 So without further ado, pleasure. We're going to keep on the theme of the emerging roles in a digital operating model. And to take us through that, great pleasure to welcome back Rob Akashok, IT management architect with fruition partners. Rob is also the senior IT management architect at DXC and co-chair of the IT for IT forum within the open group. And that's the group that's been working on the next version of the standard. Rob assists IT organizations to transform, to become lean and agile service providers, ready to manage the new digital ecosystem consisting of hybrid cloud and multi-vendor sourcing landscape. He is architecting the new IT organization, combining standards, practices, and concepts such as IT for IT, TOGAP, and SAFE. DevOps and continuous delivery, security management with established IT service management methodologies, such as ITIL. And Rob's been known to burst into song from time to time on these topics too. But for now, he's going to take us through his presentation. Great to see you again, Rob. And welcome back. Warm welcome back from the open group for Rob Akashok. Over to you, sir. Yeah, thank you, Steve. Thank you for this introduction. Just to check, you can see my full screen now of the PowerPoint slide. Yes. OK, thank you very much. Yeah, as organizations transform to this new digital operating model, also new roles, skills, and competencies are needed. But the question is, what kind of roles do you need in this new digital operating model? And I'm not just talking about new roles that you need in a single DevOps team or a single product team, but really for the entire organization. So digital management at scale and leading organizations are taking a more holistic approach to understand all the roles they need and how they fit into an overall digital delivery model. And this presentation is about that overall framework to position all your roles you need to manage digital. Now, let's have a look at the agenda first. First, I would like to explore with you the key evolving digital operating model practices, just to set the scene what's going on in this ecosystem. And then we're going to look at what do you need, what kind of capabilities do you need to manage the lifecycle of digital products? And I use the IT for IT reference architecture for that. And then I'm going to plot the different roles you need for managing your digital products and then look at what kind of roles do you need if you really scale it to the digital enterprise as a whole. Now, let's first have a look at the evolving digital operating model. As you can see in this picture, there's a lot going on that is changing the way we manage and deliver digital products and services. And in one way, we see the organizational model is changing so that we organize about the product teams, team-centric that have autonomous capability to deliver their services and manage it through the entire lifecycle. We see also the architecture model of products changing for my monolithic large applications moving into more component-based micro-services and platform-based services so that you can change components and doesn't impact the whole environment as a whole so different teams can create their own components and modify them. And at the same time, you see the delivery model is changing from a traditional project-based delivery models into DevOps and agile delivery models where we have this product team managing the entire lifecycle of your digital product from idea to production. And not just building it, testing it, deploying it, but also operating it and continuously improve it. And then we see the release model changing in instead of having large releases, maybe yearly, quarterly or monthly, we move into continuous delivery where we have the ability to continuously release new features and not just new functions that the business wants, but also to quickly fix issues when they arise. For example, continuous technology updates so that we don't have technology debt or fixing a production issue, for example, and improving the way we manage the product. So it's not just releasing new features but also managing the non-functional requirements such as security, risk and compliance. And then we see our practice model is changing. So in traditionally, we were very process-focused. Think about ITIL, which is organized around a number of processes like instant problem and change management or we have development processes, but now we move into managing and optimizing entire value stream for delivering their digital product. So not just optimizing one or two processes but really tie everything together as an integrated value stream. Our hosting models are changing from traditional physical data center to cloud and virtual machines to containers and cloud services. So we can deploy services, maybe even cloud native, in a more agile way. And then our sourcing model is changing. Traditionally, where we had many larger or small number of larger sourcing vendors for workplace, network and hosting and application support, we now move into a brokering model where we can broker services from different companies when we need them. So more like a multi-vendor sourcing model. And of course our support model is changing at the same time. We deliver now in the traditional, we had a kind of tier-based support where the service desk, they provide product support, but now we move into self-service self-help, virtual assistants, but also more automatically routed to the right product team that can fix this. And at the bottom, you could see some other changes like we become more data-driven, leverage the data in our digital organization to improve services, but also embed security privacy by design. So these are things happening at the same time when we deliver this new digital operating model. And with this product-centric delivery model, we see also some key focus areas so that we deliver better quality, but also improve the value we deliver for a customer. Reliability is also a key driver