Showing posts with label TOGAF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TOGAF. Show all posts

Sunday, August 04, 2024

How The Open Group Portfolio of Digital Open Standards Supports Your Digital Business Transformation Journey

Transcript of a discussion on how a digital portfolio of standards and methods instructs innovation internally to match the demands of a rapidly changing, increasingly competitive, and analytics intensive global marketplace.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunesDownload the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

 

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Our next enterprise architecture (EA) discussion explores how a comprehensive portfolio of open standards and associated best practices powerfully supports digital business transformation.


Gardner

As companies chart a critical course to adopt agility using artificial intelligence (AI)-driven benefits, they need proven and actionable structure to help deepen customer relationships, improve internal processes, and heighten business value outcomes.

 

Stay with us now as we explore how The Open Group Portfolio of Digital Open Standards instructs innovation internally to match the demands of a rapidly changing, increasingly competitive, and analytics intensive global marketplace.

 

Here to explore how to strategically architect for ongoing disruption and innovation is our expert guest. Please join me in welcoming Sonia Gonzalez, Digital Portfolio Product Manager at The Open Group. Welcome, Sonia.

 

Sonia Gonzalez: Thank you very much, Dana, for having me here. I’m really happy to talk about this exciting topic.

 

Gardner: Yes, it’s a very interesting time. There are lots of interesting and relevant topics to dig into. Sonia, what are the latest trends and catalysts propelling the need for a full portfolio of standards to better attain digital transformation?

Gonzalez
Gonzalez: Digital transformation is something that can completely change your company. It’s a process, a journey. But to do that, you need to start from the top. Meaning from a strategy; you need to have a digital strategy. Because you must change your business and operational models, you need to build new capabilities – and not just technical resources or technologies, but also the people. You need to train your people to pursue innovation and to create your business around customer centricity.

Of course, you need to take advantage of new technologies and trends, such as AI, the metaverse, cybersecurity and cybercrime, which are threats right now. You also must leverage the new power of computing in data processing, data analytics, and machine learning (ML).

 

If you don’t take advantage of all of that, then you’re going to be left behind. That’s why, a few years ago, we started this journey to conform the Portfolio of Digital Open Standards as a collection of practices that will allow any company to start the process, either if they are new to this (starters), or to maintain and especially sustain an already existing digital transformation process and effort.

That’s the reason we need the portfolio. We need different perspectives. It’s not only the technology, not only the people -- but it’s also everything that surrounds your company.

Gardner: Sure. And, I suppose, we used to look for silos within an organization with areas of expertise and would develop standards that might pertain specifically to them. But nowadays it’s important to have cross-pollination, if you will, and to look at standards not only in an isolated part of a company, but across them. We seek ways for them to better support each other.

 

Please explain why it is so important to seek a full portfolio of standards that are, if not integrated, complementary.

 

Digital change demands diversification

 

Gonzalez: Yes. The key words here are synergy, cross-collaboration, and consistency. All of our standards are very powerful on their own. For example, we have the TOGAF® Standard, which is one of the major recognized standards for Enterprise Architecture (EA). We have The Open Agile Architecture, a Standard of The Open Group, for agility, you have the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge (DPBoK™) for digital; we have the ArchiMate® Standard for modeling in EA, we have theIT4IT™ standard for the IT processing and digital products.

 

But if all of them are used together in a consistent way, they become more powerful. They are greater than the sum of their parts. They provide a full and more systemic view of your issues.

 

For example, to make digital transformation possible, you need EA because you need to know and understand your capabilities, your landscape, and your actual measured capabilities to identify the gaps. But you also need to be able to manage digital products. And for that we have the IT4IT™ standard.

We need to pursue more agility, not only in the development or in the technical processes, but on the business as a whole. You need to become an agile enterprise.

We need to pursue more agility, not only in the development or in the technical processes, but in the business as a whole. So, you need to become an agile enterprise, and for that we need the Open Agile Architecture standard. Also, the TOGAF standard in which you will have guidance about agility.

 

If you want to have more customer-centricity and a learning progression toward digital, we have the DPBoK™ that precisely helps you understand how we can start very small and then continue evolving your capabilities, determine what you’re learning in the process, and how you can be evolving all those capabilities.

 

Those are the main aspects to understand and the benefit of having this portfolio. It’s not only that the content is in there in the same channel, which is completely HTML, you can cross navigate between the standards, you can make searches where you will find content from the different standards. We have also added some graphics icons in there, because as you know, people need very rapid solutions to the problems now.

 

Last April in Edinburgh as part of our summit, we released a new version of the Portfolio of  Digital Open Standards. If you click, for example, in agile practice, immediately you will see content from the Open Agile Architecture. But from there you can navigate to the TOGAF Standard, and you can navigate to the IT4IT Standard for example. So that’s a way that you can, as a user, you learn from different practices because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are using the TOGAF Standard or the Open Agile Architecture or the DPBoK™. What you want and what you need is a solution to your problem. And you find that through this synergy that is found in the portfolio.

 

Gardner: The Open Group is a long and venerated organization going back to the standardization around the UNIX® platform back in the day. We don’t need to go that far back, but I would like to put a little context around how the whole concept of a digital portfolio working as a concerted effort among different disparate parts came about. Can you give us some background and history as to how the digital portfolio came about and where it is now?

 

How we got here

 

Gonzalez: Actually, that’s an interesting story. I started back around 2015. I remember that I was at one of the events and I remember being in an internal meeting, where there were some people from a few member companies who started this activity. At the moment, I was the Architecture Forum Director but as you know, architecture is closely connected with digital. The first name of this workgroup was not Digital Portfolio Workgroup as it is right now, but it was something related, such as digital business and customer experience working group. It was a very long name, and the idea was to combine digital with customer centricity.

 

So, we started working on that. In the beginning it was a very close, small group of members. Then a decision was made to make it a work group in order to allow members from different Forums such as Architecture, ArchiMate, IT4IT to engage. We started to grow and grow. We delivered a couple of white papers that have been published and are very good. Eventually, we decided to change the name from Digital Practitioner Workgroup. At a certain point, it was also led by a subgroup of platinum members at the board level, that happened around four or five years ago. They said, okay, we need to move this forward. So besides having content that is related to digital, we need to start to provide this content as a digital product.

