 Okay, so as I said at the beginning, the theme of the event is open digital standards and we're talking about where the open professions program fits within that. So, what better title than open professions program for the digital age and to deliver that I'm delighted to introduce another colleague of mine, Mr. Andres Chakal, he's vice president and CTO for the open group. Andres is a recognized expert on supply chain security, cloud architecture and cybersecurity. He's widely recognized as the driving force behind ISO 2243, better known as the open trusted technology provider standard or OTTPS. And recognize for his tireless work to establish recognized professional credentials for technology professionals through the creation of the open professions framework. Another person who's been involved in this from the beginning. So in this session, Andres is going to focus on the growing impact of digital transformation on professional credentialing programs. How has the digital age impacted how we learn, obtain skills and effectively apply them in a world now dominated by the need for agility and multidisciplinary technologists. How has this changed professional credentialing programs, continued individual career progression and the need for skilled and validated technical professionals. So a warm welcome from the open group to Andres Chakal. Andres, are you there. I am here. And let's see, I'll start my video now. Right. Well, thank you very much Steve for giving me the opportunity to speak on a subject for which I'm just slightly passionate. Absolutely. Over to you, sir. Um, so the intent of the session is really to make a case for how the digital age has impacted the value and approach to it professional certification. In particular, what impact has the shift to agility and digital made on the average technologists role in support of digital business transformation. I say technologists or technical professional. I really mean technical specialists. For example, application development folks, systems engineers, web developments, etc. To data scientists, security and risk management professionals. And yes, of course, architects and the associated disciplines. So over the last 20 years, the consensus, I'd say, you know, obviously generally is that technologists, whatever discipline you fall into benefit from being part of a more formal profession. Just as civil engineers do, but unlike civil engineers where the physics of building structures really does not change or change dramatically. The technical, the digital technical landscape landscape is constantly shifting beneath our feet. So this is 1 of those times where the industry has to lead professionalism and and not really the government. Certainly government recognition would be great. So digital transformation is a term. We adjust this chart every time I talk about it and digital transformation is manifested in the ubiquitous application of technologies that really underpin the business. And market shifts and has come in waves over 4 major periods. And we're currently experiencing what is referred to as the digital age. Generally the digital age about the last 10 years refers to the host of technologies that have led to hyper process automation. Customer centric business transformation. For example, all this is backstop by fundamental fundamental shifts in really how we construct digital solutions for the sake of brevity and simplicity. I'll refer to the use of, you know, digital design thinking practices as just agility. So, as much as the last year has been trying for all of us. I really think there's some silver linings out there. Can you imagine just how different the world would have been if the pandemic hit even just 10 years ago. Remote learning at scale probably wouldn't have even been possible. Supply chain resilience would be even more significantly impacted than it was. We would not as of yet had the technology for creating the vaccines as quickly as we did. I mean one year is quite astounding right. So just think of all the services that were not available or not used at scale prior to March of last year when we relied on them in order to get us through this lockdown period in the pandemic. And the Department of Commerce, you know, they published these statistics recently that showed the e-commerce sales rose in this period and astounding 44%. Another recognized benefit of digital transformation is now referred to as digital resilience and the ability to more effectively respond to these unknown business and economic threats and in this case the pandemic. So my alma mater and where my kids attend James Madison University. You know if you look in the bottom left hand corner you see the little satellite robot. This is called the satellite food services. You know the students prior to the pandemic made, you know, a ton of fun and played with these little robots that weren't getting a whole lot of use. But now the satellite food service at JMU has grown exponentially during the pandemic and it's literally become a way of life across campus as hundreds and they bought more of these robots. More of these solar powered robots, they roam all over the campus and occasionally get hit by the train that runs through the middle of campus but you know nothing's perfect. But just goes to show you just how things change and how they've changed quickly with digital transformation as part of the, you know, concept with agility and digital transformation and technological advances. You know now they don't show any signs of stopping or slowing down this year. Here are a few of the business transformation trends that are really expected to, you know, play out over 2021. And I've long held that corporations held the key to sustainability and sustainable energy and growing climate change and or focusing on it. And not really government, maybe partnering with government, but, and now we see that corporations are racing to provide products and services that not only drive alternative energy but also embrace the global, the goal of zero carbon emissions. Some of that is playing out, you know, really right here in the open group with our own, our very own open footprint forum. So another trend that has grown out of the impact to the pandemic and is working, you know, it's really working remotely has given way to an end in more remote operations management of the entire business. And of course, we have significant changes to both technical capability like CRISPR, as well as ecosystem changes to