for many organizations at the moment. Reduce the number of P1 incidents, for example, but also deliver products safer in the sense that we ensure compliance and risk and security, but also sustainability for the environment as a whole and eliminate technology depth or happier optimized customer journeys. Cheaper in a sense is it cheaper to maintain and operate your digital product. And faster, as we mentioned, deliver value sooner and fix things faster if there is a need for that. So all the things are happening at the same time as well. Now let's have a look at the digital lifecycle and how you develop a digital product and what capabilities do you need? Because then later on, I'm gonna plot all the roles to this model. And I use IT for IT as the backdrop for this in a simplified manner. So IT for IT is basically providing all the capabilities you need to manage this digital operating model at scale. And there are four different capability areas as you see in this picture and a number of supporting capabilities to manage the cost, the risk and contracts, for example. But let's have a brief overview of what kind of capabilities are needed and why is it so important to think about end-to-end value streams? Now if we start with the strategy portfolio on the left side, we're really about managing our full product portfolio. What are all the products that deliver value to our customers and continuously evaluate and assess these products to see how much value did it generate, the cost, the compliancy, and that generates new ideas for improvement. And at the same time capture new demands from customers. And they're all consolidated in a portfolio backlog where we have basically the evaluation of what do we need to prioritize on. So this is really balancing the full portfolio of your products and the change against this portfolio and looking at the architecture current state and target state. So it's about this portfolio backlog basically has portfolio epics on different levels to prioritize that because there's never enough capacity to do everything. But this is on the portfolio level. And then the next value streamer really are into the product and team-based structure where we have the individual product teams, they work from their backlog, they design, develop and test their services, they make releases available and can deploy them themselves on the different cloud platforms when they need them. And it's about this value stream or this capability area is really about continuously the delivery and make sure new features and non-functional requirements are delivered. And at the same time when we release something we need to publish that in a catalog and make sure that people can consume our service through a request portal for example and updating the identities and access rights and then provision those rights. But at the time of deployment we also want to automatically update the configuration database so we know what's running out there, who's using it and what are the dependencies so that we can also automatically start monitoring our digital products and services in production and detect issues and preferably automatically remediate those through automation. And if not, we can raise incidents, manage the problems associated with that and provide customer support. And then we have a number of feedback loops. You could see here a feedback loop from incident to fix it. And it might be that some problems need to go back to the product teams. They create a new release and deploy that and fix that. And of course we have the continuous feedback loop from back to the product portfolio where we continuously evaluate how well is our product portfolio operating and what do we need to improve that. Now, a key ingredient of creating this digital operating model is also looking at the different practices because you really need to start building this bigger picture of managing the digital lifecycle. And at the same time, understand what kind of practices that I'm gonna leverage to build this integrated model like a skilled agile framework, for example, to manage the product portfolio at scale or enterprise architecture leveraging Togov, a scrum for the product teams delivering their software and services or DevOps practices to work in a DevOps operating model. Itails still for service management practices. And for example, emerging practices such as site reliability engineering could really focus about how do I automate and make sure my services are resilient, reliable, like monitoring or automated deployment and make sure that the teams build services reliable and automate them. And what's happening is when all these practices, they come with specific roles like a scrum master for scrum or a liability engineer or an enterprise architect. So you also need to consider this overall digital operating model and you need to understand what practices are you gonna use in your operating model because there are a lot of key roles are derived from these frameworks. But the key message is you need to combine them in overall that digital delivery model at scale. And basically what's happening and as you see this in this picture that you typically combine all these practices together and I include something further like NIST from a security perspective for managing your security instance, for example, for vulnerabilities and IT for IT is typically used as the overarching framework to bring all these practices together in a holistic digital delivery model. So what I wanna do now is look into this overall delivery model and look at the roles you need to manage this DevOps journey at scale. Now let's start with the digital product again but in a bigger context because your digital product and the value streams around that are part of a broader digital value network. So it's not just you consider your own enterprise, you also need to consider the interactions you have in your complete ecosystem like the customers and the customer journeys in their area or the vendors and the partners