 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. What was and Partygate? Stung back into action recently, I'd like to bring together two previous minute EA episodes to hopefully extend the thinking. In the River of Architecture episode, I talked about the potential need in not only having as is and to be states in architecture, but also a what was. That was mostly to understand direction of travel and trajectory and to learn from history. Following on from the crowds and parties episode, the UK government's Partygate seems to some scandalous and to others trivial. And unless you look at the what was context as part of the what was architectural state of rules, policies and governance arrangements at the time, you can't look at it objectively in the context at that time or indeed learn from it. So, of course, as architects, our job is not one to make the judgment, but we can provide and preserve that context. And what was is as critical here as is or to be. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday. My thanks there to Paul Herman of IBM for the latest in his EA minutes. The party gates are the thing that that runs and runs, but it's a great reminder that the context of what was going on at the time is important in all aspects of our world. So thank you for that, Paul. And welcome to each and every one of you wherever you are in the world. I hope you are safe and well. Great to have you with us. This is a popular topic. We've had a lot of registrations for this event today and I'm glad you can all be with us. Please do let us know. You'll see some some cats coming through on the chat channel, letting us know where you're joining us from. It's always something we like to do at the open group and in here at Toolkit Tuesday. So always good. A very international audience and we're delighted to have you with us today. So just a quick housekeeping item. We use the WebEx platform here and the way that we ask questions is through the Q&A channel. So many of you using the chat channel right now to communicate with each other, which is great. And please continue to do that. But for the questions of our presenter today, if you have any, please use the Q&A channel, not the chat channel. And the way you'll find that if it's not already on your screen is if you click on the three dots in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, you'll see the option to click on Q&A and in there you can ask a question of our presenter today. So we have a great, as I say, popular topic today. So I'm going to go straight to it and give the most time we have to that topic. And it's the topic of the Togov Standard 10th Edition, something that I've spent a lot of time talking about and answering questions about in the last month or so since we launched it. And today we're going to get a real short and sweet summary of what's new and different. And to do that, it's a great pleasure to introduce my colleague Mark Dixon, who is the Architecture Forum Director here at the Open Group. So Mark joined the Open Group actually in 2020 as the Forum Director. He has got a career spanning 30 years and held senior EA roles in a number of organizations during that time. Today he's going to talk about our flagship standard, the Togov Standard 10th Edition and what's new. Without further ado, a warm welcome from the Open Group to Mark Dixon. Over to you, sir. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining me today. As you might be able to tell, this is coming to you live with all of the mistakes edited in. I'm going to do my best to deliver a presentation that currently takes me 30 minutes in 15. So you'll forgive me if I skate over some of the slides. I decided to leave all the slides as is because they'll be available for download. So if you want to see them all, you can do. But I shall crack on. In today's session, really, I'm going to give you the main points of the new release, the headlines for the apply to the Togov Standard 10th Edition release. And I might give you a little bit of a definitive comment here and there, but I'm also going to point you to where you can find out all of the detail. So stay tuned to the very last slide in my, I think, 10 slide deck. It will give you links to where you can go and get all the detail on what has changed in the new release. I'm also going to talk a little bit about what hasn't changed and maybe address one or two of the myths that seem to be already circulating. So the summary, the main points, three things to remember. If you prefer to sleep through the rest of this presentation, remember these three things. The main features that characterize 10th Edition of the Togov Standard and distinguish it from its predecessors are its modular structure. What does that mean? I'll come onto that in a moment. Modular structure, though, is important. And as I expect that everyone who's joined us today is either an enterprise architect or wants to find out more about enterprise architecture. Modular structure, quite important. It's now a feature of the product. The content is expanded. What does that mean? There's more content and there's also domain-specific material. Why are these two different things? It's breadth and depth, two dimensions. So I thought they were worth both highlighting. So the Togov Standard now includes material that addresses specific contexts as part of the standard. Previously, we've published guides which show you how to apply the standard in specific contexts, including domain-specific