply pipeline problem for EA's. Now the good news is that our colleagues in India at the Open Group have just launched what's called the initiate program to attempt to address that pipeline problem with the joint academia and industry collaboration effort. If you're interested in this initiate topic, you can contact any member of the Open Group staff and we can follow up with you. Now you're going to hear much more about this little bit of an extract of the survey here later when Oliver Busser from McKinsey and company and Sharma Awani from the Henry Business School speak. But the other point I wanted to make is that the respondent members from the AEA were major contributors to the survey's respondents here. The survey has been conducted over the past five years. It's updated annually and it's available as part of your membership in the AEA. So I wanted to share an overarching view on learning and development for architects from the perspective of the AEA. And that as EA is your on a personal and professional journey. Now enterprise architect here is actually a catch-all phrase for a set of specializations. Our profession is not a hierarchy. You've got to be aware of the common basic skills for architects and be able to separate them out from the specializations of your own assigned current role. Now for learning, obviously you need to understand what it is you need to know now and what you'll need to know in the future and how to get those opportunities to practice and the people that can help you develop. And the larger companies have that framework in place, but you may not be working in an organization like that. So looking here at the necessary education development areas for architects, it's a partial list, but there is some emphasis on soft skills here. So communication, people, what is the profession, design, what is an enterprise, technologies, the various specializations of architecture and execution. Again, this is just a partial list. So it helps to have an independent professional frame of reference that is independent from your own current views, your employers and clients views and your colleagues views. It's possible and perhaps likely that each of those perspectives are incongruent or even conflicting. So let's move on to a learning and development example or a case. Now this example occurs in the context of a larger talent management model, and I'm touching on learning and development for today as a segment of that larger model, specifically learning and development for architects, obviously. Now this example is actually taken from a Fortune 100 enterprise, which is currently ranked in the top 10 best places to work. And as I said before, the point is awareness for us individually of what these organizations tend to focus on to develop their people and what's relevant for our development as architects and for the practice. This enterprise model assumes that soft skills, management and leadership training are all being delivered out of HR programs. And keep that in the context for yourself as an individual that you may not have a program for that. You'll need to seek it out, right? So in the case here, what problems are being solved for? We have a demand to meet business needs that requires an increasing number of architects to be hired in or contracted. We have an absent or a lack of standardization consistency in onboarding for architects. We have resources that are currently in the architect's pool, spending too much time ramping up. People are being hired or contracted in. And they experience a negative impact on their own productivity, delivering against business issues. And when you put these things together, you can get into a situation where architects new to the enterprise are left to sink or swim. Now, we saw before you can't assume the market is going to supply against the architecture demand for some time it's not been able to and that includes contract services. The enterprise's mitigation here is to build a capability for the development of architects over time. But this is not just about onboarding as the entry point here for the example. The outcome in play for the enterprise is that by doing this type of thing, you can accelerate the time to value for customers via delivery. And that's enabled through competent engaged architects and the assets they produce, the business relevant assets they produce. And being able to rapidly orient staff to a particular situation that's in part based on a referenceable shared knowledge. So three things typically surface as critical concerns for the architect and the practice. Those are roles, career paths and training programs. So in the roles area, where are you today? What's expected? And where do you fit within the entire company? From a career path perspective, what is your opportunity for growth? Where do you want to be in the medium term where you want to go long term? And what are the optimal ways of getting there? And then, of course, related to training and experience, how do you acquire what you need? What knowledge and skills you need to develop in your current role? And what specific knowledge and skills and proficiencies are going to make you successful in your next role? So in reconciling the problems and the concerns related to this onboarding topic, an approach was determined for onboarding into the architectural practice. And of course, this required extensive work with HR and other departments that isn't all done by one organizational unit. So leveraging institution and knowledge and skills and experience of these instance means and available materials such that they are. Developing a standardized onboarding curriculum and process. Developing content ranging from general company information to specific deliverables related to the practice and