So, we started the process to deliver standards as code. That’s why this small group of members started this work initiative, like I mentioned--it was led by one of our staff members. The idea was to start taking all this content, put it in an open source platform called GitLab, and produce the output in another open source platform called Antora, that allows you to generate from different GitLab repositories using markup language (AsciiDoc) , HTML-based output, which is designed to cross navigate between content, which is one of the main principles of the portfolio. And they also started building the first graphics icons and the photographic interfaces.

At that moment, it was a work activity led by members. Eventually, around two years ago, it was decided that it become part of the staff activity, to be maintained by members in the Digital Practitioner Workgroup. I moved from Architecture Forum space, and I was named the Digital Product Manager for the portfolio. We decided to change the name to Digital Portfolio Workgroup because we didn’t maintain only the DPBoK™ Standard anymore. We maintained the entire environment. We pursued cross collaboration. We tried to engage members from different forums.

The idea was to start taking all this content and put it in an open source platform. ... designed to cross navigate to deliver operating standards.

The task now has three main components. One is the content, which is provided for our members. The second is the platform that we have in which we are producing or delivering our standards as digital products. And the third one is delivering standards as code using also GitLab and Antora, facilitating a more agile DevOps oriented way of delivering standards into the market, which I believe is something innovative. I don’t believe any other standard organization is going that deeply into standards as code. It might be the case, but we are the ones who are starting with this activity.

 

The story is that we went from being a very small work group that then became more active, and then it became something that was driven by staff and with the collaboration of members in the work group.

 

At the moment, we have already delivered four different releases. The first one was in Edinburgh, in October 2022. Since then, we have had several releases. We have been adding new standards into the portfolio. We have been adding new guides because the portfolio is meant to have standards, snapshots, and guides. We started improving the landing pages and creating new landing pages. For example, we added the ArchiMate specification along with the landing page in the release in October 2023 in Houston.

 

For the one that we had this year in Edinburgh, we improved the landing page for the IT4IT™ Standard, which is called the Life cycle, and it also has some links to the DPBoK™ We made some improvements to the general user interface and very importantly, we received some feedback from members saying we need case studies, we need more than how, we have guides, we have standards, but how other people have made this work in a practical way. So, we start talking with members of the Government EA Group and the ArchiMate Standard, because the ArchiMate standard they are the ones that have also several case studies.

 

So, we constructed another instance in GitLab and Antora called the case study collection. This case study collection is meant to have case studies from different verticals, and it is connected with the portfolio. So, in the most recent release, I gave a demo in which you can click on one of the icons in the portfolio and you will be directed to the second instance where the case studies live. From there, you can go to categories such as government, healthcare, or banking and finance.

Also, you can go to physical items such as mechanical constructions and things like that where we have related case studies available. At the moment, we have migrated five case studies, two case studies from ArchiMate®, the ArchiSurance and ArchiMetal, and the other case studies are from the Government EA Work Group. At the moment, we have a very long queue for requests for more content to be added, more guides, more case studies.

Also, at the moment, the connection with the TOGAF Standard is through the TOGAF Standard 10th Edition. We have started the migration to also add the whole set of the TOGAF Standard into the portfolio, which is the highest priority for the rest of the year. Our objective is to have an incremental, ongoing improvement of the portfolio. So that’s where we are right now.

 

Gardner: Wonderful. Thank you for that comprehensive overview. Let’s go up a few thousand feet and start to talk about why this is so important. Everybody agrees that digital transformation is essential and integral to their success, but not very many people agree on how to go about it. As organizations are facing the need to transform and consider more of the benefits from ML and other analytics technologies, what are the challenges? What prevents people from being able to transform and innovate in their organizations as quickly and as powerfully as they’d like?

 

Where to develop your digital strategy

 

Gonzalez: I think one of the main challenges is to know where you are, you know, that’s why EA is such an important pillar in this. If you don’t know what you have, it is impossible to have a feasible path ahead to becoming digital. You need to understand your current state. Do you have a digital strategy? Do you have a strategy at all? And is it clear? Has it been shared?  When you have your strategy, you start having a digital strategy. You start considering, okay, I already have these processes, I have this business lines, I have this product. It doesn’t matter if you are a company that is completely in the digital product business, it can be applicable to all companies. We had a very interesting case, last week in Edinburgh, about banking in Turkey. For that digital transformation, first they identified their current state, and then they identified again following the EA principles.  So, start small and grow incrementally

 

Identify an area that is less difficult to digitize and digitalize and transform and deliver the first outcome, and then you can continue to iterate incrementally. For example, if you are a company that is having issues with the supply chain, you go and make a value stream assessment and a value chain assessment and start identifying what you need to digitize in there. To digitize is to put your information in digital format.

 

And sometimes people, companies, they don’t even have that. They may have perhaps information in digital format, but it’s not consolidated. So, data analytics and data transformation are one of the steps. After you have digitized that, you need to start making the digital transformation with your processes and your capabilities. Meaning your people, your applications, your infrastructure. You need to make an assessment of that.

When you talk about digital transformation, it's not a one-time effort, it's a continuous and ongoing journey. You start doing it incrementally. 

For example, you need to ask yourself: Do I have the right capabilities for this? If I need to start having a manual process become completely automated and put it in one of our channels to become more customer facing, I need to improve the process. I need to train the people, probably hire new people. I need to automate, and I need to build a new channel for that, which of course comes with application and infrastructure layers. It’s a step-by-step process that starts with identifying where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there incrementally.

 

That’s why when you talk about digital transformation, it’s not a one-time effort, it’s a continuous and ongoing process. It’s a journey. You need to start doing it incrementally. In this case of the bank mentioned before, they started first by putting the data in order. They selected a critical process and improved it, and then they started improving the channels and then they started doing more things in digital and then started taking advantage of other technologies, such as AI, in their channels in the later stage. You need to start first with the simpler things that you need to do, because otherwise, if you start just changing things without connection and alignment without the impact assessment, the systemic view, you will be lost and the transformation effort will fail.

 

For example, people believe that, okay, there’s a new technology coming, I will implement it. They don’t take into consideration the current infrastructure, the current applications, the current capabilities of the people they have, whether they have legacy systems, if they have people trained. If they implement this new technology for the sake of implementing, it creates technical debt and unnecessary risks and even potential security breaches.

That’s why again, risk assessment is another key component of this. If you are transforming, but you are not aware of the risk, then you are creating another issue for your company. So, it’s a step-by-step process that you need to take. That’s why I always say that it’s very similar to EA, only in this case the customer is at the center and considering going digital. That’s the difference.

