 Gordon's a thought leader in the field of EA as a transformative discipline. He's provided vision and leadership in the evolution of EA from a nice to have cost center into a key enabler of business transformation. Gordon has worked in senior leadership and consulting in companies ranging from Fortune 10 companies to startups and in numerous industries such as insurance, finance, oil and gas, technology, medical healthcare, government and education. So in this session, Gordon will look at the challenges and opportunities raised by digital and agile and how they can lead to increased enterprise architecture value. And Gordon, welcome, a warm welcome from the open group. And thank you to Mega for sponsoring this event as well. So over to you, Gordon. Thanks. Let me first make sure can you hear me OK? Yes. And you can see my screen. Yes, we can. Ah, about a thousand. Um, thank you again. Thanks for everybody for staying on the call and and thanks to all the presenters that came before me. Fantastic job. This as as was stated before, we want to talk a little bit about stories from the road, architecting for adaptability and agility. First of all, let me just say to reiterate my name is Gordon Cooper. I am the director of customer success and professional services for North America for mega mega international. Formerly, I was vice president of enterprise architecture and vice president of technology risk at A.I.G. And I have a couple of certifications in a variety of the field. As everyone else has said, with the covid crisis and with everyone working from home, I think my picture is a little more akin to this. So that is why I'm not putting myself on video. I didn't want to scare anybody this time today. Um, first, a little bit about mega. Of course, we have 2000 enterprise customers. Plus we have approximately 340,000 plus users. We're in 52 countries and we've been around for about 28 years. So we are we have been in this field for quite some time. As you can see, we've been a leader in the wave and the magic quadrant. And we were awarded the peer insights customer choice from Gartner. Now, again, going back to what I do for mega as being part of customer success and having professional services. To be honest, I've got the best job on the planet. I get to actually go out and talk to our customers and talk about EA. I want to those strange people who actually love their job because I get to do what I like to do the most. I was I've got enterprise architecture in my DNA. So to be able to go out and share between my customers, which are all of our customers for North American, what they're doing, how they're being successful, what the trends in the industry are. And it's really direct input from from the customers themselves, the people who are actually driving the information that Gartner puts out. There we go. That being said, we have some goals for today's session. I want to talk about some of the things that I've seen, things from creating emergent designs, identifying disrupted trends, target operating models, business capabilities, designing innovative solutions. Really, what I want to talk to you about is about breaking the mold of enterprise architecture. It is not your father's enterprise architecture. I can say that because I'm an old timer. I've been in the field for quite some time. But what I'm saying is there there have been some general trends at all point in the same direction. So everything I'm seeing from all of our customers, especially some of the ones who are pushing the boundaries of EA, are all really focusing on what's happening in the business. So first, let's just let's just start with the first trend. And let's talk about how architects are helping to shape the strategy. So really what they're doing is they're following this. They're they're part of the shift to a more inclusive enterprise architecture. No longer is it just strictly technology driven. It's not technology oriented. It is really business oriented. And why is that? Because the business pays the bills. If you maintain EA as a function of technology, you can easily lose your budget, have the group disbanded, be distributed. And we'll talk about the cycles that we've seen in the next couple of slides. But this is really one of the most important things that we're seeing. They're including the business in all of the aspects of EA now, because that's where the value is realized. That's who's paying the bill, I said. One of the ways that they're seeing this is through capability based planning. Now, this was touched on earlier by one of the other presenters, and I'd like to touch go a little further on it. Basically, what we're seeing is people are understanding now that capabilities being the description of what it is they do as a company or what drives the value for the company. So in order for enterprise architecture to really embed itself in the business and bring value to the business, you have to know what the company does. So you have to know what the capability model is like, and you have to be able to use that capability model and the assessment of those capabilities to help drive improvement of those capabilities or the introduction of new ones or the deprecation of some that aren't necessarily working well. So this is one of the primary things that we're seeing as far as the business end of it. The next is in the focus on emerging technologies and innovation. So for far too long, enterprise architecture has always been that stopgap, that gate that says, OK, all technologies must pass through us. We have to approve it. Does it fit our enterprise architecture? Is it part of our standard? Well, now the shift is more, well, we're going to go out and we're going to identify emerging technologies and innovation that help us with our capability based planning. So instead of being reactive and and having the the brought to us, we're actually going out and honking. So people are looking for technologies that enhance capabilities or help develop new ones. That is where value is being brought to the business. If you sit back and only do architecture review boards, you're seen as obstructionist or you're seen as a bottleneck or something that's slowing the progress of these projects, these strategic projects that have already been funded. And if you slow them down, all you're going to do is get a bad reputation. I think we've all experienced this. And I think that's why the trend towards getting out in front of this as opposed to being reactive to it is what one of the trends that we're seeing. The next trend that I'd like to talk about is the shift in the organization. Now, when I say that, we've all been in this long enough to understand that organizations shift