 Today, Suresh would like to discuss the three eras of enterprise architecture and what is coming up in the new era of 3.0 and how the landscape of enterprise architecture is going to change. So a warm virtual welcome for Suresh over to you, sir. Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. I hope that you're all staying safe in this COVID era. So today I would like to talk about the enterprise architecture in the digital age. So a little bit about myself, I think Simon has introduced me, but just to give a quick overview of what I did. So I've been in the industry for the past 30 years and I've provided enterprise architecture consulting services in various industries like finance, automotive, health and retail. So some of the success stories that I want to share with you is we brought business agility within the organizations by enabling the business capabilities by planning and implementing those business capabilities in an agile way. We have developed some technologies around that. And then we helped organizations to digitally transform basically by architecting the digital platforms for those organizations using SMAC IT. I will explain that abbreviation SMAC IT. And then we optimized the infrastructure within the organizations, which brought about 40 to 60% savings. And also we did some application portfolio management, which is kind of correlated with that one. In some organizations, we did it in a separate initiative, which achieved some about, you know, 50% optimization in the organizations. And we provided some security services to the organizations and establishing the security at an enterprise level. And also we got some accolades from the CIO review magazine. We've been recognized as the top 20 companies across the world. And then who are providing enterprise active services. And we've been recognized as a company of the month in the July 25, 2015 edition. Now I would like to walk you through the journey of the EA, the history of the EA, right? I would like to take you to the past and then I would like to take you to the future. Now, so again, a disclaimer here. So this is my classification of the history of the enterprise architecture. So I hope those who are in the EA space for long would agree that. But if you have any questions on this, please feel free to post it on the Q&A. We'll take it up after the presentation. Now, I categorize all the EA into three categories. So EA 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, right? So I think that, so I, the 1.0 started late 80s, right? So it started very low and you know the reasons in 90s, we were developing systems left and right, right? So there was no EA or very little EA, right? And then after the 2000.com bubble burst, the EA eruption rate picked up rampant, right? So and then after the 2010s, again, it started to go down because the technology was rampant after 2010. So we have all the latest technologies like the smackage, the social media, analytics, cloud computing, all this stuff. And we are at this 2020 with the COVID, right? And so with the COVID coming in, I'm guessing that again, the adoption rate of EA is going to go up because we need to consolidate the systems, we need to consolidate the infrastructure. Again, we need to optimize whatever we are doing, right? Otherwise, probably I wouldn't say so, but my guess is we are going, the EA eruption rate is going to go up, right? So that's how I would like to categorize the EA. Now, let me walk you through what happened during the EA 1.0, right? So it was all technology focused. We tried to optimize the technology, but business and IT were disconnected. They are all in silo, so there was no connection whatsoever between the business and the IT, right? And the development was a bit traditional, like a waterfall method and all that. And it's all like whatever the governance we have, the very little governance that we had, it is all gated, right? So at every stage, we used to review the projects and so it was a very traditional gated governance. So that was the 1.0. And one of the good initiatives what I had observed, and this is one of the clients did this one, is to optimize the technology stack, right? So for each and every layer, right, right from the hardware to the OAS to the database, application servers, the data servers and security, all the shared services, they picked a product for each layer and then they built this technology stack so that the development teams and the operation teams can use this stack, right? So when I said that optimization of the technology infrastructure, so this is one of the most cool thing that I have seen in the industry is building this technology stack so that the organizations were able to optimize their technology infrastructure. So that was one of the major initiatives that I had observed during that 1.0. And to be an enterprise architect, we needed mostly technology skills, technical skills, right? So we didn't need any business skills or anything else, right? So all that we had to focus as an enterprise architect is to build this technology infrastructure, the technology services, right? So most predominantly, you should be an expert in the technology architecture rather than anything else, right? So that was the 1.0 and the maturity model, if you look at for 1.0 was we used only, you know, CMMI related maturity models which are predominantly for the implementation side, right? So that was all the maturity we were assessing at that time. Now after that 2000, I'm sorry, again, the governance, if you take the governance, so it is all gated governance and we have several gates during the process of development, right? To screen the ideas, to scope the ideas, right? To build the business case, to develop, test and launch. So we used to have gates at every stage of the development and the governance process