 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, for some 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. Welcome everyone, welcome to episode three of Toolkit Tuesday. I'm glad, thank you for joining us, I'm glad you've taken the decision to take the time to do so and I'm sure you'll find today's episode instructive and useful. We have a number of things today, the main presentation will be from my colleague Chris Ford, who I'll introduce in just a moment. But we also have some other things, we have an expert segment and please just before we get going, to get the most out of your WebEx experience on today's broadcast. If you go to the, there's a button in the top right of your screen, or should be in the top right of your screen, it might be called layout, it might be called something else, it depends on your settings. But if you go on there and you make sure that you have clicked on the item that says automatically hide names when not speaking, you'll get more of a view of the speakers and you can also click on any of the speakers, for example me at the moment, if you click or hover over the image of me, you will see three dots and you can click the option to move to stage and that will mean that you'll get a bigger picture, not that you necessarily want a bigger picture of me of course, but with the speakers it might help. So just a couple of tips there to help your experience today. We've got people joining us from all over the world today, so the timings are here in California, it's 9am, but we have people all over the world, so thank you again for making the time. So without further ado, we're going to move on. And in today's episode of the Architects Toolkit Tuesday webinar series, we're going to discuss the skills and changes necessary for architects to participate and lead digital transformations. That's key and everyone's minds right now of course. The presentation today that we'll hear will relate those needs to current research and the toolkit of open standards from the open group that architects can use to enable that readiness, enable their readiness for the challenges involved and to lead us through a lot of that today, it's a great pleasure to introduce my colleague, Chris Ford, who is CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects since 2016 Chris is based in Shanghai, China, and he also holds the post of general manager Asia Pacific for the open group. He's responsible for business functions in that region and he's also vice president of enterprise architecture and has global responsibility for the enterprise architecture activities at the open group, including our TOGAFA and the Archimage standards. Chris has deep expertise in enterprise architecture and as a member representative and chair of the open group architecture forum, he was instrumental in driving the successful development and launch of TOGAFA 9 from 2007 to 2009. So we're in good hands today with a talk on the future of architects. A warm welcome, a virtual welcome of course, but warm welcome for Chris Ford and over to you Chris and I'll see you all afterwards. Hi, thanks Steve. Good morning everyone. Open standards are relevant to you and your company and your industry and I may be asking you to change your perspective on this to innovate. Why do I say that? Well, in 2018 someone messaged me via social media. They said that architecture frameworks and practices like TOGAFA and EA were not relevant in a world of AI and machine learning and I was surprised to hear that because literally at that moment I was sitting in one of our quarterly meetings listening to a presentation about a customer facing business driven EA activity based on TOGAFA and applied to developing and delivering a machine learning capability within one of the world's leading investor service organizations, Moody's. So the point here is that you don't see a TOGAFA for AI machine learning title in a TOGAFA series guide currently but that didn't stop Moody's innovating with open standards and that's what I'm going to try and talk to you about here today. The composition of our standards and the way we can be using them to innovate. This list of the characteristics of enterprise agility meaning the ability to operate in an agile manner and innovate rapidly. Your own list may differ but this list is pretty short and clear and it deals with alertness, accessibility, decisiveness, swiftness and flexibility and you should note that these characteristics apply to all aspects of your enterprise not just to software development pipelines or even the IT organization. So it's great to aspire to these agility characteristics but what's your macro situation? What's your enterprise? The digital practitioner body of knowledge standard identifies the different types and levels of process and structure that are needed for different stages of each organization's growth, maturity and complexity moving from founder to team, team of teams and enduring enterprise and as architects as digital practitioners we must navigate and provide guidance and information for decision making appropriate to those levels and also pay attention to helping our organization move between those levels. Some of us may be playing at the founder level that represents scaling problems as you grow and some of us may be in the enduring enterprise level that dark blue segment at the top of the model and in that case if you're undertaking digital transformation and agile practices you may have an inverse scaling problem for transformation and agility so what do I mean by that? Imagine that you're in that enduring enterprise and you have multi-disciplinary