 A warm welcome to everybody. Good morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you are in the world. Most importantly, I hope you're safe. And it's been a year now since we've been running our events entirely virtually. The first one of these was April 2020 and it's been a great experience for us at the Open Group. We've been able to reach far more of you at the same time than we would have been able to if we were having face-to-face meetings. But obviously, we hear regularly the question, when are you going to have your face-to-face meetings? Well, obviously, that's out of our hands right now. That depends on many, many factors. But for now, our goal is to give you the highest best quality experience we can of a virtual event. And we have some great stuff to share with you today. Before I leave the topic of the current situation that everybody is in and the pandemic, our thoughts at the Open Group go out to our many, many participants in India right now in particular. We have a team of staff in India as well. And obviously, things are seemingly quite bad there. And I hope that that too will start to look brighter. And in the meantime, please, please, please take care of you and yours. India is a very important place for us at the Open Group. And at these events, we get many, many participants from there. So I hope some of you are still there. And on that note, if you would like to share in the chat where you are joining from, it's always interesting to know. I know that we have people from more than 85 countries registered for the event today. And many have spread all over the world, ones and twos in some countries and many in others. But it's kind of fun to use the chat channel to just let people know where you are and anything else you want to share. But as John said, please use the Q&A channel for questions for speakers, because that's where I'll be looking when I am looking for questions for the speakers from the audience. So it's hard to monitor both. So please use the Q&A for that. So today, our topic for the whole event is digital standards, open digital standards, something that we are working actively on in the Open Group. And every enterprise is going through or is about to go through. If you haven't started yet, it's digital transformation journey. And it is a journey. We hear that over and over again. It's not something you just declare that you're done. But how do you get there as an organization? Because the key is to actually delivering and executing on a transformation like that, where you're changing not just technologies and processes, but fundamental changes in people's roles. The people are so important. And today we're going to focus on professionals who are needed for some of those key activities. And at the Open Group, we are proud of our various certification programs. We have our knowledge-based certification programs, which we're well known for. Things like Togaf and Arcumate and IT for IT and Open Fair. But we also have something called an Open Professions Program. And we're going to hear a bit more about that in the start of the meeting today. And there's no better person for me to start off with than have a chat with my colleague who has been involved in this from the very beginning and still is very much so. So I'm going to start by having a discussion today with my colleague, James Derave. Now, James is Vice President and General Manager for India at the Open Group. Now, he's in that role, he's responsible for developing our membership and helping organizations in India understand the benefits of using standards of the Open Group. But he's also been very closely involved with all the certification and testing activities of the Open Group over the years and indeed our pre-dissocial organization, XOPEN. As well as all the programs developed for other consortia, which is something else that we've done in the past. So today, as I say, we're going to focus on the Open Group Professional Program or the Open Professions Program, which provides a globally recognized, credential enhancing your value and visibility as a professional while enabling your organization to adopt best practices within its career model. So a warm welcome from the Open Group please for my colleague, James Derave. James, are you there? I think I am. Yes, I can hear you and now I can see you. Great background, by the way. Indeed. I hope you're doing well. You're not in India right now. I think you're joining us from home in the UK. I am indeed and my apologies for the creature leaping about on my shoulders on the video is apparently the headrest of my chair. WebEx can't quite filter out. Okay, I'm sure we'll get used to it. Anyway, glad to have you here, James. And as I said, there's nobody better I could start off the day with in setting the context for our Open Professions Program, but I want to take it back a notch first or back to basics. We talk about professions. What is a profession? It's such a good question. I mean, the word gets used and misused all over the place. And people say, well, I'm a professional, which mean, you know, in meaning that actually quite good at something and you should listen to them and believe what they say. But the history is very deep. And it goes back to a time when societies were struggling with who to trust to do things, in particular, who do you want to trust to take a knife to cut your leg off. If you need your leg cut off, for example. And the license is given to surgeons to do that. And the part of the deal on giving them the license to commit what would otherwise be a crime is that we have confidence in them. We trust them that they've built up a body of knowledge. They've acquired that knowledge. They've gone through some kind of a training exercise probably early years, it would have been an apprenticeship. These it's more likely to be years of practice in a hospital working with other surgeons being supported being mentored being, you know, having some oversight as they take on more and more responsibility as they become more adept at their profession. So the society gives them essentially a monopoly for wielding that knife, because we trust them. And we don't just trust the people. We trust that whole system by which they became qualified to be a medical professional. So we trust the education we trust the standards that define what a medical profession needs