 We're going to hear from from Chris Ford. So Chris took over as CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects in 2016. He's based in Shanghai, China and he also holds the post of General Manager Asia Pacific for the open group. As well as business functions in that region, Chris's Vice President Enterprise architecture enhanced global responsibility for EA activities at the open group including the TOGAF and ArchiMate standards. Chris has held various leadership roles throughout his career, including implementing and managing EA practices, application development, information management and technology operations teams. So a warm virtual welcome from the open group for Chris Ford. Tell us about the AEA, please. Well, good day everybody, wherever you are in the world. My name is Chris Ford. I'm the Chief Executive Officer for the Association of Enterprise Architects and and today I'm going to take you through a look at our 2020-2021 activities and plans. You have my contact information here on this screen but you can also find me and my staff on LinkedIn as well if you want to reach out that way. So let's move on. Now the Association of Enterprise Architects is a professional community for enterprise architects globally and we're looking to support our members in development of credibility, recognition and delivery of benefits through that international community of professionals. So we want to have enterprise architects recognized as value professionals both by enterprises and by society and in the establishment of a professional organization one of the considerations and criteria is the impact on society. Now our mission revolves around three major points, that is delivering mentoring support to members throughout their entire career, providing governance for the profession as a whole, including the specializations of the practice of architecture. Now there's a lot of discussion about something-something architecture or whatever it is in terms of the naming or the job roles but from my perspective that's not a hierarchy, it is really a set of knowledge skills and experience and a category of areas that people generally choose to go into and specialize in. We also are fostering an ecosystem for the development and education recruitment and you know the full use of an enterprise architect's knowledge skills and experience. Our organizational goals revolve around as I said earlier emphasizing the credibility, recognition and community aspects of the profession. So advancing the professional excellence of our members, raising the status of the profession and the individuals practicing and providing a line of sight to the accomplishments that our members can deliver and then increasing opportunities of value for the AEA and its members and obviously again providing a worldwide network for the community. So there are a number of things that the AEA delivers in terms of its value proposition and from a product perspective. We organize around typically geographical areas of chapters, groups of individuals in a particular area or region that come together of course until quite recently that was frequently on a face-to-face basis but we've had for an extended period of time a virtual meeting capability that's available to our members and the chapters. We also publish the preeminent enterprise architecture journal, the Journal of Enterprise Architecture from the Association of Enterprise Architects and access to that journal is free to members. We have the global AEA website, we do provide events and webinars and most recently relative to the website we've launched a new career center which I'll go into in a little bit more detail on subsequent slides. So the aspirations for the organization, you know, market growth, growth in the recognition of the brand of the AEA and developing ecosystems of partners and competitors. So the partner angle comes in here as I'm speaking to you at a TOGAP user group and an archivate user group with the open group. The partnership with the open group allows people who become certified in TOGAP to opt in to a free membership in the AEA for the first two years subsequent to your passing and downloading your TNLA agreement. You get an opt-in option and there's no trick here, it genuinely is free to you. Okay, so if you've been certified in the last two years in TOGAP and you may have clicked through that opt-in button, please contact us and let us know if you want to pick up your membership. Now we do have this chapter structure that I mentioned before. We want to expand governance within the AEA community beyond chapters and I'll discuss that a little bit in the subsequent slide. And then from a profession standpoint, dealing with development, accreditation, and certification for people. So in 2020, 2021, in 2020, we launched a brand new career center. That is a link from the global AEA.org website. In the last quarter of this year and into next year, we'll be doing a complete website refresh. We will be delivering a mentoring program to put interns and resources of experienced people together and we'll be establishing and hiring a replacement editor for the JEA, the Journal of Enterprise Architecture. And we expect to be doing much more work with our partners and chapters on mission vision promotion, increasing involvement of volunteers. With the chapter reference I made earlier, in a few instances, we actually have national structures that are organizing for the profession. And in the development of profession, you normally are working within the legal and regulatory framework of a particular country, of course. And so we need to look forward to aligning on that basis. We've got quite a ways to go on that for the entire organization, but that is a priority topic for us. Now, if you go to the link at the top here, careers at global AEA.org, we've recently launched a career center. This is the landing page for it. It's a pretty nice capability. Given that we are an organization dedicated to the promotion of enterprise architecture and the professions who practice that architectural capability, we've got a very nice new job and career center capability on the website that I will encourage you to see. So what's involved in the career center? Well, there are features that deal with career resources. Employers can post and distribute their jobs to target places. Job seekers can get on the site, look for those jobs. It will feature AEA jobs, of course, but it's not just restricted to those. And you can upload your resumes as an individual as a job seeker, get a review and get some career coaching. So this is a really nice capability. I really encourage you guys to go out there to the website and look at it. So this is not only for individual job seekers, but again, also for employers or practice leads who are looking for enterprise architects to post those opportunities. Now, one of the other activities that's been going on throughout the year is a series of webinars based around some research that we've had on an ongoing basis with the McKinsey folks and with the Henley Business School. It's a survey on current practices in AEA around digital transformation and sustainable enterprises. And you can see the survey link here. The topic is based on insights from recent survey data, including EA's roles in building digital platforms. And members of the AEA have participated in this ongoing survey activity for the past five years. So it's a very rich source of information. Now, we've been conducting interactive webinars, and those recorded webinars are available on demand. And the consolidated output of the survey activity and the webinar activity is going to be published later this year in a special edition of the JAA during the fourth quarter. So hopefully you should be able to look at that. And if you're a member, you'll be able to get direct access to the JAA as it's published each quarter and download the information. So to just kind of wrap up and remind you of what we covered here very briefly, would encourage you to join the AA. You can do so directly with any certification program through globalAEA.org. You can hopefully take time to visit our career center at careers.globalAEA.org. Our jobs upload to resumes and hopefully we'll find an increasing number of employers that can post jobs. As I say that it may sound like there aren't jobs on there already, but there are. It may sound like there aren't jobs on there already, but there are. You can also, of course, join a chapter for those that are existing. And if you're interested in forming a chapter in the area that you are in, I mean the geographic area, then please contact us on through the chapter section of the AA website. Read the journal The Enterprise Architecture. And if you want, contact us and author an article, submit your proposal. And you can request a digital credential for as an attendee or speaker of the OPU Groups event this week or for this Pogaf and Archimade user group through local badges at globalAEA.org. And that is all I have to cover today. Unfortunately, I'm going to probably be able to explain after you guys view this, and I won't be available to answer any questions directly. But as I said, you can reach me at my email address. And or through LinkedIn to do any follow-up. Thank you very much indeed for taking the time to listen to me today. Very much.