 I'm presiding the Open Group Forum Director supporting the Open Platform 3.0 forum, and it's my pleasure to welcome you all to this first webinar in our series on the business context for Open Platform 3.0, which is on business ecosystems. The facilitation of this webinar will be performed by one of the co-chairs of the forum, Stuart Boardman, and the main presentation will be given by Palab Sahar of Wipro. So without further ado, I will hand over to Stuart, who will take us through the agenda, which is now on display, and say a few words about the context of business ecosystems for Open Platform 3.0 before we get to our main presentation. Thank you, Chris. Hello. My name is Stuart Boardman. You can see on the slide here what I do. I'm going to just start off by providing a little bit of context in about Open Platform 3.0 and what that's got to do with ecosystems. And then we'll move on to the main part of the presentation where Palab Sahar will tell you about business ecosystems, his view on that and the importance of understanding this to our practice going forward. And then I'll come back very briefly with just a little extra on the Open Platform 3.0 specifics. And then we will move on to questions, which Chris will facilitate and we will endeavour to answer. Open Platform 3.0 is a forum of the Open Group and we're aiming towards producing a standard. The platform is considered to include cloud, internet of things, big data, mobile and social as what we call technologies, but in the broadest sense and could in future include other emerging technologies. And we're looking at the effects those have on each other and our ability to do business in the world. We published an initial snapshot of what the thing might look like back in November. And in it we had a chapter about enterprise ecosystems, which we'll look very briefly at in a minute, and then a very short chapter on what we call wider business ecosystems. And in the next snapshot, one of the things we want to do is to go into a lot more detail on what wider business ecosystems means in the context of Open Platform 3.0 and Palab's contribution here is going to be enormously useful in reaching that point. So we defined something that we called an enterprise ecosystem and I should make it clear that we are aware that there are multiple definitions of enterprise ecosystems and for that matter of business ecosystems, we felt we needed to explain what we would mean when we use the term in Open Platform 3.0 context. So there's a definition here on the right which I'm not going to read at you or go into any detail because the next webinar in this series will in fact be talking all about this. The main point here is that it's very much looking out at the world from the perspective of one enterprise. We felt we needed to then define something which we called a wider business ecosystem. So what you can see here is that a bunch of different ecosystems collaborating with each other in ecosystems are indeed part of other ecosystems. That's a natural fact and it's also true in the way we use the context and also how Palab will talk about it. That's as far as we got, which is why we want to go further. By the way, in case anyone's interested, these rather interesting little chaps in the middle holding their computers either use us if you want them to be or they're people offering services from a service catalogue if you'd like them to be. And with that, I'll stop. I'll hand over to Palab who's going to cover the bulk of today's presentation and I'll come back at the end with one brief slide. Over to you. Thank you, Stuart. Thank you, Chris, for this quick introduction. Good morning to people who are joining in from the Southern North American continent. Good afternoon for people who are joining from Europe and good evening to the rest of us. I'm based in India at this point. So it's a pleasure to be delivering this session today because of the importance, the topic of business ecosystems that it has garnered over the past, I would say, about a year or so. Which is surprising because the term business ecosystem is actually not very new. It was a person called James Moore who actually coined this term first in a paper which was published in a legal journal in 2006. So it's about a decade old now, the concept of business ecosystems. But it's good to see that it is being brought into the context of enterprise architecture because what I'm going to present today is a little bit of a set of examples and also a case study where the concept of ecosystems was used to address a business priority or a business concern, so to speak. So let me go ahead with the presentation. So this is the agenda. I will, you know, you see that I'll be progressing through this agenda and different items on the agenda. So let me go to the first one. The concept of the term of ecosystem is actually not new. It's about nine, 10 years old. And the reason why this is becoming more and more important is on this slide. Organizations are realizing that, and there's no rocket science here, is that when you define your strategy, you do need to understand and fully have good, you know, insight into the ecosystem that you operate in. Now these ecosystems could, you know, to be considered could include your, you know, collaborating partners, include your customers, your customers, customers, so on and so forth. So the entire supply chain. What is important is that some of these ecosystems don't work in a linear fashion. They will definitely continue to work, you know, some aspects of it in a linear fashion, but most of the ecosystems and the example which I will show you later, you know, work in a network kind of, you know, pattern. And there is a survey done by the Harvard Business Review. You'll see that on the left of your slide. And according to that survey, Walmart actually believes and measured the impact of having a good ecosystem operating in a good ecosystem is directly affecting its, you know, top line and bottom line. So you can see some numbers there. Anywhere the slides are with you, I'm not going to read those numbers there, but the whole message from this slide is that organizations have to be comfortable in the web way or the network way of thinking and operating. And it does impact their top line and bottom line