methodology and other relevant activities. And then instruction as a combination of self-study, coaching, and classroom work in subsequent weeks. And then assessing for the program and for the practice at large, really, the usage relevance and ultimate value and impact on productivity and satisfaction through the program. So here's a selected example for one specialized architecture role. In this case, a technical architect, which was a form or is a formal HR definition with cellular ranges, responsibilities, and so on. And as you go through this on the slide, an industry primer dealing with value chains for the industry and the enterprise, key issues and trends, company overview, vision, brand, mission, operating principles, its history, its values, financial stats, 10Ks, things like that, culture, compliance, an organizational overview, business units, products, key leaders, bios, org charts for navigation. In the technology space, providing a view of what the technology is organization is about, their mission, strategic organization itself, again, key leadership. Now in the architecture role materials, I've surfaced Togaf here as a basis, but the practice is branded differently internally, right? So even though Togaf is underpinning this in certain areas, there is internal branding for the customizations made by the organization for their practice. So that brand name would be here rather than Togaf. The initial onboarding is filled with self-study of contextual orientation and the average is about 30 hours. So there's other areas relative to role material, things that might not be immediately obvious, but performance engineering saw microservices work, engaging with other engineering teams, the business units, you know, just generally living and working in the organization. So you've got software engineering, application development, and project management organizational use to deal with. You've got the solution blueprinting capability of how to solve a particular problem and deliver against it. And the business architecture helping to drive contextually what's going on, business unit overviews, case studies, guidebooks, etc. And then all this meshed into the competencies that are being managed for the organization. So I talked earlier about what the value proposition was for the enterprise about having competent, well-developing architects on the staff and contract it. Well, architects in reality should be producing assets of value to the organization. So there's an asset model that talks about what those things are, how they relate to the business, excuse me, the blueprint for delivery of particular solutions and implementations and the technical underpinnings of the technologies if you're in that area here for the technical architects. So these assets are maintained and revised to collaborative governance. And one of the particular feedback loops is from both the solution delivery and particular software engineering and user experience type of environment. Okay. So these assets are consumable. And here's where some of the instances of those assets live and they evolve and where the value is mined for the organization, not just out of the initial deployment of a particular task or event, but an ongoing area. So back to this point about business outcomes from the architecture delivery that actually will show up in your enterprise's annual report and positioning it to address changing business and technology opportunities that are going to be forward-looking. Now, this also is not just about the planning side, it's about being to rapidly orient teams to a particular situation or need. And that, again, is in part based on referenceable shared knowledge, particularly in team of environments or in an enduring enterprise. So this learning and development example is incomplete in scope and depth due to the time constraints allocated for us here. It is relatively dynamic and it's part of a virtuous circle through the development of business-relevant assets. And, you know, while I've been talking here, you may be going through the presentation and thinking, you know, what about this, that, or the other. So this slide is just intended to highlight topics that you might be involved in or see on the horizon for your own learning and development and for your organizational journey that were not addressed in this presentation. Okay. And that's fair, the point being that it's impossible to cover the scope and depth of the breadth of this topic here right now. And this is just a taste. But to be cautious here, for example, architecture activities for merchant acquisitions like vestiture are not on this slide either, right? And if you're involved in those, those are going to play pretty importantly in your day-to-day work. So this program, you have to look at it from an individual standpoint as much as an enterprise standpoint to say, what is it that's really going to be important for me in my role? So as I referenced earlier, we're delighted to have launched the Togoff Standard 10th Edition. It's a, it's really substantial update. And on this last slide here are references and links to it and some other practitioner-relevant materials from the Open Group, the Open Agile Architecture, the Archimage Specification, the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge, and the Open Certified Architect Program, which is part of the Open Professions area. There's a lot of experience-based shared knowledge and learnings from the industry available to you through the Open Group and through Togoff. Okay. And you can use any of it to adapt for your own learning purposes. That's pretty much what I wanted to cover here today, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me. Thanks, thanks again, and hopefully get to talk to you in the future.