 Mr Andrew Josie, who is the VP Certification and Standards at the Open Group. Since joining the Open Group in 1996, Andrew has been closely involved with the Standards, Development, Certification and Testing activities of the Open Group. And he's led many of the standards projects, including the Specification and Certification Development for the Arcumate, TOCAF, POSIX and UNIX programs. Andrew is a member of IEEE, USENIX, Floss UK and the Association of Enterprise Architects, which is an organisation we'll hear about right after Andrew. So a warm virtual welcome from the Open Group to Andrew Josie. Over to you, sir. Hi Steve, thanks. Hopefully you can hear me okay? Yes, we can. Okay, so I've just got to get things going. Okay, so anyway, that's me. As Steve has mentioned, I'm our VP of Standards and Certification at the Open Group and I've been responsible for a lot of the programs around certification and training, especially around TOCAF and the Arcumate standard. Anyway, this is the agenda. So as I say, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are around the world, it's actually looking at the window here. It's actually very stormy and a bit of lightning. So hopefully that won't affect the internet. This is the agenda for the session I want to take you through today. So I'm going to be looking at three topics. First of all, I'll be looking at the availability of resources for TOCAF and Arcumate virtual training. So the theme you'll hear from me today is all about doing things virtually or doing things remotely. We'll look at, secondly, we'll look at the TOCAF and Arcumate certifications, including some new open badges that we've recently introduced. And then finally, thirdly, I'm going to actually look at how you can take an exam remotely. So I'm actually going to take you through that process, but everybody's seen that. So I'm hoping that will be helpful to some of you. Anyway, before we join you more, let's start by looking at training. First thing on the agenda, the open group has 69 training organizations worldwide that deliver TOCAF and Arcumate training. There's a total of 92 accredited courses that actually breaks down into 69 TOCAF courses and 23 Arcumate courses at the moment. Each of those courses is assessed by the open group. And that occurs before we award them accreditation. Accreditation means they meet certain quality standards, certain ways of working that we require. All the courses that are accredited are against the latest versions of the respective standards. So they're against the 9.2 version of the TOCAF standard and the 3.1 version of the Arcumate specification. In fact, the Arcumate specification recently updated from 301. I think that was last November to 3.1. So that's a recent change there. Our accredited training is available in 15 languages. Sometimes I read out all the languages, but I won't do that today. And they can be delivered in a number of different settings in classrooms, obviously with appropriate social distancing at the moment. Virtually e-learning or sometimes we have blended. So there may be a course that does a mixture of one or more of the methods, delivery methods. All of the open group accredited training course providers are able to deliver their courses both in person or as virtual instructor led. That was one thing we made very clear earlier on this year was that this was a possibility. In addition, some of our training course providers offer e-learning courses. And we've tried to make that easy by providing a virtual training sort of resources page here at the open group. So if you click on the QR code, it will take you straight to this or anywhere from the open group website where you see from the home page, you see the various pull downs, all the certification links are on the certifications pull down from the open group home page. So virtually everything I will show you today you can find by navigating to that point. I tried to include QR codes so that if you're following along either live or in the recording and you're so inclined, you can actually point your camera at them and most mobile platforms today will actually interpret that for you and go off and find the page. We maintain calendars on our site to make it possible for you to find suitable courses. As well as having typical onsite courses, we now have recently added a virtual classroom course calendar. So you can find where virtual courses are being run. Often they will tell you what time zone they're in. I think I'm not sure the examples do there. We also provide links to our e-learning course providers. So for those of you prefer to study online at your own pace, you can go out and find an accredited e-learning course. So moving into the second part of today's talk, I want to look at certifications and badges for both the TOGAF and the ARCUMATE programs. First of all, a little bit of background. Why is certification important? What we've seen is that many of the open group standards have become or are becoming industry standards. So for example, we see the single-unit specification. There's the standard for open operating systems. We see the phase standard for avionics, the OPAS standard emerging for open process automation. And what we've seen in the enterprise architecture space is that the TOGAF standard is the de facto standard for EA. With the ARCUMATE specification, a key part of what we now call the Architects Toolkit. So what we're finding is that employers, HR managers need recognized certifications to reference for job profiles. And what we've seen with the TOGAF standard is that that's widely recognized as the enterprise architecture certification to have and frequently appears amongst the highest paying IT skills lists in the USA's top certifications lists. For example, this Foot Partners LLC is one that we often quote. So what are these enterprise architecture certifications from the open group? Well, they are trusted, vendor-neutral, globally recognized and portable credentials. They're not tied to one specific vendor or technology, like you might find with some sort of particular devices or technologies. They provide value by demonstrating to employers your commitment to enterprise architecture as a discipline. And they're backed by a market-driven education and certification program that supports