performance. And the reason why this is happening, I've taken this, you know, this is a good slide because it shows you that in many situations the boundaries that exist between organizations between different ways of delivering services are actually blurring. So for instance, today with the advent of technology, we are seeing a blurring of physical and digital, you know, services. We're seeing a blurring of boundaries between and within firms, industry sectors, development, you know, emerging economies, so on and so forth. So what that is creating is actually a complex network which already exists. What organizations need to do, hence need to do is that leverage on that network and take benefit of the complexity that already exists in this entire, you know, system or ecosystem. So let's go to the technical definition. As Chris and Stuart were saying, there are many definitions out there, but I've tried to take the most, I would say, the common definition in terms of the theme it covers. A business ecosystem is a network of organizations and individuals that co-evolve their capabilities, okay, so as to create additional value or improve efficiency. The key word here is that participants in an ecosystem can include both organizations and individuals who have a shared vision and therefore they want to co-evolve their capability to deliver a new service or improve on an existing service. Now typically, these concentric circle statistics, so you can see what Stuart was introducing earlier, right? So there is a core business which is in the center and then which is surrounded by something called the extended enterprise which may include your suppliers, your customers that I was mentioning earlier. And then you have the wider business ecosystem which can include other stakeholders, you know, which may have investors, owners, you know, trade associations, labor unions. You also deal with government agencies and other regulatory bodies. The interesting thing is that in the wider business ecosystem, you could also have your competitors as one of the collaborators. And this is what we're going to be elaborating a bit later on with the examples. Why do organizations have to focus on building their ecosystems? What are the drivers? The most important driver is that organizations have realized that individually they may not be able to leverage on all the opportunities that are available or solve all the problems and challenges that are out there, especially the wicked problems, you know, so to speak. But what has been seen over the past, and I'll share some examples later on, what has been seen is that organizations don't come and form an ecosystem in a wholesale format, which means that their decision, so to speak, to form an ecosystem or to be part of an ecosystem is always contextualized, you know, to address a business problem or an opportunity or a priority. So what happens is in the context of the ecosystem and that process or service or product or platform, they are part of the ecosystem and hence these organizations collaborate and have a shared vision, but outside of this platform and service and product, they could also be competing, which is very, very common. And what organizations are doing is that they're trying to build ecosystems and using this as an approach to operate in an environment which is, as we all understand, is more volatile, most uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And the whole idea of establishing successful ecosystems is to address these four major problems that every enterprise in the world is facing. So what are the roles that organizations can play within an ecosystem? So some players, some organizations could provide resources, some organizations could be the dominant players, some organizations could provide the human resources, the talent, the people, some organizations can only invest capital into the ecosystem, so on and so forth. So there are many ways that organizations can participate in the ecosystem, and if you see the next slide shows the different types of roles that participants can play within the context of an ecosystem. The interesting thing is that many times within an ecosystem, you also have a role which you see at the last bullet there, Parasite, which means these are organizations who do not really contribute anything as such to the ecosystem, but they tend to take out or derive benefits because of the successful ecosystem. However, obviously you can understand, and this is not rocket science here, that even if, so if the other participants in the ecosystem realize that there is a parasite in the system, then they could easily inflict that parasite. So that does happen. But these are some of the basic roles that organizations and participants can play within the context of an ecosystem. Why do organizations are, why are they focusing on ecosystems? Because obviously businesses are facing growing pressure. They want to focus on pure core activities. The knowledge content that the business requires today, any kind of business, any industry is actually rising. So, you know, no single organization will have access to all the knowledge. The companies that are facing uncertainty, I've already introduced you the term of, you know, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And very importantly, the advances of ICT are actually enabling some of these ecosystems. When I say advances of ICT, these are all the technologies that are being considered within the open platform 3.0. So we're looking at social media, cloud, Internet of Things, industrial Internet of Things, so on and so forth. And that is also, you know, advancing how the ecosystems are being put together and managed, you know. So we're going to talk about that in the examples. Now let's quickly look at some of the benefits. I've kind of highlighted some of the key points. So let me just kind of read out. The first benefit of ecosystem is it gives organizations access to resources that they wouldn't generally have if they were operating alone. It provides an element of sharing of risk, improves the efficiency because you get the benefits of economies of scale. You know, so, you know, tendency is that the service quality coordination, seamlessness definitely improves, you know, improves. It leads to better services because now, you