teams of up to nine people divide that into your employee population and do the calculation on the total number of teams of problems you'll be trying to organize around. As an individual architect the mindset and skills and practices you need to succeed at each scaling point and plateau of an organization's development may not be everything you need at the next plateau and level and that's true inversely also moving back. Just a corollary here the weight and culture of workforce, each strategy and organization or it enables it. So being a platform based enterprise is essential but your platform is not enough. You've got to consider your ecosystem and the market reality is that for some time customers and prospects have had real-time feedback mechanisms at their fingertips and a shift continues to accelerate in this way not only in B2C but to a certain extent in B2B. People today expect to readily engage with friends, acquaintances colleagues or business partners. They expect services integration, ordering delivery status transportation, food ordering and getting things done by getting themselves or something from A to B. They expect what they want when they want it, how they want it and where they want it. And typically it's impossible for one company to deliver on all of these needs and demands alone. And so in an increasingly composed environment these characteristics are delivered for the consumer prospect to the point of engagement. So we need to take in this ecosystem environment a supply chain oriented view of your digital product delivery. Now talking about digital transformation here's one definition and a framework for classifying the things that you and your enterprise need to consider to deal with an architect for. And this model is contained in the seven levers white paper published by the open group. And there are consequences for not addressing each of these levers, but the levers apply to every aspect of your business and operating capability. So the discussion about transformation beyond agile software delivery, beyond agile architecture and many of the transformation examples discussed are really typically the result of a shifting focus and implementation of new business and operating models over years of experimentation across that enterprise. So if the emphasis in discussions that you're undertaking remains solely on IT software practices or models if there's not a broader scope for transformation discussion it may not scale or replicate effectively without the less obvious transformation and cultural shifts needed in your own company. Now talking about transformation we should not only talk about it for the enterprise but also for us ourselves as architects continuous learning adjustment and adaptation applied to your own development and your enterprise culture. Organizations considered digital leaders have intensified expectations for their architects as digital practitioners to deliver on business and operating model changes with technology as an enabler at pace. And these expectations are starting to look like a call for a superhero architect. So the points here about professional skills and specializations is very important as are the partners you choose to engage with and those you can learn from. As is here an outline curriculum for learning relating to architecting. Building on basics and adding to your knowledge, skills and experience continually. Now the flip side of transformation is optimization in my view optimizing operating efficiency is valuable bread and butter stuff to shareholders to tax paying citizens and owners of private companies. Operating effectively on the right things holds your current business and potentially opens up funding paths to new investments and growth areas. Now of course delivering efficiencies in current operations and products cannot be done with blinders. Missing transformational cues can be fatal in certain circumstances like the listed examples here. The enterprise needs to be aware of external threats but the point here is about the value of an architected approach to optimization not only transformation. Your current business requires care and feeding. Previously I used to use the terms deliver new business capabilities and optimize which is certainly perhaps quite different. So what's changed? Transformation in the context of business and operating models is larger than capabilities. Now that doesn't mean that capabilities are irrelevant. They are extraordinarily relevant but building out or optimizing your capabilities for an existing business and operating model is not the same as stepping back enterprise-wide and asking and contributing to what new business are we building? Now here's an illustration of our ongoing professional journey past, present and potential futures. In each winter and spring from the 80s through the present day has led to growth in this profession both in the technology scope and in the reinforced value of an architected approach. So looking forward how do you think technology trends might impact or modify our practice if we think about VR and augmented reality design going mainstream, quantum computing coming into the floor, other topics like cloud platform scales changing even more, AI beginning to scale, serverless computing. So things are going to continue to change. The question is how we will build them. Now from a research perspective this survey on enterprise architecture and digital leaders from McKinsey Henry Business School and the AEA has been conducted additively over five years and most recently updated this year in 2021. And you can read it in the Journal of Enterprise