you work in in your network as well. And of course the governmental organizations that come with compliance requirements such as related to a data privacy. And it's really important to understand the context in this whole digital value network because you also need roles that are linked to these specific external components. For example, having a customer journey designer that really looks at how do I optimize my customer journey with the value streams of the customer or a user experience designer that understands the customer needs and experience needs or data protection officer where you need for my government compliance perspective you need somebody in your organization that's gonna drive this data privacy and make sure that it's implemented the right way. So when you design your digital operating model you also need to consider these roles in the broader digital value network context. Now, let's have a look at what roles you need in this specific on the level of a digital product. Now, what you see in this diagram is it's about managing the full life cycle for digital products or from idea to production. And the key roles you need in this basic digital product model is the digital product manager, of course that feels accountable for the full life cycle from idea to production and the services and the cost and the value and the risk and so compliance. An architecture perspective like a solution architect or nowadays the product architect and the product team itself with all the different skills needed to engineer this product and support it and continuously improve it. But the challenge is of course we have not just a single product we have many different products. So each of these product teams have their own skills and competences and their own roles their own product managers, their own product team. So the next level up if we're moving into a larger organization we need to look into how do you structure your product portfolio because if you identify the roles in a digital DevOps model at scale you need to understand the full product portfolio and not many organizations have a good solid digital product portfolio structured from a customer journey the value streams that enable them to the business value streams the business capabilities that underpin these value streams and then to the layer of all the different product teams and the digital products themselves because each of these layers you have specific owners like a person that looks after the customer journey like a customer journey owner or a value stream owner or a capability owner and then we go down to the digital product owner or digital product manager and from the architecture perspective you have a similar you have the enterprise architect looking at a bigger picture the domain architect looking at a specific value stream or business capability area moving down to the product architecture and this structure is very important because that's how you organize work in IT how you organize your accountability and responsibilities and it also determines what kind of work we need to do because some of the stories or feature requests comes in from a customer journey and then it's broken down to the different teams so and then not forget data because data is a very important ingredient of any organization so data is underpinning everything we do and so we need a person that focus on this data like a data owners, data architect, data scientist so the different roles that we're gonna explore later on on the data perspective as well now let's look into this a little bit more because I cannot emphasize enough that this digital product portfolio management so important and it's not just about the list of digital products it's really about as you can see in this picture the full product model at scale so the customer journeys, the value streams my business processes down into my business products down to the digital products and the different components that make up these digital products and more of course like interfaces and dependencies and so on and the vendors involved and we link this product model to the organization model because the organization model should be derived from the architecture of the product model not the other way around so it's very important to start with the product model and then you can derive how the organization should be structured in teams and team of teams and product lines because also work is structured this way and this is just illustrating a bit so we have stories that typically work in components or a feature on a product or an Epic Epics are typically more on a value stream for example, we wanna improve the user experience so we wanna see how we can optimize a customer journey so specific demands come in and we want to improve the customer journey we analyze the capability and then it breaks down into work that we need to spread to different product teams that need to deliver that so it's not just that every digital product is having their own backlog and thinks what they need to do is better now we need to work together as an ecosystem where we improve all the product teams together that's end to end customer journey so that's very important to embed this in our operating model we don't optimize digital product we optimize end to end value streams for the customer and the customer journeys now let's look at that again so we have these digital products with their own product owners and product teams and to work on this the next level we organize a number of products in a product line and sometimes these are called arts from a skilled agile perspective or a tribe or a cluster or a business domain but we group a number of products together and let's call the product line for now and this product line of course has a product line manager that really oversees everything's happening and can prioritize across the digital product because here we talk about value streams and business capabilities so here we have people like monitoring or managing the value stream