both the TOGAF and the ARCUMATE standards. As I mentioned, we have over 90 courses now available. So today we have a portfolio of TOGAF certification products. Looking through this slide from the left, we have two certifications. And then we have to the right what we call, so the first column is certifications. And to the right, the other three columns are what we call certification credentials. In the certification column, we have a foundation and what we call TOGAF 9 certified. So these are at two levels, two purposes. The first is about understanding the basic concepts and core principles, you know, clearly the foundational knowledge that you need. And then the second is a higher level is about applying and being able to analyze situations. That's the ability to analyze and apply the TOGAF standard. These are supported, as I mentioned, now by a number of certification credentials. The first two of these are what we call specializations. There's TOGAF business architectures. If you want to specialize in the TOGAF business architecture, you can take this particular course, which leads to a certification credential. That is a certificate and an open badge. We also have recently introduced integrating risk and security. In fact, we're going to be bringing out some self-study materials for that shortly. We're doing a bit of a relaunch on that. So that's something to look at. And that's about integrating. It's literally, as the title says, integrating risk and security, the concepts of information, security management and enterprise risk management, how you can integrate that in with the TOGAF ADM. How you can also look a little bit at SAPSA, which is a complementary framework that can be used with the TOGAF standard. Lastly, we have on the right there, something called TOGAF Essentials 2018. And this is what we call an up-to-date knowledge certification credential. I'll talk a little bit about that, a little bit more about that as I talk about this other certification badge that we have, which is the version 9.2 badge. The TOGAF certification program was actually launched in 2009 and applies to all the 9.x releases. So if you're TOGAF 9 certified, that may well be back to one of the earlier releases. So the way that we can show that you're up-to-date knowledge is by awarding this new badge, this 9.2 badge. And there are a couple of ways to get there, either by, if you were previously qualified against 9 or 9.1, you can take the TOGAF Essentials 2018 certification credential to get you up-to-date. That's all the changes that were introduced in the addition of the standard that was produced in 2018. So that's the 9.0 pretend and accredited training course against 9.2. You can go straight to this 9.2 badge. So as I say, there are two ways you can earn this. Look at the Archimate Certification Portfolio. Obviously, this is a bit simpler. We haven't really gone out and added specialization certification credentials yet. There is one. I'll talk a little bit about that. We have two main levels for the certification. Again, these are very similar to what we have in the TOGAF certification program, although instead of calling the higher level certified, we actually call it practitioner here. And we've tried to emphasize the practical nature. We supply practical exercises and things that we encourage all those training to take, so that they have the ability to apply and actually do some modeling, which is different. We have an up-to-date certification credential. This is primarily for our trainers to ensure that they are knowledgeable of the differences between 301 and 3.1, which weren't that many. And probably to the end user is probably not that significant. So we just mandate this for trainers to make sure that they are aware and have the knowledge and understanding of the differences. Obviously, since I've got you here on the talk today, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other related certifications. So just briefly, there are other knowledge-based certifications that you can study either by attending accredited training or self-study and take exam services. IT for IT, Resuments Architecture for Managing the Business of IT. We have the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge. So that's quite new. There's a study guide and certification launched in the last year. And we have the Open Fair and Body of Knowledge. And that's about risk and taxonomy for risk and how you measure information risk. I wanted to talk, I mentioned at the very start that I would be talking about some new things that we've recently added. And this is one of the new things. And this is what we call TOGAP role-based badges. We've defined what we consider as two sort of basic roles for these badges. We're seeing a shift in the industry towards employers looking for people who can work in specific roles rather than have knowledge just of standards. So we've looked at that and come out with these badges, which we're able to award in that area. So we have two of them. There's team member and practitioner. What do we mean by practitioner? In this case, will we mean somebody that's able to develop, maintain and use an enterprise architecture? Whereas team member is pretty self-explanatory. That's about people who are able to work in teams developing enterprise architecture. We've introduced these badges as you can tell by the name. They're based on the TOGAP standard. And we have also options for visual modeling and digital approaches. And I'll explain a little bit more about that as I show you the badges. So there are four initial badges. Here you can scan the QR code. There's an enterprise architecture team member and an enterprise architecture practitioner. We then also have a digital enterprise architecture team member and an enterprise architecture modeling practitioner. And I'll explain what that all means and how you get to those on the next slide. Just hopefully this graphic will explain. So the idea here is that when you achieve two certifications, then you become eligible for the badge. So you can see from this grid, for example, an enterprise architecture modeling practitioner is required to be TOGAP certified, to have the 9.2 up-to-date knowledge, and also to be an Arcumate 3 practitioner. And then they can get the enterprise architecture modeling