is a bit of a lengthy process and, you know, there used to be a lot of friction between the development and the boards and, you know, it was, it was not a smooth governance, I would say. But those days, we were just learning about enterprise architecture, right? Now came the 2.0, right? So after the 2000, 2000.com bubble bus, then we got the holistic enterprise architecture, meaning when we started to optimize technology infrastructure in the early 2000s, we realized that unless we look from a business perspective, unless we optimize the business and align IT to the business and architect IT to align to the business, we cannot achieve much benefit, right? So with that thought process, so we got the holistic enterprise architecture in place and by mid-thousands, we got that concept in concrete. And then business started to engage EA a bit more, so there was some kind of alignment between the business and the IT. And there was some agile development also going on parallely. There was some waterfall development, but in parallel, there was some agile development also. And the governance was a little bit collaborative than like gated before, right? So it was, you know, so there was a feedback mechanism from the implementation teams also. So it's a bit of collaborative governance rather than a traditional governance, I would say. And we started, so by mid-thousand, 2010s, I would say, or 2010 onwards, I would say, like so we started to get the digital transformation, taking off the new technologies coming in, right? So the cloud computing and all this. And the FinTech started to transform a little bit more. So we got the transformations going on in the mid-cycle of the 2.0 like from, you know, 2010 onwards, right? And for this, the skills needed to be an enterprise architect are, so we needed some soft skills, generic skills, right? How do we, you know, the leadership skills, written communication skills, so all the soft skills were needed. And then the business skills also were needed to build the business case, strategic planning, etc. And then enterprise architectural skills like building block design, modeling, right? And then program project management skills, where we have to manage the teams, right? And establish the programs to manage the projects and some general IT, general knowledge skills, right? Technical skills, technical IT skills, right? For the technology infrastructure and all, legal for the laws and regulations and all that. So the enterprise architect needs to be a kind of a jack-of-all, kind of a person to do enterprise architecture during that 2002, 2020, right? So that was the transformation of an enterprise architect. And then to do that, the maturity, we had to assess the maturity, we used the ACMM, which is from the US Department of Commerce. So this is the maturity model, there are six levels of maturity. So and then we use these nine elements for assessing the maturity of the organizations. So the architecture process, so how well the processes are being defined for the architecture and then how well the architecture development is done within the organizations and how well the business is linked to the enterprise architecture, right? And the senior management involves like how much, you know, we got the buy-in from the senior management, how much the business units are participating, right? How well we are communicating to the whole organization on the EA aspects, right? The artifacts are how much EA education is done across the enterprise. And security is from an IT perspective here. So how well the IT is integrated with the enterprise architecture. And then the architecture governance, how well we are governing, what are the, have we established the governance processes or not. And then the IT investment, how well the enterprise architecture is involved in the IT investment and acquisition study. So those are the nine elements that we considered to assess the maturity of the organization back then, right? And I see that there is a two schools of thought during this period. One went on in the traditional path where they still continued the waterfall kind of development. But what many organizations did was they reduce the quality gates, the governance gates, right? So instead of having five or six gates, now we have only three gates, like, so the governance was made a bit easy, a bit more collaborative, right? So that was the change I have seen in some organizations. And some organizations went agile, right? So it is all agile development, incremental development, and the governance was probably very less or even zero, I would say, right? And one of the drawbacks that I've seen in these two schools of thought was these organizations, so those who picked the traditional development path, they were developing all the applications and the same methodology, using the same methodology, either traditional or agile, right? So those who picked the agile, they were developing all the systems or the IT development on the agile development, right? So which is dangerous, which is not very good. I will explain why in a minute when we get into the 3.0, right? And so it was all, so it was big agile governance, right? So forecasting and budget was done dynamically and the measurements, it was all portfolio level metrics and measurements, and the compliance is also, it's all coordinated between the teams and it's a continuous process, right? Now coming to the 3.0, now this is one of the Harvard professor has come up with this, these are the transformations more from a business perspective, right? So they categorize the transformations into three categories which are like, so one is operational and the second one is the operational model and the third one is strategic. Operational means, so you're trying to bring operational efficiency, you're trying to make things