know, participants within the ecosystem can come together and provide a service that otherwise would not be available if one organization was, you know, trying to do it. So these are some of the key benefits. I'm not going to read out every slide here. Let's go to the examples. Okay, so this is the first. So these are some map shots of example and later on I'll show you a detailed run through of one example from the healthcare industry. So people who are familiar with the oil and gas industry would definitely kind of understand what this is. The picture may not be very clear, but I think it gives the idea. Now you know that in the oil and gas industry there's a business in other upstream business, midstream and downstream business and then so you can see the three blocks production trade and consumption on the right of the slide. So that's basically the upstream downstream and upstream midstream and downstream. Now what I'm trying to show in this picture is when you model an ecosystem it is important to model the relationships between those entities. Okay, and this was an engagement that we did because it shows you how the price of oil for instance, you know, right through the entire supply chain or value chain actually contributes or impacts the economy of a country. And this is just one of the models that we created. This is actually called a causal loop model. I'm going to use a lot of this later on in the detailed example. The second one is smart cities as an ecosystem. So you can see all of the different, again, this is a different way of modeling, so it shows you the different entities in a city, right? So you have the government, the utilities, the businesses that exist in a city, the intermediaries, the academia because they bring in the knowledge content and the entrepreneurs, right? So these are the different elements, so to speak, and the city ecosystem and the next slide shows you the linkages between the different elements, which I showed in the previous slide. So in all of the pictures what you will see is why do you do identify the critical organizations or the way they participate, the important point is to model the relationship between those elements and which is what you see here. And which is what I believe architects should be doing because our role is to connect the dots, is to synthesize so that we can envision the whole. And in this case, the whole is the entire ecosystem. This is another one. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar given that we, a lot of us tend to have a technology background, so there is a, you know, platform ecosystem. And this kind of corroborates what I mentioned earlier. Organizations come together, so you can see the different players already mentioned there on this slide. Organizations coming together in the context of a platform or a process or a service or an opportunity or a priority, and therefore forming the ecosystem. It's entirely possible that the same organizations in a different product could even be competing, but within the context of this they are part of an ecosystem. So you can see a, you know, competing ecosystem, so you can see it's very similar, but in a competing ecosystem. So this is another way of showing the relationships. The cloud economy, so we know cloud is more or less becoming mainstream now. So you can see different participants in the ecosystem and the relationship between them. So I wanted to, through these five or six examples, I wanted to show you how ecosystems do exist in many, many situations, many, many contexts, many industries, and it's becoming more and more commonplace. So it's important that as enterprise architects, we do understand the ramifications of, you know, such a change, that is, you know, changing the businesses that they operate and deliver their services. So before you go to the examples, so I'm going to give you a, you know, a technical definition of what a system is. So you've heard this word ecosystem many times now. This is the technical definition of a system. I'm sure you may have seen this before. A system is defined as a set of interrelated things which is encompassed by a permeable boundary. Now that's a very important word. Earlier I told you, I showed you on my second slide that boundaries are actually blurring. So it's important that organizations, while they have their boundaries, they need to keep themselves open to partnering or actually creating an ecosystem, which is precisely what the whole definition of system actually shows you. The important point is when organizations operate in an ecosystem, they do have a shared vision. They do have a common overall goal. All right. So these are some of the key characteristics which are listed there. Now earlier Stuart was showing you the picture for enterprise ecosystem. In the next slide he showed you that a collection of enterprise ecosystems forming a, you know, a wider business ecosystem. It's actually highlighted there, mentioned there in bullet number three. It's actually, so the whole idea is we have a system of systems, so to speak. So smaller systems are contained within a larger system. So the concept of systemic way of looking at organizations is actually not new. It was invented at, you know, by a very famous person called Jay Forester at MIT Sloan School of Management. And he came up with this whole approach of systems thinking and system dynamics. So you will see some of those, you know, ideas coming through in my example later on. Now, so let's see one example, which is a more detailed example. So I showed you some snapshots of the example earlier from different industries. And this is what I mentioned. This is one from healthcare from Singapore. So the name of the organization here is Sting Health. So I have the permission to share the information so you could actually, you know, you know, go to their website and see the main page. This is actually a main page. The interesting thing is just to give you a little bit background about this organization. So this looks at Singapore's public health, you know, public health for about 40% of the population, roughly looks at, you know, many aspects of healthcare, but only from the public. So it doesn't cover the private sector per se. But what is important is that this is a collection of organizations