Enterprise Architects Increasingly Leverage Advanced TOGAF 9 for Innovation, Market Response, and Governance Benefits

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, in conjunction with The Open Group Austin 2011 Conference, on advances in enterprise architecture and The Open Group's Architectural Framework use for business benefits.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Join The Open Group in Austin, Texas July 18-22 to learn more about enterprise architecture, cloud computing, and TOGAF 9. To register, go to http://www.opengroup.org/austin2011/register.htm.

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with the latest Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, the week of July 18, 2011. We've assembled a panel to examine the maturing use of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and how enterprise architects and business leaders are advancing and exploiting the latest Version 9.

We'll further explore how the full embrace of TOGAF, its principles, and methodologies are benefiting companies in their pursuit of improved innovation, responsiveness to markets, and operational governance. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Is enterprise architecture (EA) joining other business transformation agents as a part of a larger and extended strategic value? How? And what exactly are the best practitioners of TOGAF getting for their efforts in terms of business achievements?

Here with us to delve into advanced use and expanded benefits of EA frameworks and what that's doing for their user organizations is Chris Forde, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Membership Capabilities for The Open Group, based in Shanghai. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Forde: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Jason Uppal, Chief Architect at QR Systems, based in Toronto. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Uppal: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Jason, let’s cut to the quick here. We hear an awful lot about architecture. We hear about planning and methodologies, putting the right frameworks in place, but is TOGAF having an impact on the bottom line in the organizations that are employing it?

Uppal: One of the things with a framework like a TOGAF is that, on the outside, it’s a framework. At the same time, when you apply this along with the other disciplines, it's making big difference in the organization, partially it’s because it's allowing the IT organizations to step up to the plate within the core enterprise as a whole and ask how they can actually exploit the current assets that they already have.

And secondly, [TOGAF helps] make sure the new assets that they do bring into the organization are aligned to the business needs.

One of the examples where EA has a huge impact in many of the organizations that I have experience with is that, with key EA methods, we're able to capture the innovation that exists in the organization and make that innovation real, as opposed to just suggestions that are thrown in a box, and nobody ever sees.

Gardner: What is it about capturing that innovation that gets us to something we can measure in terms of an achievable bottom-line benefit?

Evolve over time

Uppal: Say you define an end-to-end process using architecture development method (ADM) methods in TOGAF. What it does is give me a way to capture that innovation at the lowest level and then evolve it over time. Those people who are part of the innovation at the beginning see their innovation or idea progressing through the organization, as the innovation gets aligned to value statements, and value statements get aligned to their capabilities, and the strategies, and the projects, and hence to the end of the day.

Therefore, if I make a suggestion of some sort, that innovation or idea is seen throughout the organization through the methods like ADM, and the linkage is explicit and very visible to the people. Therefore, they feel comfortable that their ideas are going somewhere, they are just not getting stuck.

Forde: There's an additional point here, Dana, to underscore the answer that Jason gave to your question. In the end result, what you want to be seeing out of your architectural program is moving the key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business, the business levers that they are expecting to be moved out. If that is related to cost reduction or is related to top-line numbers or whatever, that explicit linkage through to the business levers in an architecture program is critical.

Gardner: Chris, you have a good view on the global markets and the variability of goals here. Many companies are looking to either cut cost or improve productivity. Others are looking to expand. Others are looking to manage how to keep operations afloat. There are so many different variables. How do things like the TOGAF 9 and EA have a common benefit to all of those various pursuits? What is the common denominator that makes EA so powerful?

Forde: Going back to the framework reference, what we have with TOGAF 9 is a number of assets, but primarily it’s a tool that’s available to be customized, and it's expected to be customized.

If you come to the toolset with a problem, you need to focus the framework on the area that's going to help you get rapid value to solving your particular problem set. So once you get into that particular space, then you can look at migrating out from that entry point, if that's the approach, to expanding your use of the framework, the methods, the capabilities, that are implicit and explicit in the framework to address other areas.

You can start at the top and work your way down through the framework, from this kind of über value proposition, right down through delivery to the departmental level or whatever. Or, you can come into the bottom, in the infrastructure layer, in IT for example, and work your way up. Or, you can come in at the middle. The question is what is impeding your company’s growth or your department’s growth, if those are the issues that are facing you.