material in the standard has quite important implications for those of you who are keen to follow certification tracks. I'm going to add that I'm not going to talk a lot about certification today, hardly anything beyond what I'm just mentioning. News on certification is coming soon and I'm sure you are all looking forward to that. But if you have questions, if you're warming up questions on that topic, I'm not in a position to answer them, but I'll do my best to reassure you. So I want to talk very, very briefly about how we make the Togov Standard. It's very important that you understand that it's member-driven and experience-based and there is a consensus approval process. That means that you can be assured that anything that you're reading represents things that actually work and have been demonstrated to have worked in the real world. Why do I mention that? It's good to know that you're standing on the shoulders of your peers in the industry and it's good to know that you're using material that has been road-tested properly and proven to be sound. And not just in the opinion of the author, but in the opinion of the Architecture Forum. We take everything through a peer-review process before it's published and amendments and clarifications and changes can arise out of that process. I think it's worth mentioning that. Your reading material that is actually used by your peers in the industry. Briefly, what is the Togov Standard? For those who maybe are not quite sure. I'm not going to go through every point on here because simply there isn't time. The main thing that I would draw your attention to is, as many of you probably already know, it's a methodology and a framework, but it is intended to be configurable. And it's now modular, so the ways that you can use it have been made more flexible. Nobody expects you to use it all. Unless you're training in it, nobody even expects you to read it all. If you're going to get certified in it, it's a good idea to have an understanding of what's in it and what its potential is. But the way that you use it, it's up to you. The context in which you're operating is king. You have to use judgment in order to decide which parts of it to apply. But being a comprehensive framework, it tries to offer guidance for most situations that enterprise architects find themselves in. So if you're wondering, is the TOGAF standard rooted in waterfall? No, it isn't. Has it gone agile? No, it hasn't. Can it do either of those things? Yes, it can. It's up to you. So moving on, let's start talking a little bit about what's changed. And before I do that, I want to talk about some things that have not changed. It depends what you're reading. If you're following the commentary in the marketplace, most of it is very accurate and very fair. Most of it is saying exactly what has happened. Some commentators have got the impression that TOGAF standard has undergone some kind of revolutionary transformation. If you're coming in from TOGAF 9.2 or even earlier, there are many elements that you're still going to recognize. We still talk about the architecture development method. Those things are all still in there, all the things that you're familiar with. Catalogs diagrams and matrices are at the heart of it. You can't really do enterprise architecture without making lists of things and cross-referencing them to other things and drawing pictures to communicate them. We still describe the process of breaking down a large complex problem into enterprise segment and capabilities as a good way of simplifying complexity. The changes that we've made are significantly around the way that the content has been structured. There's been significant revision to quite a lot of the content to make it clearer. Not always to change its fundamental character, but for clarity and ease of understanding. We've expanded the content with the introduction of 20 new series guides. I will come on in just a second to talk about those. That's why this slide is called Something Old, Something New. It's an evolution from 9.2 at the risk of treading a well-worn cliche out once again. It's not a revolution to 10th edition, but it is a significant and impactful change. The modular structure has some vocabulary here. It's always good to talk for architects to talk about vocabulary, isn't it? We now talk about fundamental content and expanded content or series guides. The fundamental content is the stable and enduring core of the material. You'll recognise quite a lot of it from version 9.2, but if you look carefully you will see that there are quite a lot of differences. One of the things that we've done in the course of restructuring it is to break it out into separate volumes. The reason that we've done that is really we've observed that. We say that we don't expect everybody to use it all, making it available in useful, discrete chunks is a helpful thing. You can see that we've broken the fundamental content up into six basic pieces. We have a new introduction and core concept section. If you're new to Togaf or you want to get a good overview of the entire standard, that's the place to start, as you might expect. Then we've created volumes for the architecture development method and architecture content. If you're not familiar with the architecture content section of 9.2, that's where we talk about things like artefacts, stuff that architects make and how to make them. Then we've got a separate section on architecture capability and governance, which is