Architecture published by the Association of Enterprise Architects. It reports on some interesting questions and data about digital leaders versus the rest. For example, digital leaders using a common language in this case the term capabilities and also that EAs in digital leaders organizations engage with stakeholders and have visibility of an engagement with the C-suite. Now not illustrated here but also in the survey what attracts exceptional talent in the EA practice? The third highest ranking incentive and the biggest gap is education of staff highlighting the importance of opportunities for professional development. And what are the critical areas of professional development? Interpersonal skills are the leading issue. How do I address this gap? Well, I recommend that you go to the AEA website and download the survey and dig into the meat of this. There's a lot of very valuable information there. Now, mindset and perceptions of EAs and for EAs need to shift from topics on the left to topics on the right of this slide. But I have a caveat here. Cut through the myths and the cliches and deal with the actual perceptions. Conduct stark assessments to get the reality of your architecture practice, your own knowledge skills and experience and competencies, and your enterprise specific situations. This is not an all done type of situation. How much of the front side reflects your current practice or your current aspirations? And how much of the two side reflects your current practice or your current aspirations? The architecture practice may be symptomatic of what ails the enterprise. Or it could be a beacon of light leading the way. Typically everyone's in the transformation both together. Some are rowing, some are passengers, some are navigating, and some are just hanging on. A central tenet of agile digital transformation is taking an outside in view, determining what a customer wants, how they want to do it, and mobilizing the business and technology to meet those needs. So here's a view on illustrating that perspective. Fundamentally here, there's a virtuous circle of value implicit in this customer focus viewpoint and a recognition of some market realities. This is a customer product aware, software enabled and data driven engine supported and enabled by the latest available technology. So from a customer perspective, listening examples, customer and retail shopping, trip planning, food delivery, social media, or research to commit on any given purchase. The employee view might be that of a mind manager, a drug research scientist, or an oil exploration or climate scientist. The citizen view may be around life events, daily services, registering marriages, births, deaths, or obtaining a business license or a small business loan or a passport. Now, the Open Agile Architecture Standard from the Open Group states that a digital transformation and agility for an enterprise are inseparable in organizations undertaking changes at scale. A dual transformation approach is required to deliver the related outcomes and value. And the relevance and applied use of this approach has been experimented with, compared, contrasted, and confirmed, and implemented in companies like Society General, Michelin Fidelity, ExxonMobil, Autodesk, Raytheon, and Comcast as examples. And additionally, its relevance has been confirmed by large and boutique consulting organizations. So looking at this dual transformation viewpoint, customer, product, and adaptive operating models is a place to go look at the latest thinking on these scalable digital transformations. Now, in exploring this material, we'll find paths and options enumerated, such as transformation dimensions like ways of working, management systems, organizational structure, enterprise culture, and meta questions that come up around pace, concurrency, and sequence. Transformational scenarios such as waterfall, incremental, and Big Bang, and use an architect in your organizational will need to assess and decide on these dimensions of things repeatedly, continually. Now, when we're viewing an architecture and architecting perspective for digital transformation, here's a view of competencies, tools, techniques related to architecture development in a dual agile and digital transformation. The experience perspective is in the problem space, the working systems perspective is in the solution space, and the technical systems perspective is in the solution space. The building blocks are positioned along the axis of what the enterprise is and what the enterprise does. And strategy, value, data, information, and AI span the axis, okay? The corporate brand identity and corporate culture building blocks influence what the enterprise does, and the organization and governance building blocks influence what the enterprise is. Now, it's worth pointing out here, as always, that the trap of typical entropy related one and done architecture and the product delivery where people move on, so the intent here is continual architecture and evolution. Now, continuing with our toolkit of open standards perspective, let me draw your attention to the lower center in this slide where there's an Archimate model diagram. You see an abstracted product value and capability construct related to business processes and shared knowledge and insights in the context of the business operations. All of these other topics, trends, and considerations press on this model and reshape it in its related detailed iteratively. And so you should be aware that you can look for clarity in identifying patterns and models that express your stakeholders' views and vision for their business operations and