Gardner: Right. And certainly, undertakings to do digital transformation can swiftly become very complex and unwieldy. But when you apply structure, pragmatism, documentation, making sure that everyone is on the same page and collaborating accordingly, that complexity becomes much more managed. So as organizations use such things as the Open Group Digital Portfolio, what are some of the salient and most important benefits of that they’ll start to see?

 

Things that are perhaps a little intangible, difficult to measure, but nonetheless very important. What do you get when you do this right?

 

Measure your processes’ progress

 

Gonzalez: I think measurement is perhaps one of the more difficult things. For example, one thing that could be measurable is if you are delivering a product in a certain amount of time. You improve and digitize and digitalize to make your process better. You used to spend two hours on that; now you spend an hour and a half. That’s a metric. The other one is how efficient your people are becoming because one of the conditions for becoming digital is to transform your organizational structure.

 

If you have a structure that is too hierarchical with a lot of levels and people don’t have the freedom to act, it is very difficult to become agile or to become digital. But when you have autonomous teams, and each one of them has ownership of a specific part of the company or a product or a line of product and you have a cross-collaboration between them such as multidisciplinary autonomous teams and you give them ownership, you can start measuring what they are doing.

If you have a structure that is too hierarchical with a lot of levels and people don't have the freedom to act, it is difficult to become agile or digital. When you have autonomous teams, you can measure what they are doing.

Similar to the earlier scenario, you might have a one, two or three-day cycle and then you make a retrospective review and you re-measure, that’s what you need to do to start. For example, it would not be a good approach to make it three months and not measure what you’re doing. It should be shorter, smaller cycles. And again, you need to create these autonomous teams. In the O-AA™ Standard, there’s a lot of very good content about autonomous team and the fact that sometimes we organize our capabilities for physical or human resources following the same structure of the company.

 

So, they become very silo-oriented and very functional. The moment that you start seeing for example, how to deliver a new product into the market. Let’s say it’s a financial product, a new kind of loan or whatever. I need the person that manages loans. I need the person that manages legal aspects. I need the person that will handle the insurance policies that are related to that loan.

 

Of course, I need IT people, and I need data people. So, when I take this group of people together and they become autonomous, with a certain level of control of course, then they should be able to deliver this product to the final line easier and faster than if you have a very hierarchical structure in which you need permits and in which every area only owns and sees their own piece of work and not the whole thing. You need to own your process. You need to own your product if you really want to succeed at this.

 

Gardner: And of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and you mentioned earlier that you’re now focusing on some case studies, which I imagine illustrate the important use cases. It’s another way of understanding the benefits of a digital portfolio and EA and a strategic approach to transformation. You don’t have to go into too much detail because I’m sure people will be able to access and review these case studies on their own, but maybe you could go through a few of the new case studies and why these use cases were so salient to begin with.

 

Case-by-case connections

 

Gonzalez: I think they are important. Some of them, especially the ones from the Government EA such address actions taken by the Indian government. They took on a project to improve certain areas in the government in order to offer better services to citizens. They started to improve the processes and applications around them. In the end, they started measuring the from the start, state A, and where they were at the end in terms of citizen satisfaction. There was a measure for that.

There was another very interesting one, but we haven’t migrated that yet. It is use of digitalization and digital information to improve the COVID vaccination process. At the beginning it was very messy. As you know, it was a health issue related to people’s lives. It was critical. It began with some initial automation. Then they created a portal in which people were able to create an appointment for their vaccinations with details such as how to get there, how to get their vaccine, how to access and update their medical records.

If they had COVID before, what were the symptoms? Which dose might they need? The process made it around different areas of the country by starting small and then growing and growing. In the end, even though the COVID emergency is somewhat lessened now, they decided to keep the project going in different stages and use it in other parts of the healthcare system, because healthcare is one of the sectors that needs this more.

 

You know, sometimes healthcare systems are inefficient because they are not connected. You don’t connect your medical supplies with your patients or with your healthcare centers. Sometimes some health centers will have medicine, but some others will not have it, and that’s also another case study that may be coming soon, probably in the next month, into the healthcare-related section of the portfolio.

 

As you know, we have a Healthcare Forum in The Open Group. They maintain a Reference Architecture which is into improvement, and we have a case study from a hospital. And they are working on how to better connect the different elements in their value chains, such as healthcare centers, providers either for medicine or medical equipment, patients, patients’ records, and all that. This content might be incorporated into the portfolio later this year.

Sometimes healthcare systems are inefficient because they are not connected. Now they are working to better connect different elements throughout their value chains. 

In another case study, they implemented an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to be able to improve their processes. They had a process that was not really reused in the services, so they improved that ESB to be able to provide better service to their citizenship.

 

As I said, all of the case studies are on our website, and I invite you to look it over. All of them are very interesting and they describe the benefits of using The Open Group standards. They also mention other practices because we cannot pretend like we, as The Open Group, hold all the responses. There are other standards in the market that are valuable and important. That’s why whenever we refer to a third party in our standards for publications, we always ask for legal permission. But those case studies also have that connection to external sources, and they are completely reachable through the case studies.

 

Gardner: Right. And so, looking to the future, digital transformation now is perhaps under pressure as organizations adjust to more AI and analytics, and data driven decision-making. It seems that there’s pressure on organizations to move quickly. If their competitors do AI perhaps better than they do, they could find themselves at a disadvantage.

 

As we look to the future of how digital transformation unfolds and how the digital portfolio can be very instrumental and accelerate their objectives and success, how is AI impacting this equation? What should we expect over the next several years in terms of how organizations can make AI a friend rather than a foe?

 

Put AI into the proper context

 

Gonzalez: Yes. That’s a very good question. Actually, that was one of the main themes at our event in Edinburgh. We had very good presentations there. I think AI has two different edges, like you said. It has the good one, which is that it could be very powerful if used properly but you need to be aware that it’s not magic. If you have acquired an AI tool or have partnered with someone that provided you with that tool, you need to be aware that first you need to have the right data for it, the right information to inject into that tool. You need to give that tool training because there are some patterns that they have. You need to do programming to be able to really have the AI give you the right response. The tool also needs the right context for the data you are feeding into it to receive a consistent output

 

You need to make a special request, and you need to give some training, invest some time, and feed data and training into it so that this AI activity can serve you for several purposes. It can be just for cognitive analysis which is useful on its own. It can be very helpful for giving you decision-making support and it can be the other side of that, which is generative AI where it is generating new content from your input.