which could consist of, you know, tertiary hospitals, specialist centers, group of GPs, polyclinics, so on and so forth. So you can see some of those independent entities mentioned at the bottom of the slide, you know. So those are mentioned there. And if you need more information, it's available on the internet. So this is public information. Now, as I said, these organizations wanted to come together to address a specific challenge. Now, the challenge that they wanted to address was management of chronic diseases or management of long-term conditions. All right, which is highlighted here. Now, for some of you who may not be familiar with the healthcare ecosystem or the healthcare industry, this slide shows you the key areas, key, you know, players, so to speak, in the healthcare ecosystem. So we have the healthcare professionals. We do have the healthcare providers. We have the medical research community, the sponsors of care, because they have to take care of the insurance policy makers and the legislators. So you can see, and of course, we have the citizens and patients in the center. So if you go back to my original definition of business ecosystem, and if you take that, you know, the concentric circles, you can see all of these elements coming together and forming the ecosystem. And the different members, so to speak, of each of the bubbles are already highlighted there. And you can read it in your own time. The assumption that I'm going to make here is that enterprises are complex adaptive systems, which means that obviously they are complex because they are large organizations, they have a lot of parts who are talking to one another, and they are dynamic, which is why I introduced the term earlier, acronym called, you know, VUCA. Now what is important to understand from an ecosystem participation point of view is that any assumption that the effectiveness of the whole is achieved automatically as long as parts are optimal is not true in the systemic paradigm. Because in an ecosystem to perform optimally, all members of the ecosystem, all participants in the ecosystem have to contribute and have to perform optimally. Not just that, even the connections between them have to be optimal. And that's the reason why we actually model the links between the ecosystem participants rather than the participants themselves. So it's basically looking at the links between them and ensuring that they are optimal and they are interacting in an optimal way, you know, so as to focus on the common goal that the ecosystem has. To too much of details here, I think this slide gives you a comparison between acute disease and chronic illness. It gives you nine criteria. So the message from this slide is that, which Singh has realized, is that a chronic illness, as some of you would definitely know, is very different in characteristics from an acute illness. And anything that you establish, let's say any process, any procedure, any regulation that you establish to deal with acute disease is not likely to be successful to deal with chronic diseases because of the reasons that are given on this slide. All right. So there are some facts here which we did the background research about chronic diseases. Nothing, you know, so I'm not going to read that out. Just highlight a few key points here. So I'll kind of show all the points before. So I would like to highlight bullet number four and five. The interesting thing is when we did the survey, we realized that chronic diseases constitute more than 70% of the disease burden. This is the case of Singapore and I'm absolutely sure I've run this case study in many countries and I'm absolutely sure that it is true in most developed economies because of a variety of reasons, some of which I'm going to highlight later. And the bullet number five, which shows you current healthcare systems are designed for acute care and not for chronic care. So what you see between bullet number four and five is that there is a mismatch between supply and demand. So the supply is for acute care, whereas the demand or increasing demand is for chronic care. In fact, in many countries, I have done a survey myself. There are hospitals who don't have a geriatric care, for instance. There is no department called geriatric care. So they are getting to that level. Some of the other data is taken from World Health Organization. It gives you a general sense of where we are with respect to chronic diseases, which is the priority that Sting Health was wanting to address through this exercise. So this shows you individuals and what are the triggers for individuals getting to chronic diseases. So obviously the trigger could come from globalization, urbanization, population aging, and on your right you can see the main chronic diseases. Interestingly, what we realize is that the number of chronic diseases are actually not in like hundreds. It's probably 12 to 15 chronic diseases. You can see the list here contains only five, which are actually killing so many people. It's actually, in many countries, it's actually not just a problem. It's actually a crisis that organizations are trying to address, and it's a real wicked problem, so to speak. So that's why the different participants, which I showed you in the introduction of this case today, had to come together, form a system, form an ecosystem, and try to address that. And I'm going to show you some of the snapshots of the models that we created. This slide is very simple. It shows you how an individual has the, you know, accumulates the risk of having a chronic disease as his or her age increases, so which is, again, no rocket science, because, you know, as we age, there's the tendency that we would have, you know, one or more chronic diseases. Another interesting characteristic about chronic disease, some of you may be aware, is that you could have more than one disease at the same time. So that adds to the complexity of the disease management itself. And the second one is, as we see on this slide, on your left edge, due to hereditary reasons, a child who was born could also have certain chronic diseases. So this, all of this actually contributes to the complexity that we are dealing with. So there's an age slide here that shows you, so if you see Singapore on the right of the slide, you can see