helpful, hopefully everybody knows what governance means, but it's also an area that's helpful for those people who want to build and run architecture teams. Then for series guides, we've got a whole raft of information across a whole range of topics. The keen eye amongst you will have observed that there are not 20 bullet points on that screen underneath series guides. That would make the text very, very small and would encourage me to read them all out, which would be quite dull. But what they are are groupings and there are one or more series guides under each of those and there will be more series guides in the future extending those topic areas and adding to the collection of topic areas themselves. Now, don't get too hung up on what those groupings are and what they called. I don't think they're going to be in the exam. They're just a convenient set of folders for us to place things under. They're likely to change over time. As I said, we're certain to introduce new topic areas and we might move a few things about. But the main point today is to communicate to you that the breadth and depth of information that's available as a formal part of the standard has increased. Now, alongside that material, we still offer and will continue to develop guides, white papers and tools. In the strict sense of the way that we classify the material in and around TOGAF, we say that they don't have a formal status. What does that mean? They're not going to come up on the exam. They're extra supporting pieces of information that we hope you will find useful. But as far as the formal parts of the TOGAF standard are concerned, it's that stuff over there on the left-hand side in those boxes labeled fundamental content and series guides. If you want to remember anything from this slide, remember fundamental content and series guides. Those words are going to come up a lot around the TOGAF community. Moving on. I'm out of time. Not too bad. So the expanded guidance, 20 series guides. I mentioned that we've got 20 already and I've got another slide really that just repeats the topic areas. If I had more time, I would go into more detail on what they are, but I do not today. So I'm going to move on. You will get a reference to a document you can download that tells you what all of those are, all of the individual specific series guides are, and how to download them if you want to read them. You'll get that in just a moment. In fact, you'll get it right now. I forgot what the next slide is. It's getting started. So if you want to get the full detail on everything that has changed in the 10th edition of the TOGAF standard, download this paper, an introduction to the TOGAF standard 10th edition. It's actually a very easy read. I think it's about 20, 30 pages of narrative and a big appendix. The appendix is there for those who really want to go into the nitty gritty of line by line of what's changed and what's new in the standard. And this document will give you everything. The rest of the material, the front part of the document is actually quite an interesting narrative that describes the motivation for change as well as the substance of the change. And that's quite, even to the most casual reader who's heard of the TOGAF standard, it's actually quite an easy and informative read. So I highly recommend it. And it's a great way of starting the transition from 9.2 to 10th edition. Now I should mention, I mentioned the transition word. Not sure if I've got a slide on that. What do we do about transition? Well, the thing I want to tell you today in the time I've got is that the arrival of 10th edition doesn't signal the departure of 9.2. Making decisions about transitioning from one version of the standard to another is something that you should consider carefully. You don't need me to tell you that. So version 9.2 is going to persist for quite some time. It's going to be functionally stable, but as in we're not planning on adding any more content to it. That's all going to go into 10th edition and subsequent editions going forward. But neither are there any plans to remove it from being available. So you can be confident that that material is going to be available for a very long time for you to reference. There are no plans or decisions on retiring that information. I hope that was fairly straightforward and clear. There's a little bit more information. I've got a little bit of time left. Digital edition. I want to tell you a little bit about this. Not everybody wants to read a paper book. Not everybody wants to read a PDF. Some people want, in fact, an increasing number of people. Imagine that. Want to reference the material, dipping it out of it over the web. The way that we present that information has had a radical overhaul. It's much easier to use now, and it brings the fundamental content and all of the extended guidance, the series guides into one place. Also, critically, and I want you to remember this after I finish talking, it has a feedback and bug reporting feature built in. So if you want to, if you spot something in the standard that you think is not quite right or heaven forbid a typo, you have a way of reporting it as you find it. And I get to see them all. So when you read it, don't sit there going, well, this doesn't make sense. Send me a comment and we'll do something about it. Looking ahead, what is what's the most profound consequence of moving to a modular structure is that it allows us to entertain the possibility of releasing updates to