practitioner badge. I'm not going to run through all of these. Just give you some key facts. We issued the badges several times a week. They're issued shortly after you achieve the second certification that is required for the role. They're free and they're automatically issued. So if you're in our badging program, if you've opted in, you've got some badges already, further badges will be issued automatically by the system. How will you know when you've got one? Well, if you have opted in, then what happens is you get a notification from our badging partner. That's a company called Credly. They use their Acclaim platform and they will notify you. You can set up your Credly Acclaim profile if you want to actually automatically accept badges so you don't have to do anything. And just to show you here, this is actually, again, a picture of the badge, but also the certificate that is available with the badge. You can get this certificate in your Credly Acclaim account. So we're sort of leveraging the technology of open badges to be able to issue certificates for some of these things that way as well. And lastly, on this topic, if you want to find out a little bit more, we have a two-minute video short. So that summarizes the program, so you can click on the QR code or click on the link. This is YouTube. It's on the Open Groups YouTube channel. You will find we're putting more little two-minute video shorts out on the YouTube channel just so you can pick up on the latest news and programs in two minutes. We're always very aware that people prefer to keep it short. So now I'd like to really take you through something which is a bit more practical. You may not have seen this, but it's actually to take you through how you can take an exam remotely. I'm hoping this will be useful because what we've seen obviously this year is a shift from the majority of our exams being taken at test centers to, I think it's a 1,100% increase year-to-day of people going to take their exams remotely versus test centers, obviously due to the pandemic. So I'm going to talk you through exactly what that entails in the next few slides. So this is the thing now. You can take your exams remotely at home or in your office if you so please. Obviously this is a timely alternative, I guess, with the situation that arrived. Luckily the open group had prepared its exam so that we could do this all along and it was quite easy just to switch on a few more exams when the need arose. These are the exams that are now available. It's virtually all of our exams. You'll see there are a couple of exceptions. The Chinese exams are not available and that's primarily because we're unable to deliver the remote exam service in China. So I'm going to take you through the solution that we use. This is a solution provided by the Open Groups Examination Provider Test Provider, Pearson View, and they use a technology called On View Online Proctoring. So I'm going to walk you through the setup and check-in process. This is what you would do when it's time to take your exam. So before this stage, you would have run some system tests to check that your system and your network is suitable and can support the remote testing and you would have logged into your account previously at the Open Group. We have a single sign-on to Pearson View that connects you to a Pearson View account and you would have previously scheduled your exam. So what I'm going to show you now is the stages that you go through to actually take your exam. Okay, so this is an overview of what you would have to go through to take the exam. Basically there's some setup and then there's a check-in process. These are automated. Basically, the automated process will guide you through the entire setup and check-in process to the point of starting the exam. There is some testing that occurs of the computer. There's also an interaction with a mobile device. So it actually uses your phone or if you don't have a phone, you can use the webcam on your camera. And once this automated process is complete, you'll be then handed off to a live proctor to monitor your exam session for you. As I mentioned, we're presuming at this point that you previously scheduled an exam and it's now time to come in and take the exam. As I say, you should start this process. The advice is to start this process 30 minutes in advance of the actual scheduled time. So at this point, we've logged into the Open Group main page. We've pulled the certification pool down and we've gone to the take exam point and just a link to log in to our Pearson View account. And there we will see the exams that are ready to take and we will click on the available exams and we'll be at this screen. So we would select begin exam. At this point, you'll be supplied with an access code and a link to download the on-view application. Now this is an application that will have to run on your computer. It contains two components. There's the proctoring software and the secure browser. The proctoring software is responsible for collecting some information and we'll walk through that and obviously you have to collect some information about your ID and so on and we'll talk that out. It also checks your internet speed and that you've got video streaming working. Once that's been connected and all everything is suitable, then the secure browser is launched and that actually locks down your computer. Now this is currently 100 megabyte application so it takes a bit of time to come down and particularly on certain platforms you may have to give the application permissions to run. Currently this technology is supported on both Windows 10 and also Mac OS. So I know on Mac OS you have to grant the application several permissions in the system and this screen actually gives you the advice that you should do that and you can of course test all of this in advance and we do encourage a system test. This is the initial screen for the on view application. So you have an access code which is what you should have been given before that will be automatically populated here. You can enter a phone number so that the proctor can contact you if necessary. So at this point we are ready to do the second stage which is to begin the check in and that requires you to start using your mobile device. As I mentioned if you don't