the curve, the steepness of the curve, or the slope is very heavy. So it actually shows you that Singapore does have an aging population very similar to the pattern that you see in South Korea on the right of the slide, Japan, unsurprisingly, and some countries in Europe, especially Western Europe. So you can see the slope, like Italy and Poland, and so on and so forth. So Singapore also has a similar kind of characteristic, and this is from 2005 to 2030. So we are almost looking 15 years out in terms of, you know, future predictions. And there's a slide which shows you that any country which has to deal with people with chronic diseases, it has a direct impact on the economy of the country. Now, I'm not going to do the details, but you can see some of the large countries mentioned there, and obviously there is, you know, the Russian Federation, which seems to be kind of having a fairly high level of economic impact because of people having, you know, chronic diseases. There's some survey done based on what are the problems encountered. The reason I'm showing you this slide is because this kind of contributes into the model that we create. Now, here is another set of data. It shows you how the number of caregivers, so what you see on your, you know, on the, from the middle to the left of the slide are the number of healthy people, typically below the age of 65. Usually that is taken as the mark, and people who are above the age of 65. So you can see the number of people available, healthy people, assuming that they are without diseases even up to the age of 65, who are available to support the people who are, you know, above the age of 65. So you see the ratio coming from 11 is to 1, to 4 is to 1, and this is the reason why many countries are actually going bankrupt and the pension systems are no longer sustainable. I think, you know, many countries in Europe and other developed economies are facing the same problem, not just in Southeast Asia. And one of the ways that countries are trying to tackle this problem is they're trying to push up the retirement age, but that is only up to a point it is going to work. You know, for instance, the retirement age in Japan, if I'm told correctly, is about 70, and they're trying to increase it even further. So that's the kind of, you know, strategy and policies that the governments are trying to bring in. So as I said, the reason I'm showing you all of this slide is because we have put together, you know, all of this data to create something called the causal loop model. So the next slide shows you the causal loop model with some of the factors, some of the data that I showed you in the previous four or five slides. I'm not going to highlight all of the details of the causal loop model. So what you see here, I'll just explain the main loop here. What you see here are the key factors. So you may have seen these words before, common modifiable risk factors, risk of chronic diseases. That leads to onset of diseases, then there's an economic cost, there's a lost income for the country, and because there's a lost income, and hence there are no resources to manage chronic diseases. So this itself forms something called a reinforcing loop. So effectively, you know, if this loop works more than once for a country, you're actually, you know, looking at the bottom here. It's a raise to the bottom. So I will not go to the next four slides show the details of further of this loop. I'm not going to the details of the loop. Okay, so you can see how I'm building the loop. So in the center, you can still see the first loop, which I showed you on this slide. So this loop is called the nodal loop. So this is the central loop, and then you can see there the same loop, but surrounded by a few more variables. So what I'm doing here, so I'm not going to explain all of this. What I'm doing here is adding more and more variables based on the background research and the data that we collected build something called a business system model. So this is technically called a causal loop model. So you can see all of these are variables and you will see none of the loops, none of the variables are actually hanging loose because they have to complete the loop. Otherwise your analysis is going to be wrong. Okay, this is the third one. All right. This is the fourth one that we created. So I'm just progressively adding more variables because there are certain factors which are important within the context of the system that we are trying to understand and derive some insights out of. Okay, and that's the last subset and the entire model looks like this. Okay, so this we call as the chronic disease pandemic business model. So this is, as I said, not just a problem, it's a pandemic, it's a crisis for Singapore and many countries like South Korea, Taiwan. So many countries are facing this problem. Now, we're not going to the technical details of the modeling per se because that's not the intent here. So what you see here is about 50 variables. They are linked together, you know, so which is important. Now, earlier in the introduction of the case study, I told you that there are about nine or 10 individual organizations who came together as part of the ecosystem. Now, those organizations are not explicitly mentioned here. You don't see the name of the organizations per se. What you see is the critical factor that we derive out of the analysis and the linkages between the factors. Now are the organizations there? Absolutely they are there, but they are implicit within this model because the purpose here is to understand what is the problem, what is the priority, what is the opportunity, or what is the product or service that we're looking at so that we can identify points where you intervene into the system. Remember, as I said in my introduction, organizations come and form ecosystem because they have a business priority or an opportunity that they cannot handle alone or it's a problem or a concern, something like that. So there is always an element of focus around which you come up with certain interventions. So within the context of this case study, we came up with 10 interventions. You can see some thick arrows in blue and there's some text there. The reason why those arrows are, the thick arrows are actually focusing or pointing towards