healthcare. And now, you know, how healthcare companies and pharma companies collaborate is really changed as a result of the pandemic. And this really puts it, you know, precipitated out of the collective research and environment of the pandemic itself. Most notably, you know, we have this next level e commerce that we've been experiencing and in turn, that's changed the threat landscape as more business and consumers have conducted that increased 44% of transactions across the internet. This led to increases in cyber and supply chain threat. We got a standard for that and certification program and it's beginning to really take off as a, you know, it's known as OTTPS and ISO to a 243. Free faces of the digital age that continue to influence the careers of the our technical population and professionals. The first facet is the emergence of the hyper connected society. The digital age consumer, you know, they really share their experiences and perspectives in real time. And these are shared through interconnected services, sales channels, data collection services companies that whose sole responsibility is for the collection and dissemination. And using analytics and in AI to predict customer behavior. This all happens at, you know, near real time speeds now. And therefore, you know, the consumer feedback loop is, you know, you know, more quickly propagated. And it's more efficient to the detriment of some companies, obviously. So organizations and businesses are having to react in similar fashion. So this is really why you're seeing the emergence of serverless computing and AI led development and agility being support so important and we have to react to these changes and sentiment and take advantage of the business opportunity or avoid the business risk. So the second facet is the way in which we're learning and that's across all levels of education. And this has changed significantly with the emergence of learning communities and new learning technologies. And this includes higher education, by the way, which is also embrace these shifts and I've gotten to see this with my kids who are at university right now. So today, students are able to really find the right modality, which, you know, syncs with their learning needs. In these many different forms where protect practitioners are sharing their personal experiences and best practices. So continuous learning is now seamlessly rolled into what is what it really means to be a technical professional. Scott mentioned this, and it's expected to be part of your employment, your ability to perform, you know, to learn in real time. And the last facet really is how we're taking advantage of our instrumented and integrated work environment itself. We're using better unified set of technical tools for, you know, construction and solutioning communication tools like Slack or teams dev ops tools release management tools design thinking tools. They're all better integrated and more useful. And of course cloud management cloud based solutions and managed hosting solutions. Well, they now dominate the deploy deployment and development environments and drastically cut the meantime to develop a capability. And with better integration on all these tools integrated together comes the ability to garner useful insights on how these professionals are using these tools and how they're performing. So all three of these facets have made a very significant impact on the skills required as a professional technologist. So you can see over the last 10 years how drastically technical skills have shifted and this little chart that I put together to kind of emphasize this. This is true for both fundamental technical skills in technologies like cloud computing and API based restful solutions but also in the techniques we are employing like agile design thinking release management practices and the application of in dev ops. The use of modeling architecture, for example, prior to develop the development has shifted to agile interactive architecture practices. So we still model. I'm sure, but only as much as we need or appropriate. And so that's a big change for architects is that we don't, you know, have this heavy weight, you know, top down design now it's integrated into the agile process. So we know that skills have, you know, really changed in line with the digital age, but have professional roles. Well, let's take a closer look. So agility and agile methods now dominate our approach and practices that lead to digital transformation. Design thinking design engineering are now formal fields that have really just emerged over the last 10 to 15 years. When you look at this from a macro point of view, the focus still moves from code or, you know, putting wiring together modules to applications to systems so the specialist view of the world. Well, from their perspective is still very granular, but more focused on coding or creating reusable assets while the architecture view is focused on portfolio assets to solve business challenges and ensure the confidentiality integrity reliability and usability of the underlying assets. So yes, of course, software architecture is still important, but now it's manifested in API development and the 12 factor app. The 12 steps to develop a restful solution using design thinking as a as a foundation. So really still the same role just different skills and slightly different approach now. So to take this a first a step further, we can think of the coder as the specialist and the designer as the architect in terms of digital transformation and agility. And although generally everyone in the digital age must understand technology at a deeper level. And notice I didn't say everyone needs to know or be on architect. That's simply just not practical. I do think that to learn architecture is an experience based kind of application or skill, not something that you necessarily learn overnight in a classroom so everybody can't really be the architect. Because, you know, you can't code and construct, as well as design, manage and enable at the same time. How the digital practitioner body of knowledge or DP box suggests how a technical professional or practitioner progresses through the progress of becoming skilled as part of their digital transformation journey. And from a digital transformation or agility perspective, we can think of specialists as the API integrators and digital innovation isn't an emergent property of API led agility. Ultimately the architect assumes the role of agile enabler and the