the standard in parts. So we can now, it sounds very obvious, but as we're saying, now that the standard is made available in smaller parts, we can update those parts without having to update the whole thing and reissue the whole story. The whole standard in one go. And we can also, and we will continue to be releasing new series guides that add to the extended content. So stay tuned for more concrete information on that. There are several going through development at the moment in the architecture forum. And we will be releasing them as updates to the standard when they're ready rather than waiting for a major milestone to come out. We will, of course, continue to release supporting content, those things over on the right in that picture I showed you a few minutes ago, guides and white papers and stuff like that. I also want to go revisit a lot of the stuff that we published under the topic of tools, because I think a lot of that is due for some rework. And we are continuing to work on more innovative ways to access and adapt the standard. He said, falling into the trap of reading out the words on the slide. And that really is a hint. I haven't got anything concrete to tell you on that, but we are looking at some potentially very exciting ways to make the content more available and make the content more easy to use and useful without having to publish it in a linear format like words. Not going to tell you much more than that, but it's quite interesting. It feels like a nerd. I think I'm right on the money as far as time is concerned, because we wanted to leave plenty of time for questions and answers of which there may be many, given that I skated across the top of this topic in record time. So back to Steve. Thank you, Mark. Great job. Really great job. There's loads more depth there, obviously. And I encourage people to take a look at the slides when we make them available and the recording of your talk. So great job on going through that. There are some questions, obviously, and some of them relate to certification, which you were clear that you're not going to go into too much detail about. But let me take the first question on that, and then I'll come to you. There was a question came in very early about when will the exam for Togaf certification switch to Togaf 10 from Togaf 9.2? And the second part of the question is the current Togaf certification exam still using Togaf 9.2? So to answer the second question first, yes, if you go to take your Togaf exam today, that is based on version 9.2 of the standard. So if you're partway through or you're even about to get trained or you're thinking about getting trained or studying and then certified, you should go ahead with 9.2. Absolutely. Don't hesitate about that. The content is still relevant, and there will be a way to upgrade your certification from 9.2 to 10 when the Togaf 10 certification program becomes available. We do not have a specific date for Togaf 10 10th edition certification at this point, but it will be in the coming month. So look out for more information on that as we go forward. So a bit of a tease, but partly is we really want to make sure this is right and rather than just getting something out for the sake of it. So it will be a very good quality program and really quite well done structured to different aspects of practitioners. So look out for that. A lot of work has gone into that and there's still quite a bit to do, but we'll say more about that nearer the time. So that takes care of quite a few of the questions to the extent that we're able to. One specific mark. I don't know if you're still there, Mark. I've lost your video. I am still here, yes. I dropped the video for a moment. OK, fair enough. So a question about the interplay with the Archimage standard. But as the Togaf taxonomy evolves to version 10, will there be some impact on Archimage, do you think? I think it depends which direction you draw the arrow. I think one of the things that has been published contemporary to 10th edition but is not formally part of the standard is there is a guide on using Archimate with the Togaf standard that has been written with 10th edition in mind, although it was published slightly in advance. It still, you know, it works. Now, there is an active discussion in the forum about how formally we should include the Archimate standard within the Togaf standard. And there are good arguments for and there are good arguments against. And the way that I could see that panning out is having a more exact specific model around the metamodels that we include with the Togaf standard. The reason that we sound hesitant is that we're mindful of the fact that we're very keen to maintain the neutrality of the Togaf standard as far as relative to modelling standards. So there have been discussions before, before I was staff, I recall there being discussions about, well, should we recognise UML and do specific kind of UML style diagrams in the Togaf standard? And really all the way down the line, we've said no, because we don't want to prescribe a specific modelling standard for use with Togaf. However, what I would say is that the level of thinking that's gone into the guide that I mentioned using Archimate with the Togaf standard has identified a number of really interesting things which I think could lead to an improvement in or, you know, improvement as harsh, isn't it? Developments in the metamodels to make them more specific if I could put it like that in a good way. Does that