 

So, you put that text or images or content in whatever form and it should be able to create a video, to create a story, to create a summary, to create a report, to create whatever kind of output that you need. But in order to do that, of course, there are some very critical capabilities that you need to build and that’s why again, if you are in the middle of your digital transformation and you want to include AI, you need to be sure that you have that capability.

 

For example, critical questions to ask are: Do I have the right data to feed into that AI tool? Do I have the right texts, images, and content because you need to give context. Even a simple ChatGPT that you use in your phone, if you ask a question and you don’t give the context, it will provide a very inadequate response. You need to give context. Sometimes the same AI will ask you “I need more context”. So, you need to provide the context.

You need to have an algorithm in that AI tool that is able to interpret the data you’re giving it to predict because they learn from experience and to act on that and you need to be able also to address your output.

The output could be a success, but it could be a failure. It’s not like because AI told me this, I’m going to use it. And also, you need to be adjusting the algorithm that it uses, the learning process, the outcomes, analytics.

 

The other thing that is very important is to understand that there are different components around AI, we have ML, we have a neural network, which is the way that this information is processed and when it is able to learn from the past experience.

 

Of course, there’s another one called natural language processing (NLP) and learning, which, by the way, is one of the more active working groups in The Open Group. Of course, they need cognitive computing, so we need to be aware that you need resources, infrastructure for this.

 

And now that we are thinking about sustainability, AI is going to become one of the threats in terms of sustainability.

 

We had another very good workshop in Edinburgh about the carbon footprint and even though AI is good, as all technology could be good, its footprint is actually going to become exponential because AI requires a lot of technical resources and power consumption.  It needs a lot of computing processes to be able to generate the output, especially if you’re going to generate complex things such as a video or song or any other kind of generative content.

We're already seeing evidence of jurisdictions looking at the increasing power and water demand ... so they can understand the implications on utilities and infrastructure of these new AI workloads.

And of course you need to have a vision. Why do I need AI in the first place? Is it really that I need it or because it’s in fashion, because everybody is talking about it. You need to have the right capabilities for that. For example, you have to have an AI policy. We already have an AI policy at The Open Group that we have shared with our members. For example, confidentiality is one factor. You should be very careful if you put some critical information in an AI tool. If that AI tool is behind a locked, closed door, where it’s not public, then probably you’re fine. But if you take a public tool and you put private data in there, then there can be cybersecurity threats. Cybercriminals are already using it.

 

Another important aspect for the AI policy is legal considerations. Legal needs to be involved in the policy. You need to also make a risk assessment before implementing it and of course you need to be sure that you have the technical critical capabilities.

 

And there’s another important one. You need to teach your people. I think everybody talks about AI and it’s an interesting topic, but we all need to learn more about it. I know people that are already experts, but we need to learn more about it before using it in the company because it can become a threat

 

You may have already heard in the news that there are already criminals using AI to generate fake calls. You receive a call and it’s your son’s voice telling you that he has been kidnapped. So how would you react to that? Or there are artists and singers that have been making demands and lawsuits because someone has imitated their voice. They’re singing using AI.

 

It can be used very well or very poorly depending on the programming which is also a little scary. For example, you can use, and it’s already being done, you can use drones or small robots in a war zone just to see if there are people that are alive who need to get medical care, but you can also use it to kill people.

 

It’s a double edge. I think it’s excellent to take advantage of what humans can do with technology, but it can be used -- it should be used very carefully, and it should be used knowing that you have the right capabilities and especially can respond to the critical questions--Why do I need AI? How am I going to implement and what am I going to do with it? That is my advice in that regard.

 

Gardner: Great. Well, it sounds like not only is the digital portfolio very important for making your journey to digital transformation smoother and faster, but it certainly also sounds like it’s very important to mitigate the risk when it comes to adopting AI and similar technology. So that’s very exciting for the future and I hope you get a chance to talk about that more.

 

Before we close out, Sonia, please help our readers and listeners understand how they can become more actively involved with The Open Group in terms of events, certifications, resources and specifically how they can start to avail themselves of the digital portfolio.

 

The Open Group support and opportunities

 

Gonzales: Okay, thank you for that. First of all, I invite our listeners to go to our website. On there, you will find important information about all of our standards. On the main page, you have to scroll down a little bit. You will find something called the Portfolio Digital Open Standards.

 

In there, you can read what it is. You can click and you will know more about it. There’s a video from our co-chair and you can click and actually you can experiment with the thing live. It’s completely live now and you can start navigating in there, trying it. You can make searches. You can go to the case study collection.

 

More importantly, please give us your feedback. There’s a small icon in the top right of the screen, which you can click on and send us your feedback. It’s completely private. That feedback is only seen by The Open Group staff. So don’t be shy about putting your email in there because it’s something that we treat very carefully.

Also, in our website, we have information about certification. Also in certification, we are going into a learning progression. Those of you that are familiar with the TOGAF certification program, it has gone now into this badge program in which you become certified in level 1 and 2 in the TOGAF standard.

But then you can become specialized in business architecture, risk and security, agile, digital. We had to couple that precisely to give this more agility and we are going to follow a similar one for the DPBoK™ Certification. There’s already plans to restructure the DPBoK and to also restructure their certification program.

 

More importantly, if you want to contribute with us besides giving us feedback, you can become a member of The Open Group. It has a lot of advantages. You can go to our website. You will find information how to become a member. You will see the cost for a silver, gold, or platinum member. You will see a little bit about the benefits. You can ask for more information, reach out to our business team.

 

Also, you can send me an email. Please contact me, drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to help you through the portfolio. You don’t have to be a member to have some kind of an onboarding session with me. I can give you at any moment on onboarding session and explain to you what we are doing even if you want to just know the portfolio, or you want to become a member. We can also engage with our business team for them to give you more explanation about the process of becoming a member.

 

If you want to become certified and you’re not sure of the process, you can also reach out to me. If you are a tool vendor and you want to certify your tool, you can also go to The Open Group and you can reach me, and I can lead you to our certification team people and they should be able to serve you.

 

Also, please go to our social media. We have our YouTube channel in there. You will see a lot of videos, The Toolkit Tuesday, testimonials, The Open Group Blogs. We recently published a blog about the digital portfolio. We are soon going to publish a survey. It’s going to be sent to our social media probably LinkedIn, so be aware of that. Also, we have our podcast like this one, our blogs. Use our social media. You will find a lot of information in there.