its execution through these modeling capabilities and expressing your architectures. Now, digital leaders have a focus on what is the context for their architecture, for their business operation and the technology, including IT. So how might a role of an architect fit into the agile product team or product backlog and sprint planning activity? The answer is situational. Any one of the people on the teams illustrated here may act in the role of an architect or it might be a specific job with the name professional architect in role, either as a staff member or consultant or both. Regardless, the truth is that architecting needs to be done. People in roles working on various delivery threads, such as covering scope domain design, concerns related to strategy, operations, customers, products, business processes, data, information, cybersecurity, supporting technologies, cross-functional services, APIs and microservices. There's a massive list of considerations. And the architect's role is involved in daily engagement with the team members and stakeholders. Again, to be clear, this is a role and expertise illustration, not a position illustration. People in this team may have and likely do have the capability to perform multiple roles when and if needed. So this is just a skim over slide, really. Here we're showing the architects and the architecture teams role in product backlog and sprint planning activities. And clearly the role is involved in timely, relevant engagement with stakeholders and team members. Now, this is the Togaf ADM related to delivering business outcomes in the context of agile business and agile solutioning and agile dev sec ops delivery. When setting up and leading operating and governing architecture-related activities and the integration with enterprise functions, you might end up with this context and transformation. But you also need to look beyond just the ADM. Look to the Togaf series guides, the leaders guide, the governor's guide and others, and the white papers that I referenced earlier in this document about digital transformation. Here, what we're trying to communicate that the ADM isn't waterfall, you choose how to implement it. And it's based on what your organization term is a strategic operational organization of cultural considerations are and how it's tailored for that purpose. So to rephrase this, you and your organization make choices to use waterfall, incremental, iterative, Big Bang, Lean, TQM, Kanban, other scenarios and techniques in developing and delivering architectures and engaging with other team styles in your enterprise. Those choices are strategic, technical, or situational, but they are not determined by Togaf, but they do impact how you deploy it. Those are tough choices to make, hopefully made well by you and your organizations. Now, when iterating on delivery, you partition and segment work in a manageable and prioritized pipeline for delivery. And so here we're showing the architecture pattern of partitioning and segmentation, which is present in Togaf, applied in sprints and scrum with the instrument's intent and potential artifacts. So wrapping up now with competency demands for architects, even when you are orienting your internal practice-based and value delivery, have exceptional talent in the team, you'll be facing significant external competition and pressure for that internal consultancy role, as well as opportunities around that for partnership and learning. There are management consultancy organizations providing services with highly trained top talent. Competition for talent is fierce and competition amongst those management consultants is also fierce when they're talking about getting clients. So as always, a choice has to be made about what capabilities your enterprise will keep internally and what it will externalize. How does your internal practice differentiate itself and deliver value and how do you? Now, the OAA standard identifies an updated range of skills that may be considered part of the enterprise architect's role today and moving forward. These include the disciplines needed by management consultants who help design business and operating models. This update borrows from concepts and methods such as strategic marketing and market research, user and customer experience, design thinking, lean product and process development, socio-technical systems, organizational sociology, operation strategy, software architecture, enterprise architecture. So here, the roles of EA and EA capabilities need to be adapted depending on organizational context and maturity level. Park back to the emergence model from the digital practitioner material in the very early slides. Well, that's a wrap on my presentation here. Back to you, Steve. Chris, wonderful, wonderful job. There's a lot of content in there and you've helpfully provided direct links on the last slide there so that the attendees can go there and dig a bit deeper and follow those links. So there's a lot of information there and some great stuff. So a thank you for what you've led us through. A quick question. One we hear quite a lot. At this point, it's fair to say the open group is probably best known for our TOGAP standard, but you've mentioned a few other of our standards along the way that maybe have a role in their part of the toolkit for digital transformation. Can you give your view on how you might go about those or your view of the utility of those other tools, not just TOGAP? Well, you know, the irony here is that with what I did cover, which was a lot and, you know, frankly, my colleagues in reviewing this material said you're probably covering way too