professional needs to be. We trust the assessment and certification methods used by the profession to determine whether someone qualifies to have those letters after their name. And then we'd also trust the ability of the profession to enable people who acquire that qualification to maintain the standard. So there's something about continuing professional development. There's something about, you know, is there a mechanism for barring someone who's who's made a mess. And associated also you get other things around that bits bits of infrastructure such as professional indemnity insurance to cope with the fact that professionals need to be accountable for the work they do. So that's that's kind of the history and we all know, we all know doctors it's just part of what we assume a medical practitioner is. But it applies to other professionals such as lawyers or accountants or childhood surveyors or civil engineers or mechanical engineers. But these are all very well established. And I think in, in it, it's different. And it's different for a couple reasons but I think mostly because of because of it well it's new. You know, essentially any since the, well, that's where the earliest in the 50s of any 60 70s the numbers started to go up so we've not been around very long. And so, the other factor in there is the body of knowledge and the established practice of professionals in our, in our industry have been changing very fast over those years. So the cell to mean any consensus about what the body of knowledge is, or about what kind of training and apprenticeship and mentorship is needed so, you know, we're sort of the profession or the community is being sort of scrabbling around to say well where are our foundations how can we build something and that's that's kind of where we've got asked to help out a bit. Right. That's great. Going back to the, the context of the medical profession is a great one for us all to relate to and obviously our day to day world in the open group is quite different but along the way there you mentioned trust standards adhering to standards all of those things. So, so why did we at the open group start our open professions program where did it come from and who's aimed at. Well, you know, one of the things to that may be a little strange when you look at the open group from the outside is, you know, you think there's well there's this organization that does stuff. Well, entirely correct we do, but it's not us as staff that do it, we may enable it to be done. And the intellectual input and creativity and content comes from our members. You know, we were asked by our members to solve the problem of trying to define what a professional initially what a professional architect was. And we thought about it and we asked for input from our members and they said well here's what we think and here's what we think, and we saw an astonishing amount of commonality. So, these were organizations that had spent a lot of time thinking about this problem internally, but rather than having their own definition, they wanted an industry definition of profession and we're prepared to contribute their intellectual property their ideas their thoughts into a common pool. So they asked us to take charge of that and to take it forward turn it into a standard and build what became the professions program. So it was a member request. And the need for doing it was was about not just that they didn't want it to be just their own thing. But they wanted some industry consensus, they want that to be an industry standard for what a professional that stage architect was to be. And they were looking for vending neutrality to add value to that say well it's not a point of phrase is not an HP or an IBM or a cap Gemini definition of what a professional is it's the industry. So that's how we how the program came to be. Right and that that goes, presumably it's that it's the fact that it's built across industry that gives it the credibility and the, which plays to the trust that you talked about with the medical profession that's absolutely, absolutely. And sorry, go ahead. No, no. So that's, that's really why it's why the industry and those who who hire or contract with those professionals believe in the in the program and the credibility of it. Absolutely. And it's not just that, you know, a member consensus came up with the definition of what it needs to be professional they also came up with the definition of how do we find out whether someone meets those criteria. So the process of how someone applies for certification what information must they present how do we evaluate an application. And the, you know, the core feature which is like many other professions is that we use professionals to judge the applying the other professionals who were applying to become professionals within the program. It's not examination. It's by peer review. So final stages into is a review an interview process with a group of certified professionals interviewing a candidate. So, you know, it's it's it mirrors many of the many of those approaches that other professions have used done in a way that we can operate and scale globally. Great. Great. So, we've been we've been doing this for for a few years now. How many, how many professionals do we do we have another program around the world? What's what's the ballpark number? Well, I did look, I must confess, not this morning, but over the weekend, three thousand and eight to two architects, two thousand three hundred and forty three technical specialists, two hundred and fifty one data scientists and four trusted technology practitioners. Right. And the trusted technology ones are most recent, most recent. We're here. We're here more about that. We'll hear more about that later, of course. But so, as I said, the program has been operating for a little while, but we've we've made some changes recently. So what's new. Two big things or are the one really big thing and one one almost big thing for the architects. So we've added another, what we call discipline. So, the program started with just to focus on what we call back in 2006, I think it was it architects and then we've added enterprise architecture and we've added business architecture. And this year we launched digital architecture as a discipline. And that caused us to think very hard about everything we'd ever done. And so, when we define a requirement