 

And in terms of proceedings, especially if you attended the session, you could go to the proceeding and see what we discussed last week in our Edinburgh about AI. Ecosystem Architecture is another topic that we are taking very seriously at The Open Group. Sustainability is another one like I mentioned. Sometimes there’s a trade-off between technology and the environment which is becoming more and more relevant now.

 

Reach us through our social media, through email, or through our web page and we will be more than happy to give you more information.

 

Gardner: Well, great. I’m afraid we have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored Briefings Direct discussion on how a comprehensive portfolio with open standards and associated best practices powerfully supports analytics-rich digital business transformation.

And we’ve learned how The Open Group’s latest digital portfolio of standards and methods instructs innovation internally to match the demands of a rapidly changing, increasingly competitive and analytics-intensive global marketplace.

So, a big thank you to our expert guest. We have been here with welcoming Sonia Gonzalez, Digital Portfolio Product Manager at The Open Group. Thank you so much, Sonia.

 

Gonzales: Thank you very much, Dana, again for having me and thank you to our listeners for listening to your podcast and providing feedback. Thank you.

 

Gardner: Yes, a big thank you to our audience for joining this Briefings Direct strategic enterprise architecture discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of insightful discussions sponsored by The Open Group.

 

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your enterprise architecture and business agility communities and do come back next time.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunesDownload the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

 

Transcript of a discussion on how a digital portfolio of standards and methods instructs innovation internally to match the demands of a rapidly changing, increasingly competitive, and analytics intensive global marketplace. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The Open Group, 2005-2024. All rights reserved.

 

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Wednesday, October 27, 2021

The Open Group Marks 25 Years of Working Together to Make Successful Standards

Transcript of a discussion on the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the global technology standards arena by The Open Group.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Way back in 1996, when web browsing was novel and central processing still ruled the roost of enterprise IT, The Open Group was formed from the merger of the Open Software Foundation and X/Open.

This October marks the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the technology standards arena by The Open Group. Beginning with a focus as the publisher of the single UNIX specification technical standard and steward of the UNIX trademark, the organization has grown to more than 850 members in over 50 countries -- and it leads the field and technology standard services, certifications, research, and training.

Stay with us now as we explore how standards like UNIX and TOGAF evolved to transform business and society by impacting the world as a digital adoption wave swept over human affairs during the past quarter century.

Here to commemorate The Open Group’s achievements and reminisce about the game-changing, earth-shattering, and culture-evolving advances of standards-enabled IT, please welcome our guests. We’re here with Steve Nunn, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at The Open Group. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Nunn: Thank you, Dana. I’m glad to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with David Lounsbury, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at The Open Group. Welcome, David.


David Lounsbury:
Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to be here, too.

Gardner: And we’re also here with Jim Hietala, Vice President Business Development and Security at The Open Group. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Hietala: Hi, Dana. I’m glad to be here.

Gardner: Great to have you all. Steve, even after 25 years of clearly breathtaking changes across the IT landscape, why is The Open Group’s original mission as salient as ever?

Nunn: In a nutshell, it’s because the world needs open standards. That has been our heritage -- open systems, open standards. We added conformance to open standards, importantly, along the way. And it’s never been more needed than it is now.

Nunn

When we began, there was a crying need for more choice among customers and more interoperability among different software applications. The main proprietary vendors just weren’t necessarily delivering that choice. So, it’s really because customers need standards.

You know, they help suppliers, too. They help all of us in our day-to-day lives. That’s why we’re still needed at 25 years on -- and we’re looking forward to a bright next 25 years.

Gardner: David, sometimes you have to pull people kicking and screaming into standards. It’s like what your mom told you about eating spinach. It’s for your own good, right?

Lounsbury: Right.

Gardner: But we couldn’t get to the current levels and breadth of technology use without them.

Meeting the need for standards

Lounsbury: That’s right. And, you know, Steve mentioned the need for standards -- and the technology does drive the standards. At the time when we were founded, there were relatively few CPU manufacturers, and now there has been an explosion in compute power and a radical fall in the cost of networking, and that’s led to lots of new ways of doing business. People are looking for guidance on how to do that, how to restructure their organizations, and on which technology platforms they need to use. That need is fueling a swing back to seeking new standards.

Gardner: Jim Hietala, with your focus on security, 25 years ago we couldn’t have imagined the things we’re facing around security today. But without people pulling together, we wouldn’t be able to buttress our supply chains. How has security in particular been enabled by standards?

Hietala: It’s interesting to look back at the past because in the world of security today you hear about two predominant themes. One is zero trust, and if you look back at some of the work the Jericho Forum was doing inside of The Open Group 10 to 12 years ago, those were the origins of what we’re calling zero trust in the security industry today.

Hietala

The whole notion of perimeter security was failing. We needed to move security controls closer to the data and to secure people’s access within what were previously considered secure networks. The Jericho Forum seeded that discussion a number of years ago.

The other big issue out there today is supply chain security, with some of the supply chain security attacks in the last 18 months. And here again an initiative inside of The Open Group that was formed some 10 years ago, the Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF), that was brought to us by the US government, was focused on addressing the security of the hardware and software for the components that go into the IT systems being procured.

And again, we’ve had some groundbreaking work inside of The Open Group on the topic of security that’s highly relevant today, even though the environment has changed tremendously in the last 25 years.

Gardner: Yes, as Steve mentioned, this is a long game. Sometimes it takes decades for the value of these efforts to become fully evident to all the players.

I’m old enough to remember there used to be quite a few UNIX® standards or variants. The process behind pulling them together for the benefit of everyone -- both the users and ultimately the vendors as well -- became a cookie cutter model for creating standards generally.

Steve, how did the evolution of UNIX standards in particular become opportunity to do much more?

Nunn: We converted what it meant to be a UNIX system, from being derived from a certain code base, to being based on a standard. The key is it wasn’t just one standard. It was a lot of standards. There were 1170 different specs that changed what it meant to be a UNIX system. It was then all about conformance with the standard and how the system operates in connection with the standard -- rather than derived from a particular code base.

It was gathering a set of standards together. Our history since then -- this idea of a standard of standards -- has evolved and developed to make standards approachable and useful for solving business problems.