certain variables is because based on the analysis that we did, those variables were found to be the most impactful, which means if we were to change those variables, it would have impact in the entire system, in the entire ecosystem. So we came up with 10. I'm not going to go into the details of all of these intervention points. And these intervention points, by the way, are called strategic interventions. The interesting thing is once you come up with these strategic interventions, you as an enterprise architect can now prioritize on what you should be doing. In the same example, for instance, obviously no, no organization will have all the resources to address all of these priorities, all of these interventions. So they did a level of prioritization and identified let's go and do one, five and seven, for instance. So you can do that level of prioritization. The interesting thing is when, when you have a model like this of the entire ecosystem, you can actually run simulation models to understand what's going on. Now people who are familiar with simulation definitely know that to run simulation models, you also need input data. So obviously there is a trade-off in terms of how much of granularity you want to build into the model. But the whole idea here is to understand the relationship between the different factors that you identify within the context of the problem or the opportunity that you're trying to address, that the ecosystem is trying to address. The second thing, the second benefit, important benefit of a system model, which is basically the same one which you see here, is also to use it as a performance management system. So I have removed the thick arrows now. The relationship still shows up. It's exactly the same picture. But you see there are five boxes there. There are four boxes in orange color, one is yellow. So the organization in this case, the ecosystem decided that they wanted to focus on these five metrics. So they use the same model as their performance management system. And the reason why you have a very effective performance management system is because all of these boxes, these metrics are actually connected into the system model. It is important because let's say there is a change in the cost of insurance. I'm just taking an example. You can easily guess or you can almost predict what is going to be the impact on the rest of the metrics, which is extremely important. So that's the reason you can not only use this model to identify the interventions that the ecosystem needs to put in place, but also to use it as a performance management system. Okay, now as I said, this is a real case study. So the government actually came up with seven items to address the priority. You can see the seven items listed here. Again, there is nothing confidential here. This is part of the national budget, which is published in 2011. So these are the seven priorities. What we did was we mapped out the 10 interventions which I showed you earlier, the thick arrows with the priorities which I showed you in the previous slide. So what you see here on the top are the seven priorities announced in the budget. And on your list, you can see the 10 interventions that we identified and we mapped them. The whole objective of mapping them was to understand what are the priorities that the government is trying to address given that the ecosystem is definitely going to have certain resources. So you can see the mapping there. So item number three, item number seven and nine where the priority that the government is trying to address and there are other areas which still need to be addressed. You need to understand that we are dealing with a real wicked problem. This is a very complex problem, management of chronic diseases. So it cannot be handled within one year in terms of our annual budget. So the steps are still going on and some of the other areas are being addressed from what we identified there. So this is just a snapshot of the mapping that we realized. So the important point here is that there is a plan to realize the strategy. So the strategy was identified through the system model, the ecosystem model that we created, the interventions and then you do a priority in terms of what's your action plan. So there is an element of strategic thinking followed by an action plan, which is very important. How do you build the models? As I said, we will not go into the technical details of the model coming to nearly the end of my session. As architects, we need to understand what are the discrete events going on. So remember, I showed you some data about the fertility rate, the aging and all that. So the important point as architects is we need to understand that these discrete events can actually form a pattern, but you have to see the behavior over time before you see that there is a pattern. So there is some level of longitudinal thinking, so to speak. From there, you understand what is the loop. So that's why I brought in initially in the first picture, the nodal loop, I identified five or six variables, five or six factors and linked them into something called the nodal loop. So that was the initial systemic structure. From there, you identify what are the mental models that we're looking at, because one of the things with complex problems and complex enterprises is that you have to deal with mindsets. And this is where it's important to understand the causal relationship between the different factors that you identify in your model. And finally, you get to a point where you have a shared vision. Now, after we presented this model to the key decision makers, they realized that now they had to come together, they had to collaborate, they had to come up with a common vision, a shared goal to really address this situation. And that's typically the kind of approach that we take in identifying and building, crafting good ecosystems. I would use the word even architecting successful ecosystems. This is the last item on my agenda. One of the key success factors, I would say, showstoppers of successful ecosystems is also to have successful governance. It is not a free-for-all, which means that governance needs to be deliberately put in place. So there's a deliberate effort to put a strong governance so that the ecosystem continues to operate