for an architect, when you go back at look at the words we wrote say five or 10 years ago was often an assumption of a waterfall project in the thinking behind the sentence that described the skill. So we had to look hard at all of those and cut out all the waterfall project style terminology and assumptions about the requirements. And what we found when doing it was that the digital architects actually required nearly all of the same skills as the other other architects, plus a couple of experts, particular ones that were relevant to the digital. So that was big what big change number one we've added digital architect discipline and it's now just available. You can now apply for that to swim. I'm glad to hear that because I told this event. It would be by now so good to know. If you look on the website, they're there, there are forms of that you can start filling them in and I hope you do. Anyway, the other big change was one of the, it was to respond to a criticism that we asked people to fill in a very large form. And we limited people making applications to make to be only 50 to 55 pages long. A lot of work. And we also charged a significant sum of money to make that application. So it caused people a great deal of angst and worry about. Can I expend this amount of effort to keep this application form? And can I risk that amount of time and money to make this application. So in responding to that and I'm trying to make the program a bit more digital in its operation. We have split those applications into multiple sections, which we call milestones. So you can apply for a milestone. And it will be evaluated. And if you get it, you get a milestone badge. You should make the plain badges for achievement of all of these things. And by the time you've got a full set, you then do the final step to apply for certification, which is a small additional increment, which then involves the interviews. So, basically, we've sort of deconstructed, I think that's probably the more modern word to do with this. We've deconstructed it into separate pieces, which when added together. And we've made it up to what we had originally. It's just done in a stepwise fashion to it so that people have smaller steps to climb as they march through their careers. Right, which is, which is important. So they can now do this along the way rather than waiting till they've, they think they've met all the criteria and then looking back. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And along the way also means that since a lot of it, a lot of the applications about describing what you did in the project and what skills you demonstrated in the project. You can do one of these applications for an experience milestone, and either during or immediately after the completion of a project, you don't have to wait until you've got a set of three before you apply. So you can do things much closer to the experience, possibly the weekend after. Right. Right. Good. Good. So we're going to, we're going to hear later in this, well, next actually starting next about some of the impact of that and some more detail on the individual parts of the professions but one of the things that that obviously we've been, we've been working on is, is getting the, the program recognized by others so can you, can you talk to, to what extent it's, it's acknowledged beyond the open group. Yes, indeed. And, and, and I wish I could tell you that every country in the world, the government has a profession's recognition register or more you were on the register doesn't exist. There's, there's, you know, the valiant efforts and successful efforts in organ in, in, in, you know, in the European Union for cross recognition of professional qualifications. So, you know, if you're, if you're an accountant in France, you can practice in that anyway. That doesn't exist globally. So we have gone for building recognition with the organizations that seem to have the largest footprint initially. And in this area, it's the British Computer Society, the BCS, we have achieved recognition of all four of our professions at what we call level to master level. They are recognized as meeting all of the qualifications necessary to achieve the BCS is charted it professional professional status. And it's a validation that well established charted professional body in the UK recognizes what we're doing is being equivalent to what they do. So, you know, the moment I can find targets to talk to to have similar conversations in other countries, we will have those conversations. We're, we're certainly aware of them, but the conversations aren't easy because they sell them a well established profession to have this conversation with. We did try and talk to as an organization in which all of these professional bodies globally connect. So we've had conversations like that. You know, could we do a recognition with I fit but that's not born fruition yet. I still have hopes. Right. Okay. And lastly, because we have we have just under two minutes. I mentioned something very important here, which is what you mentioned level two. One of the features of the program is there are different levels that you can you can apply for and ideally move along the move along the path. Can you just say a short one minute version about those. Yeah. 50 second level one is for team members contributing professionals. They may perform and work with support or mentoring. You know, I go back to the, what I was telling you about medical profession right at the beginning. People joining through to becoming independent practitioners go through a period where they're where they're watch their shepherds that supported their mentors and guided. So that's our level one. Level two is people who master the state of the art who led their projects. And level three is for individuals who are having a significant impact upon the business of their employers or clients. They're making significant change. That's probably how it is. In a nutshell, that's wonderful. Thank you, James. And I will see you later, I believe, for the for the panel discussion. And if, if any of you have questions about program for James, then feed them through the Q and a channel and we'll, we'll pick them up in the panel. And in the meantime, a big virtual round of applause for James to rave. Nice to see you again, James. And we'll move on to our next speaker. Thank you, James.