Fundamentally, at The Open Group, all our work on standards starts with trying to solve a business problem. A set of standards makes solutions more applicable, more approachable, for implementation. And increasingly nowadays we add things like developing some code alongside it. That’s the essence of it. We were transforming the first kind of UNIX standard, the Spec-1170, set of standards.

Gardner: David, what a success UNIX has become since back when we thought this was going to be just a way for workstations to interoperate better on a network. It became the foundation for Linux, BSD, and for the MacOS. It went from workstations to servers and then dominated servers. It seems that there’s no better validation for the success and power of standards and what we’ve seen with UNIX over the past 25 years.

Lounsbury

Lounsbury: Yes, no question about it. I come from the minicomputer revolution, where I started in my career, and basically that whole industry got run out of business by UNIX systems. And now we have it, as you said, on our laptops. I’m running it on my laptop right now. It’s on all our smaller systems. Embedded processes all tend to run a variant of things that look like the UNIX standard.

If you have to create something quickly, and you want to create something that’s robust and will run predictably, you pick something that follows the UNIX standard.

Gardner: And how did you get people to rally to such standards? There’s more to this than technology. This is also about a culture of cooperation. There is a human behavioral aspect to it.

How has The Open Group been able to pull so many different threads together and repeat this? You’ve been doing this as well for TOGAF, with enterprise architecture, with Open Agile, ArchiMate, FACE, and reference architectures like IT4IT, among many others.

What is behind this ability to govern so many factions into a common goal?

Staying power of neutrality

Lounsbury: There are a couple of dimensions to it, and Steve’s already mentioned one of them. He talked about the end-customers. We recognized the value of neutrality -- not only neutrality of technology, but also the other dimension of neutrality, which is the balance between the buy-side and the supply-side.

There are many things called standards activities that are really altered to one side or the other. We found the balanced viewpoint: balanced across the technologies, balanced across the demand, which is the essential key to having stable buy-in. Now, of course, that must be built on rock-solid processes that respect all the parties, all the way through. And that’s how our formal governance comes in.

Nunn: That’s right, you’ve hit the nail on the head. The magic happens when the customers drive this. They have things that need to be achieved through standards.

The process has been essentially stable -- evolved slightly over the years -- but it's a tried-and-tested process; a consensus process of one company, one vote. It's allowed us to create trust.

The second point David made is key, too. The process has been essentially stable -- evolved slightly over the years -- but it’s a tried-and-tested process; a consensus process of one company, one vote. It’s allowed us to create trust.

That’s the word I want to want to bring out here: trust in the process, trust in the equity of the process; that all parties get to have their say. That has essentially stood us in good stead. We’ve been able to apply that process, and that same approach in governance, across many different industries and business programs.

Gardner: I suppose another key word here, Jim, is cooperation. Because while The Open Group is a steward and has been involved with governance, there’s a tremendous army of people who contribute the things that they have learned and know and then bring to all this.

How important has it been to encourage that level of cooperation? It’s astonishing how many people are involved with these standards.

Hietala: It’s critical to have that cooperation, and the work, frankly, from the members. The Open Group brings the staff who help initiate standards initiatives and run them per our processes and our governance in a fair, open, and transparent way.

But it’s the members who bring the subject matter expertise in whatever area we’re talking about. In the case of The Open Group FACE Consortium, it’s the defense contractors and government folks administering some of the programs who bring subject matter expertise that helps us produce business guides, procurement guides, and the standards themselves, as well as the reference software.

We have a saying that joining a standards effort such as The Open Group is like joining a gym. You have to not just get the membership -- you have to show up and do the work, too.

Lounsbury: Both of Steve and Jim mentioned confidence. I think that the confidence we project in the process, both the formal governance and the ability to bring people together, is the real differentiator of why The Open Group has stood the test of time.


We see many examples of groups that get together and say, “Well, why don’t we just get together and solve this problem?” And what we often find is that they don’t because they lack stability. They can’t project stability. They don’t have the endurance. The government is a good example of where they then come back to The Open Group and say, “Hey, can you help us make this a sustainable activity that will have the impact over time that we need?”

Gardner: Another key word here then is journey, because you never get to the destination, which is actually a good thing. You must be self-sustaining. It has to be ongoing, the peeling back of the onion, the solving of one problem that perhaps creates others: and then again and again.

Is that never-ending part of the standards process also a strength, Steve?

Nunn: Yes, because around the world the various industries we work with don’t stand still. There’s a new problem coming up every day, as you alluded to, Dana, that needs solving.

When a group gets together to solve an initial problem through a standard, there's much more. ...The problems don't stand still, and technology evolves the world. Disruptive events happen, and we need to adjust and update the standards accordingly.

When a group gets together to solve an initial problem through a standard, they realize there’s much more there. I can think some recent examples, such as the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Forum, which is in the oil and gas industry. They originally got together to focus on subsurface issues. And now they’re realizing that that a standards approach can help them in many other areas of their business as well.

The problems don’t stand still, and technology evolves the world. Disruptive events happen, and we need to adjust and update the standards accordingly.

Gardner: Is there a pattern to the standards you’ve chosen to foster? You obviously have been very successful with enterprise architecture and TOGAF. You’ve gone to modeling, security, and reference architectures for how IT organizations operate.

What’s the common denominator? Why these particular standards? Is there an order to it? Is there a logic to it?

One success leads to another

Nunn: The common denominator is something mentioned earlier, which is a business need. Is there a business problem to be solved, whatever industry that might be?

Over the years, The Open Group can trace one activity where a group of companies got together to solve a business problem and then it led to several other forums. The example we usually use is The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium in federal avionics. They recently celebrated their 10th anniversary.

That effort led directly to work in the sensor architecture space, and strangely led to our Open Process Automation Forum. Members saw the great work that was being done in the FACE Consortium, in terms of a modular method that creates an architected approach. The past saw a situation where one aircraft, for example, is funded completely separately, with no reuse of technology or parts, and where everything was done from scratch with one prime contractor and subs.

And we had some other members fortunately who saw from the oil industry how a set of industry standards had emerged. They said, “We have the same issues in our industries. We want a standardized approach, too.”

As a result, the Open Process Automation Forum is doing great work, transforming the way that systems are procured.

These successes form a traceable connection between an industry that has a problem to solve and the established best ways of doing it. They come together and work on it as an industry, and through tried-and-trusted processes, rather than trying to beat each other in the marketplace to the first magic solution.