like a value stream architect and a value stream analyst that really understands the end to end value streams across the digital products and a domain architect that can do the oversight and understand what's going on and so you can see that new roles are added in this product line level but there is more on this level because product teams need to be very effective and efficient so in theory we want as much of the skills and competencies should be within a product team so they can deliver and operate themselves but we know more products together are combined in a value stream so you can share resources in some cases like for example release coordination it's typically what you can want to organize around digital products themselves so they can communicate with the customer so for example we have a value stream improvement the release coordinator can coordinate across multiple digital value streams, products or we have a security lead in this space and agile coach and scrim masters and so a scrim master might not be dedicated to one product team but can be used across multiple product teams and so that's where you have kind of roles that sits within the domain but are used across different digital products but the next level is you introduce the enterprise level let's say where we see the end to end customer journey because a customer typically consumes services from multiple domains and here we have the enterprise architect and for example the customer journey analyst that understands the customer needs end to end and on this level you get again new roles needed and potentially also new skills and competencies now but this is not the end yet because next to products we also have platforms so it's very important to introduce the concept of platforms and enabling teams so the platform basically are those that are also product teams but they enable other teams to deliver value so for example the key platform that we have is that for example a cloud platform team or a technology platform team they deliver the standard building blocks that the DevOps teams or the product teams can consume and they don't need to develop it themselves it's a self service and they can consume those services for example standard API platforms or standard cloud hosting patterns so it's very important to have a good platform team that can enable all the DevOps teams to deliver better and safer and next to that kind of cloud platform teams you also need a digital engineering platform team because what you need is a good digital engineering capability meaning all the capabilities you need to do design, build, test, deploy, monitor your services make them secure, manage compliance and risk and be able to test them and this is not a simple task so typically you have a platform team that provides all the capabilities that DevOps teams need to better develop the software to code scanning, do deployment, do monitoring manage the licenses for example and monitor security so it's very important that you deliver this as a platform as a service where all the other DevOps teams or product teams can leverage and use so basically the DevOps teams running on top of the platforms can just focus on generating value for the customers they don't need to take care of the DevOps tool chain or to the cloud platform themselves no, they leverage these as servers so they can focus of generating business value but at the same time these platforms provide a lot of guardrails like for security, risk and compliance so it enables the teams not just to deliver faster but also make sure they are compliant and secure so let's have a look at that and how that fits into the role model so here you see again the product and the product line in the enterprise so now we add the platform teams to it so we have different platform teams as I mentioned we have the cloud technology platform teams and they have a cloud platform manager and a cloud architect and of course the cloud platform team and next to that we have the DevOps or the IT for IT platform team that delivers all the capabilities to manage your digital product lifecycle as I mentioned the development testing monitoring and so on and here you have an IT for IT architect looking after the entrant DevSecOps tool chain and the IT for IT platform team that delivers the automation capabilities basically for all the DevOps teams now let's have a look at how that all fits them together in this total picture of roles you need in this digital operating model so again we start with the platform teams we have the product teams we have the product line and the enterprise and now we're gonna go through all the roles that can be plotted to this entrant diagram but just a reminder roles can be combined into a single person so it doesn't mean you need all these roles with dedicated persons but it depends a bit on the scale of your organization but if you're in a large organization you need these roles in a DevOps at scale model so let's have a look at so the product managers we have different levels as you could see we have the platform product managers the digital product managers the product line managers and leading into the CXO and the digital officer we have architecture on these different levels so the cloud platform architect the product architect the value stream architect the enterprise architect for example so these are the key architecture roles that are embedded in this model and within the product team all the skills and competence should be there to manage the full lifecycle of the product so within this product team you have different roles as well but they can be combined into a single person like good software engineers that are really good at developing the software or UX designers UX designers is specific skill that not everybody has so you might have a specific role if your application or service is specifically has a good user experience interface needed infrastructure engineers that can look at the scalability of the infrastructure to automate that