faster, better, cheaper, right? Using the new technologies, so whatever the new technologies that we have, the SMAC IT, so which I will talk about again in a minute. And so that was just that, so bringing that operational efficiency is the first of the transformation. And the second transformation, which is the operational model itself, meaning doing something fundamentally in a different way, like Netflix, right? Being moving away from distributing the DVDs to streaming online, right? So they use the new technologies, but also they change the business model. So that is the second operational model. And the third one is you're completely changing the essence of the company, means you are crossing the boundaries of the business domains, right? So like Amazon going from retail to cloud computing or Google from advertising to the other areas, right? So the companies have crossed the boundaries, they were into multiple businesses and they were changing the whole essence of the company itself, right? They're completely transforming from a technology perspective as well as from a business perspective. So they're coming up with a completely new direction on how they are managing it, right? So now all the digital technologies that we can put in, so this is where only using the digital technologies is operational. But if you are changing the business model also, then you are into the operational model. But if you are changing the whole way that you are doing the business itself will be strategic, okay? Now, so in the book, Design for Digital, Gene Ross and the co-authors came up with these five building blocks to digitally transform any organization. So the first one is you need to have a shared customer insights, right? Unless you have the understanding of the customer needs, right, you cannot transform. So you can use any technologies like Big Data or whatever to get our social media to get the information from the customers, analyze it. So you need to have an understanding of what the customer needs, right? And you need to build a digital platform, again, using this market, right? Social media, mobility, analytics, cloud computing and the internet of things, right? So you need to build a platform so that the information can go from various platforms, from one platform to another, how you can make sense out of that information and how you can come up with some new business models, you know, how you can transform your business. And then you need an accountability framework, right? Who owns what? Who owns what components, what, you know, what business units are? So there should be an accountable framework so that you have an understanding of who owns what and the whole organization should operate in a collaborative way rather than fighting for each other. And then those organizations who kind of expose their digital platform functionality like Apple exposing their platform to the developers so that they can build their, you know, apps on top of their platform, right? So those organizations excel during this, you know, digital transformation. And then to operate all this, we need an operational backbone where you build, you identify your core systems, your data, your systems to operate efficiently, right? So these are the, so I kind of agree to this, you know, five billion blocks that we need to digitally transform any organization. And so I've been talking about this, you know, smack it concept, right? So how you can take the information from the social media, right? How you can analyze this, that information using big data or any analytics methods and how you can use the potential of the cloud computing to analyze that one. And how you can get the information from the sensors like, you know, internet of things like, you know, sensors or any, any kind of equipment, right? Even using the mobile technologies and all. So this smack it becomes the backbone of this digital transformation, right? And within the open group, I don't know if you are familiar with, we have a forum called Open Platform, where in, we are trying to come up with the specifications on how these various platforms can exchange the information and how we can make sense out of that information and how we can transform our organizations, right? So those who want to look into that open platform, you can look into that. So basically the open platform or this market, which is an extension, the open platform is an extension of that smack it is transforming various industries, right? So you can take any industry, retail or, you know, agriculture, transportation, healthcare, right? So you take any industry, this market of the open platform, the digital platform is kind of transforming the organizations within any organization, right? And to build this, what do we need, right? So I took the skillset that we needed earlier, but I kind of expanded that a little bit. So now the business skills that we need is should be cross-domain, cross-industry, because as you have seen, any strategic organization is crossing the boundaries of the organizations. And then we need to have that smack it kind of skills to do that. And moreover, in this, you know, post-COVID era, right, we need to embed ethical skills within the organizations, right? So having, you know, justice, service, community, right? So these are the things that we need to embed within the employees of any organization or within the citizens of any country as well, right? And this is the maturity model. I took the same maturity ACMM, but so, okay, actually, Terry and I are coming up with some maturity model, which is in working progress. So instead of business linkage, I would say you should be business technology. Why? Because technology should be part and parcel of the business. Now, you can't think of technology outside the business or you can think of business outside the technology. That