Gardner: Jim, it sounds like the need for a standard almost presents itself to you. Is that fair?

Hietala: As an outsider, you might say, “What in the world do control systems users have in common with the military avionics industry?” But the takeaway is with each iteration of this new standards initiative our staff learned better how to support the formation and operation of a set of best practices around an operating standards initiative. The members learn as well. So, you had folks from Exxon Mobil at a conference speaking about how they transformed their industry, and the light bulb went off. Others brought the idea back from the oil and gas industry.

Then we at The Open Group helped them identify similar uses in some other industries: metals and mining, pulp and paper, utilities, water utilities, and pharmaceuticals – they all use the same set of control system equipment. They all had similar problems until we were able to bring it into a standards initiative. And once you have that sort of support behind an initiative, the suppliers don’t have a choice but to pay attention, get involved, and help drive the initiative themselves.

Gardner: David, it’s clear that just presenting a standard isn’t the only factor for success. You must support it with certifications, additional research, events, and forums that continuously bring people together in an atmosphere for collaboration and ongoing training. You’ve not only broadened the scope of what The Open Group does in terms of the standards, but also a wider set of functions that augment and support those standards.

Lounsbury: That’s right. Both Jim and Steve mentioned the process of discovery by the members, or by potential members, and the value of standards. That’s a critical component because the natural instinct is for people to go off and try to solve things on their own, or to get a magic bullet competitively.

The art of what we do is help members understand that only through collective action, only through wide agreement, is there going to be a sufficient response to solve the business problem.

But part of the art of what we do is help members understand that only through collective action, only through a wide agreement, is there going to be a sufficient response to solve the business problem and provide a center of gravity for the vendors to invest in building the systems that embrace and employ the standards.

And so, a part of building that continuing confidence is knowing that there will be trained people who know how to use the standard effectively. There will be systems that conform to the standard, and you can get together with peers in your industry to find out about what’s going on at the cutting edge of technology.

And, frankly, even the social networking, just meeting people face to face builds confidence that everybody is working toward the common objective. All of these things are critical supporting pieces that give people confidence to invest in solutions and the confidence to specify that when they purchase.

Gardner: It seems like a big part of the secret sauce here is mutual assured success for as many of the people in the ecosystem -- on all sides of the equation -- as possible. It sounds simple, but it’s really hard to do.

Nunn: It is, Dana. And you need champions, the people who are passionate about it in their own organizations.  

For me, the single biggest differentiator and reason for The Open Group’s success so far is that we have a very respected set of certification programs and processes. The importance of certification is that it gives standards some teeth. It gives them meaning. We’re not just publishing standards for the sake of it, and nobody uses them. They’re being used by trained people. There might also be certified products out there, too.

Certification helps turn it into an ecosystem, and that in turn gets people more engaged and seeking to evolve it and be part of the movement. Certification is key because of the teeth that it gives the standards.

Gardner: Well, the custom is when we have an anniversary to do toasts. Usually, toasts are anecdotal or remembrances. Are there any such moments in hindsight that ended up being formative and important over the past 25 years?

Cheers to 25 years of highlights

Nunn: For years, we had heard that UNIX was going away, that it’s not relevant anymore. I think the work we’ve done has proven that’s not the case.

Another highlight or breakthrough moment was when we got our TOGAF practitioner certification program up and running. That spread around the world to a large number of individuals who are certified and who are promoting the value of the standard itself.

We’ve created a community over the years, even though that community is harder to bring together right now in the pandemic days. But certainly, for the vast majority of our history, we have brought people together; these people are familiar with each other, and new people come in.

The face-to-face element is special. Somebody recently made a great point about the effect of the pandemic. And the point was that you need the personal interactions in developing standards. Standards are about contributing intellectual property, but also about compromise. It’s about discussing what’s best for the relevant industry. And that’s hard to achieve in a virtual world.

You need the dinners, the beers, whatever it might be to build the social networking and up the trust for the individuals in these situations who are often from competing companies. The way that we have encouraged the community and built up what we’ve often called “The Open Group family” over the years is a key factor for us.

Gardner: David, what are some anecdotes that come to mind that highlight the first 25 years?

Lounsbury: I’m going to pick up on Steve’s theme of face-to-face meetings. One that stands out in my mind was the first face-to-face FACE Consortium meeting, which was at a vendor building on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

And, I’ll be honest, there was a ton of skepticism, both from the government agencies and from some of the larger vendors, that this could ever possibly come together. And because we got the people together and we had a few enthusiastic champions -- not necessarily the people who started things out -- but the people who saw the value of cooperative industry engagement -- we got it together. And 60 companies walked out of that room saying, “Yeah, this might actually work.” And from then on -- that was over 10 years ago -- it changed the way avionics are produced. And now it has inspired changes in other industry verticals as well.

Because we got people together and we had a few enthusiastic champions we got it together. What we sometimes call The Open Group Way differentiates how we create standards. It has inspired changes in other industries as well.

So, what we sometimes call The Open Group Way differentiates how we create standards from what had gone on in other standards activities that they had been engaged in.

Gardner: Jim, what’s your toast to the past quarter-century?

Hietala: At little bit higher level, I point to the fact that The Open Group has grown to more than 850 member organizations from dozens of countries. The specific things that resonate with me and made an impact over the years are engaging with all those members from the many different countries and nationalities at events we’ve held.

That and to getting to over 120,000 TOGAF-certified people, which is a huge milestone and was definitely not an overnight success. TOGAF was tens of years in the making, so those to me are indicative of where we’ve come in 25 years.

Gardner: It seems that the Tower of Babel isn’t particularly high when it comes to information technology (IT). The technology is a common denominator that cuts across cultures and boundaries. There really is a common world stage for IT.

IT – The universal language

Hietala: I think that’s true. There’s probably work that goes on inside of standards organizations like The Open Group, that isn’t necessarily seen, that enables that. There’s a fair amount of work translating the products of The Open Group into various native languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, French, or Spanish, or Chinese. Those often happen at the ground level by volunteers, typically from the countries that want to enable adoption of what they see as a highly valuable standard.

Lounsbury: The profusion of technology you mentioned has driven a fundamental change in the way people run their businesses. And The Open Group is very much at the forefront of thinking about how that’s best going to happen.