One of the reasons that this framework is so useful in so many different dimensions is that it is a framework. It’s designed to be customized, and is applicable to many different problems.

Gardner: Back to you, Jason. When we think about a beginning effort, perhaps a crawl-walk-run approach to EA and TOGAF, the promise is that further development, advancement, understanding, implementation will lead to larger, more strategic goals.

Let’s define what it means to get to that level of maturity. When we think about an advanced user of TOGAF, what does that mean? Then, we'll get into how they can then leverage that to further goals. But, what do we really mean by an advanced user at this point?

Advanced user

Uppal: When we think about an advanced user, in our practice we look at it from different points of view and ask what value I'm delivering to the organization. It could very well be delivering value to a CTO in the organization. That is not to say that's not an advanced user, because that’s strictly focused on technology.

But then, the CTO focus is that it allows us to focus on the current assets that are under deployment in the organization. How do you get the most out of them? So, that’s an advanced user who can figure out how to standardize and scale those assets into a scalable way so therefore they become reusable in the organization.

As we move up the food chain from very technology-centric view of a more optimized and transformed scale, advanced user at that point is looking at and saying that now I have a framework like TOGAF, that advanced user has all these tools in their back pocket.

Now, depending on the stakeholder that they're working with, be that a CEO, a CFO, or a junior manager in the line of business, I can actually focus them on defining a specific capability that they are working towards and create transition roadmaps. Once those transition roadmaps are established, then I can drive that through.

An advanced user in the organization is somebody who has all these tools available to them, frameworks available to them, but at the same time, are very focused on a specific value delivery point in their scope.

It moves the conversation away from this framework debate and very quickly moves our conversation into what we do with it.

One beauty of TOGAF is that, because we get to define what enterprise is and we are not told that we have to interview the CEO on day one, I can define an enterprise from a manager’s point of view or a CFO’s point of view and work within that framework. That to me is an advanced user.

Gardner: When we talk about applied architecture, what does that mean? How is it that we move from concept into execution?

Uppal: The frameworks that we have are well thought-out frameworks. So, it moves the conversation away from this framework debate and very quickly moves our conversation into what we do with it.

When we talk about a framework like TOGAF, now I can look at and say that if I wanted to apply it now, I have an executive who has defined a business strategy, which typically is a two page PowerPoint presentation, sometimes accompanied by Excel. That’s a good starting point for an enterprise architect.

Now, I use methods like TOGAF to define the capabilities in that strategy that they are trying to optimize, where they are, and what they want to transition to.

Very creative

This is where a framework allows me to be very creative, defining the capabilities and the transition points, and giving a roadmap to get to those transitions. That is the cleverness and cuteness of architecture work, and the real skills of an architect comes into, not in defining the framework, but defining the application of the framework to a specific business strategy.

Gardner: Jason, we mentioned that there is a great deal of variability in what different companies in different regions and in different industries need to accomplish, but one of the common questions I get a lot these days is what to outsource and what to manage internally and how to decide the boundaries between a core competency and extended outsourcing or hybrid computing types of models?

How does the applied architecture come to the rescue, when this sort of question, which I think is fundamental to an enterprise, comes up?

Uppal: That’s a great question. That’s one of the area where if architects do their job well, we can help the organization move much further along. Because, what we do in the business space, and we have done it many times with the framework, is to look at the value chain of the organization. And looking at the value chain, then to map that out to the capabilities required.

Once we know those capabilities, then I can squarely put that question to the executives and say, "Tell me which capability you want to be the best at. Tell me what capability you want to lead the market in. And, tell me which capability you want to be mediocre and just be at below the benchmark in industry."

Once I get an understanding of which capability I want to be the best at, that's where I want to focus my energy.

Once I get an understanding of which capability I want to be the best at, that's where I want to focus my energy. Those ones that I am prepared to live with being mediocre, then I can put another strategy into place and ask how I outsource these things, and focus my outsourcing deal on the cost and service.

This is opposed to having very confused contract with the outsourcer, where one day I'm outsourcing for the cost reasons. The other day, I'm outsourcing for growth reasons. It becomes very difficult for an organization to manage the contracts and bend it to provide the support.

That conversation, at the beginning, is getting executives to commit to which capability they want to be best at. That is a good conversation for an enterprise architect.

My personal experience has been that if I get a call back from the executive, and they say they want to be best at every one of them, then I say, "Well, you really don’t have a clue what you are talking about. You can’t be super fast and super good at every single thing that you do."