testing and then of course they also need to support so we have a support specialist and supporting the product through its lifecycle and as I mentioned across these product teams you might need a release coordinator that really coordinates across the different products communicate with the customer make sure that we generate the right value without having issues with risk and causing issues in production so communicate with the customer what is the best time to change this for example and on the enterprise level we have the customer journey design and the customer journey analyst as I mentioned then data as I mentioned is also a key area we need to focus on basically data skills are embedded in all the layers and I highlight a few key ones like a data protection officer that looks at the data privacy aspect a data architect, a data scientist and data analyst specific skills you need for a specific data issues you might have and then the chief data officer then security and compliance we mentioned that as well as also a key element as part of your digital product journey so here you see some key roles also important to mention that risk and compliance is fully embedded in the ways of working so for example in the digital engineering platform the CI CD pipeline for example make sure that security and risk is fully embedded there so the teams that leverage that are compliant because they leverage the standard building blocks so if they use the cloud platforms they're compliant with the components in the cloud for example so we have a chief security officer for example but in each domain we still have the security specialist close to that specific product domain as well and maybe somebody that oversees the whole identity and access management space which is a key area in many organizations and you need somebody to focus on how do we manage identities and access across all the product lines across the different customers and vendors there and then of course if you zoom into the platform teams they have specific roles like a key one I want to highlight is for example the reliability engineer that really helps the teams to build reliable software so for example they help with automation automated deployment or monitoring make things resilient, out of scalable and so on and that's not a skill that many organizations have in all the product teams so you need to enable that and that's why it's part of the enabling team and the same with the monitoring and observability specialist that person that really understands how can I better monitor my services and enable the teams to deliver those monitoring part of their product design and of course API integration specialist for example to facilitate the development of integrations and create standard patterns for that but in this DevOps model at scale there are still some roles needed that you would see typically in the traditional service management space because it's all about productivity as well so in principle every team should maintain and manage their product they should monitor the service to provide support but in some cases it's not very effective that every team has their own support model for example we have customers consuming multiple products and we have a lot of customers to support so there you still have some roles that like the service management roles on the enterprise level maybe a 24 by 7 monitoring team that they can make sure that we have a 24 by 7 monitoring capability and security operations for example to manage the end to end security cyber defense specialist that really looking at the entire cyber defense domain not just within one product line a security or a continuity lead manage the business continuity so we have on these roles also on the enterprise level or at scale level somewhere in organization and then now completing the picture there are some more roles in here like the catalog manager so a person that makes sure that we have a consumable service catalog and of course the catalog is maintained by the product teams but we need somebody that can consolidate all the catalogs think about an Amazon Azure there's an integrated catalog and there's somebody accountable for that service to make sure everything is consumable as a service for example now and not to forget on the supporting model we also have license and contract management financial management vendor management so as you could see in this picture there's a lot of roles and it looks very complex but it's really about looking at the entire organization and as part of your digital journey you need to start with a product driven structure so decomposing your customer journeys your value streams and your digital products and within that framework of scalability then you can determine which roles do I need based on the practices that I'm going to leverage and then you can plot it to the skills and competencies in your own organization and then starting your journey in this area but to have this bigger picture is very important when you start this digital journey so basically reminding you is we need to have this bigger picture we need to create a product breakdown structure and then plot these roles to this overall model so thank you very much for listening to this presentation I hope you can leverage this presentation in your own organization when you're thinking about what kind of roles do I need in this new digital ecosystem and not just roles within products and teams but really DevOps or digital at scale for the entire organization please feel free to contact me if there's any questions or comments that's always appreciated and thank you for listening to this session Rob, wonderful job as ever thank you very much for getting through that that was whistle stop speed you covered a lot there and have given a lot of information to people a lot of comments in the chat while you were speaking that you might want to catch up on so see you on the panel but meanwhile a warm round of applause for Rob Akashok thanks Rob thank you Steve