 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 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. So, guidance should have a sensible opposite. So let's take architecture principles as a form of guidance. Is the opposite a sensible decision to take? What do I mean by that? So, many places have architecture principles and I personally think they can be highly valuable in providing guidance for decision making. And I like to structure them as patograph with a name and a description and a rationale that gives you some idea of why, so you can understand the purpose and the implications, all of the consequences if you follow it in your decision making. But most importantly about principle is that the opposite has to be a sensible course of action. My favourite of all time was to see a principle that said the right tool for the right job at the right time. I almost found myself thinking, as opposed to what? The wrong tool for the wrong job at the wrong time? You know, I don't think anyone ever woke up and went, aha, I'm glad I was given that bit of advice. So is there a sensible alternative? Is it even possible? Otherwise, it's not really guidance. Hi everyone and welcome to Toolkit Tuesday. This is episode 15 of Toolkit Tuesday. So we've done quite a lot of these over the last six months or so. If this is your first one, then welcome. If this is not, then welcome back. We're delighted to have you and wherever you are in the world, I hope you're keeping safe and well. Our main topic today is the India Academic Initiative in Architecture or the Initiator Programme. And I'll introduce that in a few moments. But first of all, I'd like to thank Paul Holman for his thoughts on enterprise architecture. He always has some great insights and things for us all to think about. So thanks for the latest in the EA Minute Series, Paul. Great stuff. A couple of things before we start. Our thoughts are obviously with the people of Ukraine at the moment. And please join me in wishing and praying for a swift end to the tragedies that are occurring in that country. Life has to go on, obviously, but our thoughts are very much with the people of Ukraine, as I'm sure yours are. A quick housekeeping item. Here at the Open Group at Toolkit Tuesday, we do questions through the QA channel here on the WebEx Tool, the QA channel, not the chat channel, please. QA channel you will find, if you click on the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, that will give you an option to open the QA channel. Just click on it and that box will open and submit any questions you might have for today's speaker there, please. But please do use the chat channel for communicating with others who are attending the broadcast live, or in particular for letting us know where you're joining us from. We love the little messages that say where you are in the world at the time you're joining us. And I'll kick off, in my case, Sonoma County, California. The real wine country of California, as we say here. Anyway, without further ado, I will introduce our main speaker today. And it's a pleasure to introduce a colleague of mine here at the Open Group, Dr. Palab Sahar, who is General Manager for India for the Open Group, as well as our Chief Architect for Southeast Asia. He's also the President of the Association of Enterprise Architects in India. Dr. Sahar has been identified as a thought leader by IBM Smart City Connect and featured by Forbes Magazine. He is a Mayati NGD 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 architecture initiatives. So a warm welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, please, for Dr. Palab Sahar. Over to you, Palab. Thank you, Steve, for the great introduction. And a good day to all of you from wherever you're joining. This is a very interesting session that we're going to talk about today. And as Steve was introducing it, it's called the India Academic Initiative in Architecture. Let me just share my slides, you know, and yeah, I'm just getting my slides here. So I think it should work now. Let's see. Yes, I think you can see my slides now. As I was saying, this is a very interesting initiative we are about to launch on the 9th of April. But I think this is a good opportunity for the India team and particularly me to talk about it. At least to look at the overall vision, the objectives, what are the foundation and pillars, what is the scope of this initiative, the guiding principles, some activities and benefits. So as Steve was talking during the introduction of the India Academic Initiative in Architecture, and I'm going to provide a few slides which summarizes what we have in mind. And obviously, as you would understand that because this is going to be launched into weeks time and over time, things might develop. So this is a work in progress and things can change over time as the work group gets into its practice, so to speak. So talking about the initiate, let me set some context. I think we all understand that over the past five to seven years, there is a huge demand supply gap for enterprise architects which is corroborated by these numbers and by these statements by entities like Gartner, like the Harvard Business Review, the World Bank, McKinsey, and of course the University's grants commission here in India. So as you can see on this slide, my intention here is not to read everything about it, but it does talk about the need to train enterprise architects and more importantly to introduce enterprise architecture as a formal subject in our graduate and postgraduate level courses and programs. So if you see the, there was a paper published by the Harvard Business Review just a few weeks back, as late as December of 2021, where it talks about the need for MBA programs to be updated so that they are suited to the digital era. And if you read that