Gardner: So making those choices is what’s critical. Some of the confusion I also hear about in the field is how to do a cost-benefit analysis about what processes I might keep internal, versus either hybrid or external source processes?

Is there something about the applied architecture and TOGAF 9 that sets up some system of record or methodology approach that allows that cost-benefit analysis of these situations to be made in advance? Is there anything that the planning process brings to the table in trying to make proper decisions about sourcing?

Capability-based planning

Uppal: Absolutely. This is where the whole of our capability-based planning conversation is. It was introduced in TOGAF 9, and we got more legs to go into developing that concept further, as we learn how best to do some of these things.

When I look at a capability-based planning, I expect my executives to look at it from a point of view and ask what are the opportunities and threats. What it is that you can get out there in the industry, if you have this capability in your back pocket? Don’t worry about how we are going to get it first, let’s decide that it’s worth getting it.

Then, we focus the organization into the long haul and say, well, if we don’t have this capability and nobody in the industry has this capability, if we do have it, what will it do for us? It provides us another view, a long-term view, of the organization. How are we going to focus our attention on the capabilities?

One of the beauties of doing EA is, is that when we start EA at the starting point of a strategic intent, that gives us a good 10-15 year view of what our business is going to be like. When we start architecture at the business strategy level, that gives us a six months to five-year view.

Enterprise architects are very effective at having two views of the world -- a 5-, 10-, or 15-year view of the world, and a 6-month to 3-year view of the world. If we don’t focus on the strategic intent, we'll never know what is possible, and we would always be working on what is possible within our organization, as opposed to thinking of what is possible in the industry as a whole.

Everybody is trying to understand what it is they need to be good at and what it is their partners are very good at that they can leverage.

Gardner: So, in a sense, you have multiple future tracks or trajectories that you can evaluate, but without a framework, without an architectural approach, you would never be able to have that set of choices before you.

Chris Forde, any thoughts on what Jason’s been saying in terms of the sourcing and cost benefits and risks analysis that go into that?

Forde: In the kinds of environment that most organizations are operating in -- government, for-profit, not-for-profit organizations -- everybody is trying to understand what it is they need to be good at and what it is their partners are very good at that they can leverage. Their choices around this are of course critical.

One of the things that you need to consider is that if you are going to give x out and have the power to manage that and operate whatever it is, whatever process it might be, what do you have to be good at in order to make them effective? One of the things you need to be good at is managing third parties.

One of the advanced uses of an EA is applying the architecture to those management processes. In the maturity of things you can see potentially an effective organization managing a number of partners through an architected approach to things. So when we talked about what do advanced users do, what I am offering is that an advanced use of EA is in the application of it to third-party management.

Gardner: So the emphasis is on the process, not necessarily who is executing on that process?

Framework necessary

Forde: Correct, because you need a framework. Think about what most major Fortune 500 companies in the United States do. They have multiple, multiple IT partners for application development and potentially for operations. They split the network out. They split the desktop out. This creates an amazing degree of complexity around multiple contracts. If you have an integrator, that’s great, but how do you manage the integrator?

There’s a whole slew of complex problems. What we've learned over the years is that the original idea of “outsourcing,” or whatever the term that’s going to be used, we tend to think of that in the abstract, as one activity, when in fact it might be anywhere from 5-25 partners. Coordinating that complexity is a major issue for organizations, and taking an architected approach to that problem is an advanced use of EA.

Join The Open Group in Austin, Texas July 18-22 to learn more about enterprise architecture, cloud computing, and TOGAF 9. To register, go to http://www.opengroup.org/austin2011/register.htm.

Gardner: So stated another way, Jason, the process is important, but the management of processes is perhaps your most important core competency. Is that fair, and how does EA support that need for a core competency of managing processes across multiple organizations?

Uppal: That’s absolutely correct. Chris is right. For example, there are two capabilities an organization decided on, one that they wanted to be very, very good at.

We worked with a large concrete manufacturing company in the northern part of the country. If you're a concrete manufacturing company, your biggest cost is the cement. If you can exploit your capability to optimize the cement and substitute products with the chemicals and get the same performance, you can actually get a lot more return and higher margins for the same concrete.

The next thing is the cleverness of the architect -- how he uses his tools to actually define the best possible solutions.