from being centralized, decentralized, back to centralized, back to decentralized and a lot of steps in between. It's never it had not solidified long enough because the practice just wasn't understood well enough and had not been applied well enough in most organizations to where you have security in this position. And what we're seeing now as people are starting to understand better what this is and please excuse the cliche ivory tower graphic. But actually, that's what's happening. We're breaking down that tower and by becoming part of the business. We're seeing that EA groups are now becoming a small central group. Like a corporate function, but it's smaller. And then the decentralization of it you have in some cases like in some of our customers are using a Spotify model, where they have enterprise architects embedded into these different areas. That way, they have representation in each of these major strategic initiatives. And that is what I mean when it's a hybrid organization. It's decentralized in that you have EA representation, but it's centralized because the repository and the the governance of EA happens from a central location. The other thing that we're seeing now is solution architecture, how it's working more closely with EA and this really has to do with a focus on EA for developing guardrails as opposed to being overly restrictive. So what they're doing now in order to adopt this or adapt to this agile approach that everyone wants to do, we had to get out of the way. And the only way that you could get out of the way is by developing a taxonomy or reference architectures or guardrails for solution architects to be able to go in and pull their components. And use these components to design or to architect their solution. Now, if you're able to do this, then what you're able to do at that point is start talking about privacy by design, security by design, risk by design. All of these different components are taken into account in the design part of the process, as opposed to seeing it after it's already been built. Because into each one of the components, you have these considerations already made before they're brought into taxonomy. So basically, you're no longer the bottleneck, now you're an enabler. So also what that means is the solution architect is well down the path to compliance before they even have to look at whether their solution is compliant, because all the components have already been proved to be compliant throughout. So that's that particular trend. I know I'm talking fast, but that's because I've been up all night and I'm hyped up on energy drinks. So if you need me to slow down, please just put it in the chat. The next trend that we're seeing is that architects are now architecting the business. So what do I mean by that? Basically, what we're seeing is that due to this business outcome driven approach, architects are starting to find that the value is in the architecture of the actual business itself. For instance, one of our customers, we've talked to them and worked with them about developing, using EA to develop target operating model. Now, what I mean by that is they had a business problem. So it was an EA group that was trying to become relevant to the rest of the organization. So they went out and found out what some of the biggest initiatives are for that business and it turned out that one of the biggest initiatives was these people were trying to develop, quote unquote, the mind of the future. Now, what did that mean to the EA group? The EA group then had the opportunity to develop this architecture, this reference model for what that mind of the future actually looked like. What processes were used, what organizations were involved, what technologies were used. And I'm not meaning information technology necessarily. Yes, of course, that's part of it because people communicate with email. They use SAP or whatever the case may be. But I'm talking about actual business technology and mining. It could be mining technology or for instance, in compression, it would be gas compression technology or it could be medical technology. Whatever your business is, there are technologies that are not necessarily related to IT that operate in your and as part of your value stream. So these things need to be taken into account and they're being taken into account by these companies who are further on the cutting edge. Another example of this was for the insurance companies, where I see the management of risk model. So what they're doing is they're layering all of these models into the enterprise so they can get the context of these models. Then they can start looking at the quality of them and it makes them compliant SR 117 right off the bat because they're now able to see what the data lineage is. They're able to see how many models downstream and upstream are dependent on this model, what the final products are. And then you can do a loopback from performance information, from transactional information to see how you can adjust these risk models to have a better outcome. Again, it's all about business outcome. And that's why EA's are starting to become a business focus. And here at MEGA, one of the things that we're really pushing hard on is this pragmatic approach to EA. Now, when I say pragmatic approach to EA, I'm talking about what is a practical application of what it is that we're talking about. Too often I talk to some of our customers and they're either starting up an EA, they're restarting an EA function, and they're focused on, well, we need to model this and we need to take this section. We need to do an as is state and you have to back them up and say, no, you don't need to do that. You need to find out what the business actually needs and develop the architecture that supports that need or informs decisions around that need. If we haven't told our customers anything else, we've been able to communicate to them. What you do as an enterprise architect should be consumable by the entirety of the business of the entire organization. In fact, there is not a single component in the organization, first of all, that is not included in the enterprise architecture. But second of all, does not actually is excluded from impact or part of the decision making process. And that's the most important thing about enterprise architecture. And that's what we're really seeing. We're seeing this drive towards that. We're seeing how people are starting to push the boundaries of EA to incorporate business. They're using EA as an actual sales tool now because they're understanding the architecture of their customers. So if you look at like a Porter's five forces diagram, you see that these things that are external to the