paper, it does talk about the need to teach enterprise architecture. Same thing with McKinsey, you can see that there, the need for architects is there and this is being corroborated and this is being further supported by the fact that today if you, I'm sure all of you are familiar with the Gartner hype cycle. So this is the Gartner hype cycle 2021 for enterprise architecture. And you see today, enterprise architecture as a discipline is at a nice spot. It is getting to a point where it is useful, it is going to become productive and it is going to deliver value to the organizations. And we all understand the past two to two and a half years because of the pandemic. There is a lot of emphasis on digitalization and digital transformation. This brings us to the point where the value and the influence of enterprise architects has improved and we know that for sure, because there are many surveys done by entities like McKinsey, like IDC, like Gartner, they talk about the value of enterprise architecture where they are no longer assumed to be just useful, but they are taken as trusted, I would say, internal advisors to becoming more influential within the organization. And this is the picture which kind of in my view nicely captures what we are talking of. The value of enterprise architects in the context of the digitalization and the digital transformation that we have seen at least accelerated in the last two to two and a half years as a result of the pandemic which I think all of us would agree with. So with this context, what we thought is it's important therefore for us to introduce architecture as a subject at postgraduate levels. And I think we realize that this is something that would require us to bring the industry and the academia together because it's important for us to deliver design, develop and deliver courses that are industry relevant for academic consumption, which is very important. So this is the formal universities and academic institutions. It should provide a platform for industry and academia to collaborate so that we can further and advance the discipline through projects, through applied research. It should encourage the students to pursue a career in architecture. Now, a lot of you are architects and we all understand and we all agree that we have become architects because we have practiced architecture as a profession, as a discipline on the job. We didn't quote unquote learn architecture formally. Most of us did not learn architecture formally during our master's degree or whatever education you have. So this is something that we want to address through this initiate program. We also intend to enable capacity building activities, especially at the universities, at the academic institution level because this is where the faculty members, the teaching resources are available and therefore they can be bolstered through the body of knowledge that already exists. So what we have done here is we have identified the six foundational pillars of the initiative. They are the six C's as you can see on the right of your picture, arranging all the way from curriculum to career design to credentials which includes certification to making the courses contemporary to encourage collaboration between industry and academia and also to give back to the community. So with those three things we have come up with certain benefits and certain activities. Let's look at what those activities are. So these are the concerns that we hope to address through these initiatives and I've taken all the three key stakeholders. One is of course the industry and a potential employer. So the employers are asking the question, where are we going to get the next generation of enterprise architects from? How do we groom and nurture enterprise architects within the organization? What institutional and organizational steps are we putting in place to create a career track for enterprise architects? What should universities do to improve the quality and quantity of enterprise architects and how do we support the university in addressing supply-side issues? In creating these questions we have spoken to industry partners who happen to be our members, we have spoken to universities, we have also interacted with students who may be the potential employers. Look at the universities. How do we create interest in faculty and students? Because this is an applied area, right? So therefore we have to create interest in faculty and students and obviously based on the data that I've produced in the last three, four slides, I think that interest is already generating. So they're asking the question, the universities are asking the question, what support is available for course design, development, and delivery? How do we train our faculty and keep them updated? How do we interact with the industry to enrich this initiative? What is needed to calibrate the student expectations? And finally, very important stakeholder in everything that we are doing are the students and the potential or the future employees. What is the career path that the industry is providing? What is the growth prospect? How are the industries supporting the industry, the employers, potential employers, supporting and encouraging enterprise architects? How do we make sure that the courses and the programs that are taught in terms of enterprise architecture are industry-relevant and they are globally accepted? So these are the, in a nutshell, these are the few questions that we think are important and these are the kind of issues or concerns we intend to address in this initiate program. Now, these are the indicative areas of work flowing from the previous slide. We intend to work on model curriculums, even provide certain pedagogical tools and teaching aids, some faculty development programs, subject matter content. Fortunately, the