much stuff. I left things out like the IT for IT reference architecture, right, dealing with how you run and operate the technology component of your operations. And not only that, though, it deals with strategy and architecture as well in a specific set of contexts. So the view that the architect is the center of the universe is not the open group's view, right? And so the digital practitioner viewpoint point is saying digital transformation is occurring and practitioners as a whole are in the enterprise that have to change. And architects are one of those practitioners. The others are the product managers, the business owners, and what skills do people need in order to accomplish those things? The OAA, as updated, as I just thought about at the end there, with a set of skills that are more related to management consultancy and internal consultancy. But these are the expectations that are being placed on architects by leaders of organizations that are undertaking digital transformation. And there's an interesting question in the Q&A here from Rick, or Rich, about, he agrees with the sentiment, what the hell does this have to do with architecture specifically? Well, that's my words, not his. And I would say that it's the scope of your architecting now may include organizational design, where it may not have included that before, right? But that, again, is situational. For one organization, they may not have that set of expectations on an architect. But if they do, you're going to have to increase your skill set and you're going to have to get into organizational design, and that may be one of the architect's roles. So in such a broad context, it's very difficult to go down into the Natsas detail on this stuff. But that's what I tried to do in terms of the ladder slides around here's where Togoff might fit, here's where Agile and Scrum might fit, those sorts of things. Right, right, Chris. Well, in the interest of respecting people's time, we'll leave it there. But thank you for your great presentation today. And as we said, there's a lot there to unpack. But there are some links to take you right there. And maybe one of the things I picked out for an audience that's mostly architects, I'm guessing, competition for your skills and experiences is fierce. And that should be good news for everyone. Very good news. Yeah, absolutely. Chris, one welcome again. Thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. So briefly now, folks, we're just going to have a Toolkit Tuesday tip from one of our experts on the series, Terry Blevins, who after, well, not after, but he's had a very long career as an enterprise architect in both public and private sectors. And today he's with EnterpriseWise LLC and is also a fellow of the Open Group. So we're going to have a quick Toolkit Tuesday tip from Mr. Terry Blevins. Hi, my name is Terry Blevins with the Toolkit Tuesday Tip. We have a lot to think about when supporting digital transformation and digital enterprises in general. It's a complicated scenario and yet a great opportunity for enterprise architects to demonstrate their support and value. There's a few key things I think we, as enterprise architects, need to consider when asked to support a digital effort. The first is to make sure we see our role as enablers for the digital effort. Our role in this scenario is not to just create architecture models and standards, but our role is to enable and support the digital effort going on in the business or mission. Keep in mind that the architect's role isn't to make the change, but to enable the change by supporting all those involved in making decisions associated with the changes. Secondly, we must think about enterprise architecture differently. One thing to rethink is how we view the Togaf ADM. Right now, some think of the Togaf ADM as a cycle, but especially in the case of digital enterprises, you should not think of the ADM as a cycle. Rather, we should think of the Togaf ADM more like a set of buckets of architectural capabilities to be delivered to those in need. And you should also think about delivering those capabilities through a service delivery model. Providing those architecture services to those that are making decisions by implementing the necessary changes at the time of need is key to your success as an enterprise architect and the success of the digital enterprise. So look at the ADM as a collection of capabilities that you will provide through a service delivery model and by doing this, you will be better equipped to support the digital enterprise. Keep architecting for enterprise value. Thanks for watching. Terry, thanks very much for that great tip. Very valuable and for our audience, as I said before, Terry has a long and distinguished career in enterprise architecture and so when he gives us some tips, we should listen and there's some great value in there. So thanks again, Terry. And that just about brings us to the end of this episode of Toolkit Tuesday. I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to join us and I hope you found it valuable and that you'll join us for the next one, which is in two weeks' time, where we will focus on the subject of enterprise architecture and enterprise agility using the Togov Standard. So a really key topic, EA and Agility and using one of the tools in the Toolkit, the Togov Standard. So I hope you'll join us in two weeks' time, where our main presenter will be Chris Frost of Fujitsu. In the meantime, wherever you are from anywhere in the world, I hope you remain safe and well and see you in two weeks. I'm Steve Nunn. This was Toolkit Tuesday. Thank you for joining. Bye-bye.