enterprise, like customers, if you don't know what customers are doing, what their trends are, what their consumption looks like, then how can you sell to that customer? And it is a problem that EA can easily solve just by understanding what that customer looks like, build them into your architecture, and then you can build a model for how you can better present your products to them. In fact, we're working with one of our current customers, we're working with one of our customers on developing this as an offering right now. So it's actually one of the more cutting edge uses for business architecture in this case, but architecture in general. So what we want to do is if we look at the difference between the traditional enterprise architecture versus this pragmatic approach or versus this outcome driven EA, it's a question of survival or thriving, which ones it's going to be. If you stick to the traditional enterprise architecture, you're looking at manual labor, you're looking at a very intense effort. It takes years to create. It takes years to even see some of the value. It's a lengthy process. It's all inclusive, but all inclusive to a point of failure because you spend all of your time developing all of these artifacts and focusing on the artifacts without having any relationship of those artifacts to real business value. And that's what I mean when I say little perceived value, because what good is information that cannot be easily consumed by people who are making decisions? In fact, one of the things that we've seen is people who do, for instance, governance, governance audits. Initially, it can start off as being, you know, do these decisions map to the right organizations that have the designation authority to actually do this? Sorry, someone said someone, there, that was covering that up. Do these people have the authority to make the decision? We'll expand on that. You can look at these processes and you can look at the decision points and say, not only do we have the right people making decisions, do we have the right information presented to these individuals to make valuable decisions? So that's one thing. So outcome-driven EA, it is automated. And the more automation that you can incorporate into your enterprise architecture, the better. Now, I'm not saying that you should incorporate or you should use operational tools to do enterprise architecture because the scenario or the example I use for this all the time is if you're counting on discovery to drive your strategy, then that means that you're driving forward in a car only by looking through the rear view mirror. You're not gonna have the outcome that you hope because you're reacting to what's already there. There is no planning. So that's why we say automate where you can. If you can do design to build, that's fantastic. You're providing a service to someone who can consume your deliverables or consumables as an EA. You've got fast time to value. The main thing is you have real customer use cases. You're using a business outcome-driven approach and you're letting the business guide you and what you need to provide them to make decisions. There is your measurable ROI. So I know it's, I'm about nine minutes early, but what I wanna do, oops, sorry. There we go. If you have questions, this is my contact information. I'm awake and online pretty much all the time. So any questions that you may have feel free to reach out. I don't know if there were questions that were asked during the course of the presentation, but I'm happy to turn it back over to you to see if there were any questions. Gordon, thanks very much. Thanks very much. It's great. I love the, I love the stressing that EA is about far more than technology and their real business, real business uses for it. And there are a couple of questions. I wanna go straight to them in the interest of time. One was your trend number two that you talked about is very much resonating with me, says the questioner. I brought up a closer relationship with EA and solution architecture to my CTO yesterday and he seemed confused. Do you recommend pulling solution architecture fully into the EA practice or keeping it separate or how do you see your customers dealing with that? It's easier for me to tell you how I see the customers doing it because my opinion is just that it's my opinion. What I see with customers is I see some organizations that are growing that are taking on this business outcome driven approach where solution architecture actually has a dotted line into enterprise architecture. They still serve the business and so still that strong business connection and I still see them aligned in that organization but there are now dotted lines back to EA. Okay, okay. This is a kind of cross between a comment and a question I guess. It's a good point, Gordon, about EA supporting business needs when it's done in a pragmatic and outcome driven way. Otherwise I found EA can quickly become discredited by forming a cottage industry that produces irrelevant views and is not focused on outcomes but produces pretty views of IT. And I think that's really the essence of your presentation but any comments to that? I'll comment on that just a second. I have been a part of organizations that have done this. Like I said, I've been in this game for quite some time and I've lived through that. Where early on in my career, we really focused on developing the models and creating the diagrams and knowing that if we build it, they will come. Well, guess what? No, they won't. If you get out there and provide them something they want, in fact, I was having this conversation with a customer just this morning. If you go find what people need and I'll use the example of internal audit in a fledgling EA organization, internal audit is a gold mine because basically what you can do is it's a two-way conversation. They need information that you've got and have assembled. So you can share that information with them. But by the same token, they have information that you need which are all the open audit issues that you can then go to the owner of those issues and say, hey guys, I got what you need to help resolve this open issue. So it's a great way to expand the reach of EA into the actual business organization. That's a great tip. Thank you. So we're going to leave it there, Gordon, and say your details are on the screen and they will be on the slides that will be available to everybody during the course of next week. If I could ask you, Gordon, maybe to monitor the Q&A just for a few minutes to see if something else comes in that you might want to answer. That will be helpful. In the meantime, a round of applause from me and all the attendees, if you could hear them.