successfully. So there are three ways that typically organizations or ecosystems can govern themselves. One is you could govern yourself. So it's a self-governance, self-governed network. Typically, in this case, you would have to get to a point where the participants are of equal size and equal influence, and hence they kind of listen to each other so that they stay on course to the common goal. The second one, which is in the middle of the slide, is where one of the organizations within the ecosystem becomes a lead organization. And in the case of Sting Health, we identified a lead organization, and the reason is why, because everybody then rallies around the lead organization but within the context of the shared vision in the common goal. And the third one is where instead of a lead organization, one organization takes an administrative role. So the difference between the leadership role and the administrative role is that sometimes the administrative role can also be outsourced. So which means the participants of the ecosystem are the knowledge partners or the collaborating partners, whereas the administrative part of it could be done by somebody else. So in the case of Sting Health, they identified the middle one lead organization. So somebody, an organization within the ecosystem was identified as the lead organization, and they kind of in some sense got everybody aligned to the goal and the vision of the ecosystem. So what are the things that we have to keep in mind when we are dealing with ecosystems? Number one, we have to take a systems perspective, and that's why I introduced the concept of systems and even a definition. Number two, there must be a strong intent. And typically, as I said, this intent focuses on a business priority or an opportunity or a problem that an individual organization is unable to solve. Number three is that you organization, when they form an ecosystem, they have to be a bit opportunistic, which means that the strategies may still be ambiguous, but you still are willing to take that risk. And in fact, one of the elements of successful ecosystems is that you kind of leverage on half chances, so to speak. Number four is that the ecosystem architect, enterprise architect like us, we need to have the ability to think in time because you can get your data on snapshot basis, but how the pattern emerges over time is actually very different, and you need to understand what is the behavior over time. And finally, there is some level of guess and check work, so there is some level of hypothesis and conjecture formation in the ecosystem, and so there's a need for some level of creativeness in the ecosystem partner. Okay, so I think I have kind of come to the end of my session and I will pass the slides to Stuart. Okay, thank you very much, Palab. I will be very quick in order to leave time for questions, and yeah, I can only say we could easily spend a day on this topic. What you presented is so rich and you touched so many vitally important issues that we will need to address going forward. However, from the point of view of Open Platform 3, even from a purely technology point of view, then we can say that there will be many different types of services using different technologies in any one scenario, typically, and these may also typically be provided by independent parties in much the same way as in the ecosystems that Palab's just described. And indeed, in some cases, there may be no one party that is in control of the whole thing any more than there is one party in the health service example that Palab showed us. So we have a particular example that we've been working with that comes out of one of the use cases that we've put together. There's no time to talk through this, but it has to do with a smart vehicle-charging ecosystem and the roles and relationships of the different parties, all of whom are providing, including the users, by the way, because batteries are smart things as well and provide information, all of whom are providing essential parts of the overall process and all of whom have a common interest but also slightly different interests. And if you want to read more about that, there's a link at the bottom, a URL to a blog that I and another open group member wrote. I'd like to make it clear that at this stage, we're not talking about any forum production, so there's nothing official about this, but it's the kind of work that we're looking at and we will want to take the ideas that Palab's presented to us into account as we move forward. So with that, I think we should move on to questions in the time that we have left. Thank you very much to everybody for listening and to Palab for that superb presentation. Chris, can you take us into that? Palab, for that great presentation. It brought up some excellent points, but there's one I think that I'd like to start with on the question side. You did actually answer some of the questions, but in a particular way, so I'd like to explore that a bit further. So for example, there was a comment by Bill Wimsat that behavior and motivational models would be a key semantic and model technique, and you explored in fact causal models. There was a question from Jerome Christians. What would the speaker's advice be on how to model the business ecosystem in relationship to TOGAP Archimate? Are there guidelines, best practices to make this visible using the Archimate language? So perhaps you could say a little bit about Archimate, but the real point I'd like to ask you on is that the kind of model you were showing, the causal model, was very different from what some people might think of the natural way to model ecosystems, which was the kind of picture that Stuart showed with the different participants or different participating organizations in the model. So could you maybe comment on what different kinds of model you would see as being appropriate for modeling, for an architect modeling a business ecosystem and how you see the causal model as perhaps relating to some of the other kinds of model, and finally, what kind of technique you might use for displaying these models? Yes. So coming back to the way or the different types of model that we can use, you can definitely, or within the context of the ecosystem, we can definitely use a model to show the different