open group library has so much of content, but it requires a lot of curation because if you just send a newcomer into the library, more likely that the person will get confused because of the volume, the sheer volume of content that we already have. So which means the work group, the experts in the work group need to curate that content and make it relevant for consumption within the academic institutions. How can we provide mentoring, support and guide? How can we have industry academia joint programs, credentials and certifications? We have spoken about that, skills and competency framework and internship. This is very important because as we know architecture is an applied field. It's very important for senior architects in the industry to be able to provide internship projects to be able to provide mentoring to the students who take architecture as a course in their university. So these are the indicative areas of work. As I said, this is work in progress and some of these may get modified, but I think you get the idea between the last slide and this slide in terms of what we intend to do in this work group. Now, what are the benefits? Obviously, if you are coming from the industry, you get to access future job candidates. As senior architects, you gain experience in mentoring bright students. Now, a lot of architects are good architects themselves, but do they have the experience of mentoring junior architects? So that's that in and of itself is a skill development. You also have the opportunity to give back to your alma mater where you have graduated from and obviously that creates a lot of good will and good feelings within your institute, within your university. You can interact with faculty members, advance the profession, you collaborate with other universities in developing and enhancing contemporary curriculum, and obviously you learn what are the institutional steps taken by other organizations back to groom and nurture architects that you can incorporate within your own organization. The participation benefits for universities would be, you get a platform to participate in curriculum design, you build connection with industry leaders because as I said, this is a platform between the industry and the academia. You interact with other universities, you become obviously as an academic member, you join the architecture forum and you get access to all the activities of the architecture forum. You network with other universities, other faculty members and collaborate within the academic fraternity. So these are the benefits of the universities. Now, obviously we have members who come from the industry, but what we intend to do here is to increase our ecosystem of academic members. Obviously becoming an academic member comes with its own privileges. For instance, you access all the work and activities of the architecture forum. It's body of knowledge, you get access to our curriculum, your academic license course material, you get opportunity to build and enhance your faculty capability, so on and so forth. And I have already spoken about the internships, mentoring opportunities, courseware licensing, so I don't intend to get into the details. But obviously the slides will be made available to you, the recording will be made available to you. You can have a look at the privileges for universities to work as academic members. Now, these are our current members. As you can see, we have members already, some very, very large well-known organizations who are part of our work group. Globally, we also have two academic members and I'm sure over time this is going to grow. So this is just FYI to understand that this is already gaining and generating a lot of interest in the industry in terms of how they can collaborate with the academia to kind of be part of this platform and create an ecosystem of academic courses in the context of architecture. Now, we seek and welcome senior enterprise architects. So when I'm using the term enterprise architects, it includes all variations of roles like business architects, data architects, technology architects, IT architects, system architects, solution architects, platform architects, digital architects, security architects, so on and so forth. So they can be part, if you're from the industry, you can be part of this initiative program. This is a global not limited to just those from India or in India. We also encourage universities and academic institutions and faculty members who are going to benefit from this program to be part of this. In fact, on April 9th, which is our launch date, we are going to have an event as you can see on the right of the slide, which is between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Indian Standard Time. This is the outline of the agenda of the event. So please come and join the event. I'm sure some of you may have already received the e-mails to register for this event and participate. Here we will have two panel discussions. One industry panel while academic panel, industry panel led by industry leaders, academic panel led by academic leaders and also having interaction between the two sides so to speak in terms of how the industry can support the academia and how the academia can support the industry. So that's what we have planned in a nutshell on April 9th. There are some principles. We will develop work products that universities can consume. That's important. Focus around the six C's that I showed you earlier. We will leverage the current body of literature, the current standards, current tools and maintain simplicity. We will use the overall frame of reference. I've shown you the 10 different areas of work, so to speak. We will solicit feedback from universities where adoption is undertaken because once they become academic members, they become part of the open group family