make sense? Is that a good enough answer for now? I could probably talk for an hour on that topic on its own, to be honest. Yeah, let's not, but it is a good... I think that answers the question there, Mark. I don't know if you're able to come back on video. The audience would like to see your face as well, where you're answering. There we go. Thank you. So another question has come. There are more about certification, obviously. I can take one about OAA certification, our Open Agile Architecture certification. Will that be kept separate from Togaf 10 certification? The answer to that is yes. It will still be separate. And there's also a question, which I think is maybe from somebody in our training ecosystem, about when the conformance requirements for the Togaf 10 classes will be available. And again, we don't have a specific date for that, but there is a beta program going on with our training community. So if you are part of that, then please get involved in that. If you are part of the community and you're a member, then you're able to get involved in that beta program where we're getting feedback and improving the program before launch. So one last question for you, Mark. And it's quite a long question, but I'm going to shorten it. It's basically at first review, a lot of the content in the 10th edition appears evolutionary in nature, but the core standard is largely intact. So are there any specific major changes that people should focus on? And this is somebody who's certified in version 9.1, actually, and is now looking to get up to date. OK, so it depends what your motivation is for the question. If it's certification based, then I would say that you need to take a good look at the series guides and familiarize yourself with what they're for. So if you're looking at transitioning from certification from 9.2 to 10th edition, the inclusion of series guides in the standard has obvious ramifications for stuff that you might need to know. So that's your motivation. If your motivation is what's useful, I'm still going to point you largely at the series guides. And what I'm going to say is consider the context in which you're operating in and if you are in need of guidance on using TOGAP in an agile context. If you're looking at digital transformation or post-digital transformation world and you're looking at the fundamental role of architecture. Or, you know, another good one to headline would be if you are in the business of building and maintaining an architecture practice in an organization. The series guides are going to give you road tested guidance from experienced practitioners that should help you in the course of doing that. Like I said during the during the piece, 10th edition is in terms of its fundamental content, quite a deliberate evolution from 9.2. The material in 9.2 is good and it's proven. What we've done is work hard to improve the clarity and understand, you know, make it easier for people to understand. We're not looking at tearing all of that up to replace it with a whole bunch of new content. But the expansion of the standards to include the series guides is significant. Great. Mark, we'll leave it there. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge of the TOGAP standard 10th edition today and answering those questions. There will obviously be more coming from the open group around the standard and around the obviously interesting topic of certification in the coming months. But for now, Mark Vixen, thanks very much. Thank you. Okay. So just before we go, this is obviously a topic of interest as we as we knew it would be. But many, many people joining us today and even more registered who will watch it probably in the convenience of their own time zone. But for those of you who feel able to get to the Washington DC area in next month, we're actually having a TOGAP user group meeting as part of the open group quarterly event in DC. And that is on Tuesday, also a Tuesday, July the 26th. So think about that if that's even a vague possibility for you. There's more information on our website. And we will get to cover some obviously some more detail around the new standards and the new version of the standard and other related TOGAP issues. Because it's getting the user group is great. It's where it's another vehicle for us at the opening to hear what works for people who are actually using it for real in their day jobs and what needs looking at more. And, you know, we usually we usually get some really valuable information and I think the audience goes away. So do think about that if you're in the area or could be on Tuesday, July 26th. Lastly, for today, we will gather again for to get Tuesday into weeks as usual where the topic will be the open group digital portfolio standards. So that is something that is highly relevant to TOGAP TOGAP plays a significant part with that. But it's also about bringing our portfolio of standards like OAA, like Archimake, like the IT for IT reference architecture and the DPBOT, bringing them together in a way that is more easily usable and using them together in practice rather than using each one separately along the way. So look out for more information on on on that between now and then and hope to see you in two weeks in the meantime. Thank you all for your time today and your questions and enthusiasm. And yeah, we had a great list of countries today, always always great to see. So take care and be safe wherever you are and see you in two weeks. I hope bye for now.