primary scrum master managing the overall portfolio of functions and capabilities as the intermediary. Between the business needs and the technical implementation. So yeah, we have, you know, new digital age roles, even new digital age professions for example data science. Scientists, well they kind of evolved out of a combination of data engineering skills. You've got the whole trusted technology skill being something that's relatively new. And I guess the question is, you know, has our approach to professional certification evolved alongside these changes. Well, let's take a closer look. So in a hyper connected society individuals want to share their accomplishments. Skills and experience and employers. Analysts and even job providers want to source that underlying metadata and training providers are able to raise their profile and credibility using all of this metadata and information is garnered from badges. All this is from this simple concept of a digital badge, which emerged from the digital age, you know, just relatively, relatively recently badges really just a digital credential that is used to do just that represent an individual's accomplishments through metadata and the open group has adopted badges populated with the pertinent information and issued by our partner and credley. So certification is a validation of capability which comes in two different types. Knowledge based assessment usually used to validate a particular skill and experience based certification, also known as professional certification. An experience based certification really validates your application of skills through successful practical experience. And it's nothing really new like Scott talked about, but, you know, continues to evolve doctors lawyers accountants they often do more than just pass tests and go to school that the past practicums in order to be considered a licensed professional. And more and more of the work that we do as technologists is safety critical and creating the open professions program is key to recognizing. The capability is a technical professional in the digital age. Just as there have been shifts in the ways of waves of digital transformation the open professions program has also evolved and become aligned to the needs of the digital age. I think James touched on this a little bit our members have added two new professions that have emerged over the last 10 years for data scientists and the other four supply chain risk management professionals. Called the open certified data scientists ODS and the open certified technology practitioner, which is OCTTP. In addition, we have, you know, just discussed during this conference and we went live with the newly established digital architect discipline. Within the open certified architect profession program and not to be outdone our largest contingent of certified professionals. Normally is is the open certified technical specialist and went through a really extensive revalidation of specialties and their criteria. They were used at the start of 2019 and because of the shifting influence of the digital age, they even rebranded and change the overall profession name from the open certified IT specialist to open certified technical specialists because specialists are really no longer just associated with the IT department in the digital age. This program, which allows companies and organizations to operate on top of their own profession or technical technology requirements like Scott talked about is, you know, becoming is called becoming an accredited certification program or ACP. We've proven this approach provides fair and objective assessments of candidates ability to apply their, their skills. Through experience and enables the recognition of capability and career progression, ultimately providing our technical professionals, you know, with the experiences they need to progress their careers. So let's talk about those changes in the way in which we are conducting those assessments in the digital age. So, hold on one sec. Nothing like a battery failing in the middle of a presentation. Well, the digital age, you know, technical professional, you know, first more agile incremental approach to assessing their careers to being certified therefore we have, you know, retired the monolithic package and approach and really replaced it with a milestone based approach which allows for a more agile and incremental journey through professional certification. As such, you know, the milestone based approach which were really more closely mirrors the professional experience of it, the digital age allows us to provide an incremental experience. The candidates obtain badges that represents their career milestones that must be met in order to achieve certification for a particular level of experience. And when all of those milestones have been completed, the candidate submits for a peer review board. This board is made up of domain experts who are certified themselves. So this is a peer based certification. We think this process is really more in line with the expectations of technical professionals practicing in the digital age and better aligns to the digital. You know, implementation with agility and design thinking. It's incremental and it's iterative and it aligns with those practices. It's designed to be a better experience for the candidate allowing them to really display the progress that they make along the way within their careers. So I think for the digital age, it's here today. It's standards based guided by you the member. It's easily obtained directly by the individual or through organizational accreditation. Either way, you get a portable professional credential recognized by other global and government profession bodies like James talked about. So learn more about the standard and the program at these links, engage by accessing your, our profession site. Contact the professions authority. If you're, you have questions or considering obtaining accreditation for your organization. No matter what profession or discipline you fall into, there's a professions certification so that you can call yourself an open certified professional. So thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity Steve. Thank you, Andres. Great job. Great summary and we'll take questions in the in the panel, but for in the meantime, I think you've given given people some food for thought and and a call to action there. So thank you again. We'll virtual round of applause for under Chicago. Thank you, Andres.