What does it mean to architect your business going forward when you have all of these new management techniques, all of this new technology that’s available at very low cost causing these fundamental shifts in how you interact with your customers and in your ecosystem? That’s currently on the forefront of the minds of many of the groups working inside The Open Group.

We all know there’s a new management book a day nowadays. That’s why there’s a growing demand for stability of guidance in this world. How to do these new digital ways of working? We look to standards bodies to come out with that guidance. Our members are working on it.

Gardner: I suppose the past is prologue. And back when I first got involved with enterprise IT in the late 1980s, this type of technology transformation was still fringe in business. But it’s become more than mainstream, it’s become dominant.

We talk about digital transformation. We could probably just drop digital, now it’s transformation, period. Given the depth, breadth, and importance of IT to business and society -- where do we go from here?

How do you take the success you’ve had for the past 25 years and extend that to an even grander stage?

Standards provide frame for future transformation

Nunn: As Dave said, organizations have to transform. They’re looking for structure. They’re looking for tools that help go through this transformation. It can’t happen soon enough. The pandemic has been an accelerator.

But they need a framework, and standards provide that framework. That doesn’t mean exactly the same approach for all standards. But I don’t think we need to fundamentally change the way standards are built.

We’ve talked about our legacy of trust and the tried-and-tested. We need to evolve how things are done as we go forward, to fit with the speed with which transformation needs to occur and the demands that individual organizations in their industries have.

But we definitely now have a very solid bedrock for evolving, and the transformation aspect of it is key because people see standards as helping them transform. Standards give them something to work with when so much all around is changing.

Gardner: Jim, how do you take the success you’ve had with digital standards and expand the use of the methodologies?

Hietala: We’ve seen that the practices, business model, and the approach to taking a big industry problem and solving it through the development of standards has been proven to work. Companies in need of those standards efforts are comfortable looking at The Open Group and saying, “You’re an honest broker to be in the middle of this and make something happen.”

For example, a member from our OSDU Forum looked at what was happening there and saw a similar need inside of his company. It happened to be in the energy industry, but he saw a problem around how to measure and manage their carbon footprint. They examined the approach used in the OSDU and said, “That’s what we need over here to determine what our carbon footprint is.”

Taking a big industry problem and solving it through the development of standards has been proven to work. Companies in need of those standards efforts are comfortable looking to The Open Group.

And what they found quickly in looking at that customer need was that that’s a universal need. It’s certainly not just an energy industry issue. Cement companies, large auto manufacturers, and many others all have that same need. They would all be well served by having a standard effort that produces not just standards but a reference software platform that they could build from that helps them measure and manage any carbon footprint. The approach has evolved a bit. We’re able to support now open-source initiatives alongside of standards initiatives. But fundamentally our consensus-oriented standard process has not changed.

And that’s the way we build these initiatives, rally industry support, and take them from looking at the customer business problem to producing standards and business guides. The way we address the issues hasn’t changed.

Gardner: David, if you can apply the lessons learned at The Open Group to even more challenging and impactful problems, that sounds worth doing. Is that part of your next 25 years?

Lounsbury: Yes, it certainly is. There’s a couple of dimensions to it. There’s the scale in number of people who are engaged. And we’ve given plenty of examples of how we went from a core standard like UNIX or IT4IT or TOGAF and applied those same proven techniques to things such as how you do avionics, which led to how to do process control systems, which led to how to do subsurface data. That has all led to a tremendous expansion in the number of organizations and people who are engaged with The Open Group.

The other dimension of scale is speed. And that is something where we need to keep our standards up to date, and that has evolved. For example, we’ve restructured our architecture portfolio to have more modular content. That’s something we’re going to be looking at across all of our core standards, including how we link them together and how we make them more cohesive.

We’re looking at reducing the friction in keeping standards up to date and improving the pace so they’re competitive with those one-off, two-people-writing-a-book kinds of guidance that characterizes our industry right now.

Gardner: For those who have been listening and are now interested in taking an active role in open standards, where can they go? Also, what’s coming next, Steve?

Nunn: Yes, we’ll have some anniversary celebrations. We have a great event in October. We’re doing a moving global event over a 24-hour period. So, a few hours hosted in each of several locations around the world where we have offices and staff and significant membership.

We also have an ever-growing number of active meetings in our groups. Most of them, because of the pandemic, have been virtual recently. But we’re starting to see, as I mentioned earlier, the eagerness for people to get together face-to-face again when, of course, it’s safe to do so and people feel comfortable to do so.

And we’ll be looking at not just what we’ve achieved but also looking at how we make the next steps. A big part of that relates to the work we’ve done with governments around the world. A good example is the government of India, which recently published a standard called IndEA, based on our TOGAF Enterprise Architecture standard.

It’s being used to fundamentally transform government services, not just in the national government of India, but in various states there. And then other countries are looking at that work. We also have work going on with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in healthcare and digital services for citizens.

We’re doing a lot of work with governments to make a real difference to people’s lives as citizens, in countries that may need to catch up with some of the more developed countries. They’re using our standards and the work groups we’ve put together to get up to speed.

For me, that’s an exciting part of our future: The difference we can make in people’s daily lives.

Gardner: And, of course, a lot of this information is on your website, www.opengroup.org. Any other resources that people should be aware of?

Lounsbury: Yes, all our standards are free to download from our library on our website. You can obviously find how to register for events on the website, too. At the Forum level, there’s good information about each Forum that we’ve been working on. There’s always a contact form associated with each of the Forum webpages so you can leave your details and someone from our team will get in touch and tell you how to get involved.


Gardner:
I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on 25 years of remarkable achievements in the technology standards arena by The Open Group.

And we’ve learned how standards like UNIX and TOGAF evolved to transform business and society, impacting us all over the world as a digital adoption wave swept across human affairs. So, a big thank you to our panel. We’ve been here with Steve Nunn, Chief Executive officer at The Open Group. Thank you so much, Steve.

Nunn: Thank you very much, Dana. It’s been a great discussion.

Gardner:  And we’ve been joined by David Lounsbury, Chief Digital Officer at the Open Group. Thank you, sir.

Lounsbury: You’re welcome, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Jim Hietala has been with us. He’s vice President Business Development and Security at The Open Group. Thank you, Jim.

Hietala: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect commemoration of technology standards successes discussion.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Your host throughout the series of BriefingsDirect discussions sponsored by The Open Group.

Thanks again for listening, please pass this along with your business community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a discussion on the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the global technology standards arena by The Open Group. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The Open Group, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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