and therefore they will help us improve the future work products and we will be open to collaboration with other relevant stakeholders. And this will happen over time from joint initiatives. I think with that I finish my presentation. Let me stop sharing so that I'll be happy to take any question and answers on this. All right. So I have received two questions, which is I think fairly natural and logical to ask. First question is when we mentioned the word architecture, is it limited to just TOGAP? The answer is absolutely no. Obviously TOGAP is a very, very widely used standard of ours globally, but we have used architecture here as an umbrella term, which means it could also use the adoption of other standards produced by other forums of the open groups. So for instance, aspects of IT for IT, it could be security architecture, it could be architecture in the commercial aviation sector. I'm just giving you some examples. While TOGAP is definitely the primary framework, it is also open to other standards and other grades produced by forums which have a heavy architecture component. And that is what we want to do. All right. And the second question which I have received is that, which is I think it's a very great question because the name is initiate in India. Is it limited to India? So the answer is yes and no. So our intent of doing this was to first start off in India, get to a relevant critical mass and then open it up for global acceptance. Because, you know, so that's what we have done at this point we have discussed in the work group level. However, keep in mind that any work product that comes out of this work group will be available in the open group library. So let's assume that I'm giving you an example. Let's assume that there is a model curriculum for an MBA program, right, which is produced by this work group. Now that is part of the open group library. So even though it is produced by this work group, it is available to all universities across the world. So that's why I said it's both yes and no. So eventually we would like to make it global, but we want to start off with India and then eventually grow it up with, as we reach the critical mass. So these are the two questions I got. Are there any other questions? Okay. I'm seeing the questions in the chat channel. So I hope I can take that. So let's see. There is, okay. So the one question that has come up is that, do I need to sign up for the initiate program? So if you are from the industry and your organization is already a member of the open group, any forum, you can just join the work group. Nothing else is needed. You know, just contact us and we'll be happy to make you part of the initiate program. If you are from an organization which is not a member of the open group, then your organization needs to become a member of the open group, any forum again. But if architecture forum, so be it. And then you can start, you know, you can participate in the initiate program. If you are coming from an academic institution like a university, as I showed you in one of my slides, your university has to become an academic member of the open group, which is at a much reduced fee. Okay. And then you can participate in the initiative work group. Okay. I don't see any other question. Let me quickly go through. Yeah. Yes. So as I said, if your organization is already a member of the open group, there is absolutely no problem. Just reach out to us and we'll take care of, you know, including you in the work group. All right. Looks like there are no other questions. As I said, the slide deck and the recording will be made available to you. And, okay, the last question which I get is how to register for the April 9 event. As I said, you know, if you go to our website, it's already published there. And otherwise, you know, just reach out to us. We'll send you the registration date. Okay. I think we have addressed all the questions. So are there any other questions? Do we have? Ah, okay. As I said, so the question here is, do we have a timeline for any curriculum or academic resources launched for initiate? Yes. There is a timeline. Again, it's a member-driven activity. I've shown you the members, current members in one of my slides. It means that the members have to come up with a timeline and a project plan in terms of what we want to do in terms of creating a model curriculum and talking to the universities. So that's the way it is, right? Yes. There is a timeline. We want to achieve something concrete within this year. You know, at least a model curriculum and some kind of supporting for mentoring and internships. But again, the members will also take a call in terms of how much time they can contribute to this workgroup and take this forward. Okay. So it looks like I have covered all the questions. There's nothing else pending unless I've missed. Yeah. So let me hand this over back to Steve. So Steve, back to you. Thank you, Pella. Great stuff as ever. Thank you very much for your presentation and also the Q&A session today. So thanks very much for doing that. And thank you to all of you for joining us today. Don't go away just yet. I do just want to tell you a little about the next episode of Toolkit Tuesday, which will be two weeks from today. And we will be cycling back to some of the questions that we've had over the last 15 episodes, as it is now. And some of the ones we didn't get to. So please join us again in two weeks where we will go back to some of those questions with a panel. And we'll also have a chance for you to ask some other questions live on the day. And promises to be a very informative session. So please join us again in two weeks time, April 5th, episode 16 of Toolkit Tuesday. Meanwhile, thank you from me, Steve Nunn, and keep safe wherever you are in the world. Thanks for joining us. Bye for now.