have a mobile phone then you can actually use your webcam. So why do we have to use a mobile device? We have to use that to take some photos and upload them to Pearson View. This includes a picture of yourself, some photo ID to prove who you are and also some verification of your workspace of where you're going to take the exam so the environment around you. As I mentioned if you don't have a mobile phone you can use your webcam to take the required photos. Firstly you need to take a mug shot, a head shot and this is very much like preparing a passport photo so you've got to get your head in the right position and you've got to make sure that you have an expression list sort of look on not smiling too much. You then are required to present a current government issued ID and the name on your ID must match the name in your web account profile. Now if it doesn't you know you should make sure you contact the open group at least a couple of days before if there's something not quite right we can normally help you out. There are a few little sort of funnies between the character sets that Pearson View supports and what the open group supports. We support full UTF-8 characters but Pearson supports some I think it's some limited sets so sometimes we have to transcode accented characters into their sort of ASCII equivalents but that's quite normal. Acceptable forms of ID include driver's license passport military ID identification cards if you're in the US green cards permanent resident cards and government issued local language IDs so if in doubt it's always best to contact Pearson View who managed the service for us if you've got any concerns about your ID. Then there's an environment check now this includes taking four photos of the room where the exam will be taken so everything has to be clear within arms reach no monitors other than the one used for testing can be plugged in there can be no notes, papers, white boards and so on you must be in a room with the door closed or in a private space so you'll see it asks you to take a picture basically looking front and then back left and right so and then you upload those. Once you've uploaded the photos the mobile checking is complete and then you're on to the final steps so as part of the final steps it just gives you some reminders and actually wants you to explicitly confirm you agree to these rules because if you break these rules then what happens is your exam session can be revoked and then lastly you should just make sure that you've closed all the other applications that are on your PC apart from the on view application and then you're into the final stage of waiting for your proctor this can take up to 15 minutes to happen and if there is a delay you know that it can be due to a problem with the photos and in that case the proctor will attempt to reach you over chat or call you on your phone so if you see an unknown caller calling in that could well be the proctor so please answer it now if you don't get connected within 10 minutes what Pearson view have actually done now is actually to put up a pop-up that will actually give you the option to actually get some immediate help on chat and also a web screen to pop up and possibly allow you to reschedule at that time so they're always looking to improve the experience obviously we're talking about connecting remote computers to remote systems all around the world over varying internet connection so sometimes things can go wrong they can not get connected so assuming we were connected then once the proctor has arrived we'll be ready to start the examination so that's at this point I would wish you good luck and off you would go just to wrap up I've given you a bit of a will stop tool there I think I've used all of my 25 minutes I'm hoping that you get three takeaways from here that you should understand the training approach to see and be able to locate our virtual and remote training resources you should understand the available certifications from the open group including the new badges that we've recently introduced and lastly you should understand how you take your exam remotely so I hope that's been helpful I will be around to take questions I'm not sure if we have time right now but I am here and also here's some information if anyone needs to contact me either on LinkedIn or Twitter hi Steve thank you Andrew great summary and we are out of time but I do I'm going to try and get a couple of questions in here you've talked obviously about our knowledge based systems but a question came in about which relates more I believe to our skills and experience based program the open professions program and the question is some of the personal certifications require contributions like teaching but my contributions are mostly inside my organization so what options do I have to contribute outside or to the open group community and how do I start okay obviously we do and I do understand in the experience based we do recognize internal contributions within companies as well mentoring but within the open group we recently I guess it's probably been at least track of time might be a year now but we do have contribution awards so if you are working on a publication it is possible to get an award so we have author awards co-author awards contributor awards reviewer awards, translator awards so the idea is these would all be recognized that you could put forward as your experience indeed we hope to build eventually a CPE continuing professional education with CPE and C-order CPD credits that you could that would be recognized and part of what we've got with our awards that are out there which is another type of open bag that I didn't cover today they would actually get recognition in such a program so if that is one way to actually give back to the open group to contribute amongst the community here great so there are some questions Andrew that I know you can answer in a heartbeat in the Q&A channel if you could get an opportunity to take a look at those and answer those that would be great for the folks who've taken the time to ask them but they know all the answers but we need to move on I know and there is a study guide for the business architect yourself just to mention that quickly fantastic a big virtual round of applause for Andrew Josie thank you Andrew