should be one and the same. And that is going to happen. And then the enterprise security, so instead of IT security, I kind of made it generic so that, you know, you can look into all the security aspects, rather than just the IT security. And also enterprise investment and acquisition strategy should be so that I made it a bit more generic. And these are the quality attributes for any architecture. You should have those architecture should be fit for decision making, right? So it should be agile, interoperable, so the usable, secure and open. So these are the qualities that we are, you know, Terry and I, I'm thinking of for any architecture to have this quality. Now, coming to the governance model, I kind of lean to the bimodal governance model because all the projects cannot be implemented either traditionally or in agile way. So you should have both the things going on, right? So some has to go through the traditional development methodology and some has to be agile, right? So that is what, so a bimodal governance model helps the organizations to transform a bit more, you know, in a faster way, right? So those initiatives, which are long term, which impacts many business units, if you are building something core to the organization, those have to go through a traditional development and some innovative projects where you don't know the requirements that, you know, that clearly. So if you want to get the feedback from the business units, then you have to, you can go through the agile method. And so again, the organizations has to be agile end to end, right? So again, we have, we are agile in one or two, right? So maybe in the development and the operations with the DevOps, but the agility should come from the architecture, from come from the planning itself, right? So agility, I think, should be end to end. Now, having said all this, right? So especially when we are developing new technologies, we have to make sure that the new technologies are built in such a way that that are beneficial to the society. Right? So now there are some ethical frameworks within the industry, especially for AI, because when you take AI, when you are training the systems, right? If in a good way, they act in a good way. If you are training them in a bad way, they act in a bad way, right? So we should take the responsibility of building the systems in a good way, right? So I think, so these are the principles that we need to follow. Beneficience means, now, what is the benefit, what is the benefit to the society, right? And what harm, what not harm should, should we do, right? So we should avoid the harm, right? And it should be autonomous, right? And then give justice to the, to the whole society. And how, so we should take the accountability for what we are doing, right? So these are the ethical, you know, the principles that we need to follow when developing the digital transformation, digital technologies. And Australian government has come up with some principles and same, the Singapore government also, they had come up with some principles, which are pretty much the same, you should be human centric, right? You should be transparent, you should do something good rather than doing anything harm. And Singapore government went to an extent and they gave some guidance on when humans should interact with these AI systems, right? When they should be out, right? If the probability of harm and the severity are both low, here humans can be out of the loop. But if both are severe humans should be in the loop and then if it is, you know, low severity or, you know, low probability and all. So then humans can be over the loop, meaning they have to define like when you have to intervene or when you can pull off out of that, you know, the decision making process or whatever it is, right? And then so Singapore also came up with a governance framework that helps the organizations to build the systems in a better way, right? And even IEEE, you can check, there are some standards how we can develop the systems in an ethical manner, which are beneficial to the whole society as such. So here are some takeaways. So Enterprise Architecture has evolved from technology to strategic. So we started with the technology, right? And so now we are just strategic. Now you can see that the cycle has changed. So cycle is kind of, you know, we are getting into the cycle again. So we were at probably 1.0 where we started at the 2.0. But so the initiatives that happened in the 2.0, early 2.0 when enterprises started to optimize the technology infrastructure, that was a big disaster. So we were not able to achieve the optimization that we wanted. But hopefully in this cycle, at least we do some better things and the business leaders can take better decisions to optimize the technology that is beneficial to the organization as well as to the society and build the digital transformation building blocks. So in whatever way you want, right? In whatever order you want, you can build those five building blocks. And we need to always balance between the standardization and innovation, right? So you cannot go extreme for anything, which will be a disaster again. And you need a different set of skills. As I said, in the coming era, we need cross-domain, cross-industry skills to be an enterprise architect. And you have to choose the right method for development. As I said, you have to choose the right development methodology for right products, projects. And then use the technology for the benefit of society. And also you can embed ethical, you should embed ethical values within the enterprises, within the citizens of the enterprise. So I'm thinking that I went a little bit overboard, but so that's my presentation. If you have any questions, you can shoot me an email or you can post the questions in the Q&A. We will take up those questions now.