participants as Stuart was showing and the linkages between them. I would use them as the level zero model, so to speak. So if you go to my example of the smart city, so that's actually looking at the participants within the context of the smart city and the relationship between them. So I would use that as an initial model. But the thing that we have to understand is that we need to go beyond the initial model in terms of how the participants are interacting to a more granular level as to identify what are the factors that are actually playing within the ecosystem, and that's where the causal model comes in. Because the smart city model that I showed you, in fact, I have a detail of each of those elements and causal models. So the next level granular models are available. I've actually done that case study. So you can start with the participant model, but the causal model is still required to analyze the problem at hand or to analyze the opportunity or the priority at hand. So that's the kind of approach I take, and that's how it gives you the insight into the problem or the priority or the opportunity you're trying to address or leverage. Okay, so that's, I think, all architects would understand that you model systems in different ways from different perspectives. Could I just specifically ask, have you looked at the ArchiMate language? Do you see a role for it in describing this kind of model? Yeah, I have seen the ArchiMate language. So at this point, whatever I understand of the ArchiMate language, so the models that are existing in the business architecture, for instance, tends to look at it from a linear perspective. Whereas in a causal model, I've never used the word linear. That's why the word loop, right? So looping is extremely important and from what I understand, the typical process models are not suitable to use to create causal loop models. So the process model is a typical input process output kind of approach, which is typically what you would get in a UML model or a BPMN model or an ArchiMate model. Whereas in a causal loop, the focus is how to understand the behavior over time of those factors. So even though the model itself is technically very simplistic, but there's also an element of change. So in the models that you see, if you go through the slides, there are some polarities there. So there is a, you know, you'll see a series of plus and minus signs that actually shows you how the variables change over time. Let's move on perhaps to a slightly different aspect. So there's a question from Gopi Krishnan, Patrick Maithu, who says he understands that modeling the business ecosystem could be useful for a government or a regulator. Could you please throw some light on how this could help the individual business organizations? And another question from Don Brancato, which asks more specifically about how you can trace business strategy to ecosystem capability as a function of value. So can you maybe say a little about how these ecosystem considerations drill down to the specific enterprise and how a particular enterprise develops capabilities or looks at ecosystem capabilities in the light of its own business value? Yeah, so I'll take the first question, which is from Gopi Krishnan. No, not at all. See, the whole idea of this approach of modeling, it is definitely useful for government, but it is very useful even in the corporate sector or, you know, an organization which is not a regulator. Earlier, I was showing some examples, there's two of us showing some examples of the smart, you know, the smart charging and the smart metering aspect and the smart city. So many of these situations can include, you know, players from the private sector. In the example which I showed you, the healthcare example, the insurance companies are actually private sector organizations who become part of the ecosystem because of the given priority or the opportunity. So that's from a, you know, whether to address your question, whether it's only relevant to government or being a regulator, not at all. Now the second part of the question is that can we use this approach, you know, in the context of a single organization? Absolutely. I mean, I myself have done it in many situations where the whole idea was to look at it from an enterprise within the context, within the boundaries of a single organization and look at certain priorities. So that's the reason I introduced this concept of system of system. Ecosystem is a system of system, but an organization itself is a system because there are departments and divisions within the organization, both in the government sector and in the corporate private sector, and the approach can still be used in any situation. So that is addressing Gopi's question. The next one is how an individual business might trace the ecosystem capability as a function of business value and how that might affect the governance within the enterprise. Yes. So once you come up with the intervention, the thick arrows that I showed you, the 10 thick arrows that we identified, these strategic interventions, what we typically do is identify those interventions as priorities for the organization or the ecosystem, as the case may be, and then you can actually use certain value metrics for each of those interventions. That is exactly what we did in the example that we cited. And one of the inputs, if you will, in terms of how we prioritized on certain of those interventions was value. And in this case, because the value itself is not a financial metric, this is value in terms of addressing the priority of managing chronic disease management and patient experience and the patient lifecycle. So those inputs were definitely taken and this is something which is very natural, very logical in terms of identifying and prioritizing on some of those interventions that you kind of come up with through the analysis of the model. There are a lot of points that we could go into and there are a number of questions that we haven't yet answered, but I think we are coming to the end of our allotted time. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody for their attendance and participation and particularly to thank Stuart for his facilitation and to thank Palab for a great presentation and for the answers to the questions that were put to him.