In this organization, the concrete manufacturing process itself was core competency. That had to be kept in-house. The infrastructure is essential to make the concrete, but it wasn’t the core competency of the organization. So those things had to be outsourced.

In this organization we have to build a process -- how to manage the outsourcer and, at the same time, have a capability and a process. Also, how to become best concrete manufacturers. Those two essential capabilities were identified.

An EA framework like TOGAF actually allows you to build both of those capabilities, because it doesn’t care. It just thinks, okay, I have a capability to build, and I am going to give you a set of instructions, the way you do it. The next thing is the cleverness of the architect -- how he uses his tools to actually define the best possible solutions.

Gardner: Of course, it’s not just enough to identify and implement myriad sourcing or complex sourcing activities, but you need to monitor and have an operational governance oversight capability as well. Is there something in TOGAF 9 specifically that lends itself to taking this into the operational and then creating ongoing efficiencies as a result?

Uppal: Absolutely, because this is one of the areas where in ADM, when we get back to our implementation of governance, and post implementation of governance, value realization, how do we actually manage the architecture over the life of it? This is one of the areas where TOGAF 9 has done a considerably good job, and we've still got a long way to go in how we actually monitor and what value is being realized.

Very explicit

Our governance model is very explicit about who does what and when and how you monitor it. We extended this conversation using TOGAF 9 many times. At the end, when the capability is deployed, the initial value statement that was created in the business architecture is given back to the executive who asked for that capability.

We say, "This is what the benefits of these capabilities are and you signed off at the beginning. Now, you're going to find out that you got the capability. We are going to pass this thing into strategic planning next year, because for next year's planning starting point, this is going to be your baseline." So not only is the governance just to make sure it’s via monitoring, but did we actually get the business scores that we anticipated out of it.

Gardner: Another area that’s of great interest to me nowadays is looking at the IT organization as they pursue things like cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and hybrid models. Do they gather a core competency at how to manage these multiple partners, as Chris pointed out, or does another part of the company that may have been dealing with outsourcing at a business process level teach the IT department how to do this?

Any sense from either of our panelists on whether IT becomes a leader or a laggard in how to manage these relationships, and how important is managing the IT element of that in the long run? Let’s start with you, Jason.

Uppal: It depends on the industry the IT is in. For example, if you're an organization that is very engineering focused, engineers have a lot more experience managing outsourcing deals than IT organizations do. In that case, the engineering leads this conversation.

We have actually done cloud before. This is not a new thing, except that before we looked at it from a hosting point of view and from a SaaS point of view.

But in most organizations, which are service-oriented organizations, engineering has not been a primary discipline, and IT has a lot of experience managing outside contracts. In that case, the whole cloud conversation becomes a very effective conversation within the IT organization.

When we think about cloud, we have actually done cloud before. This is not a new thing, except that before we looked at it from a hosting point of view and from a SaaS point of view. Now, cloud is going in a much further extended way, where entire capability is provided to you. That capability is not only that the infrastructure is being used for somebody else, but the entire industry’s knowledge is in that capability.

This is becoming a very popular thing, and rightfully so, not because it’s a sexy thing to have. In healthcare, especially in countries where it’s a socialized healthcare and it's not monopolized, they are sharing this knowledge in the cloud space with all the hospitals. It's becoming a very productive thing, and enterprise architects are driving it, because we're thinking of capabilities, not components.

Gardner: Chris Forde, similar question. How do you see the role of IT shifting or changing as a result of the need to manage more processes across multiple sources?

Forde: It’s an interesting question. I tend to agree with the earlier part of Jason’s response. I am not disagreeing with any of it, actually, but the point that he made about it is that it's a "it depends" answer.

IT interaction

Under normal circumstances the IT organizations are very good at interacting with other technology areas of the business. From what I've seen with the organizations I have dealt with, typically they see slices of business processes, rather than the end-to-end process entirely.

Even within the IT organizations typically, because of the size of many organizations, you have some sort of division of responsibilities. As far as Jason’s emphasis on capabilities and business processes, of course the capabilities and processes transcend functional areas in an organization.

To the extent that a business unit or a business area has a process owner end to end, they may well be better positioned to manage the BPM outsourcing-type of things. If there's a heavy technology orientation around the process outsourcing, then you will see the IT organization being involved to one extent or another.

The real question is, where is the most effective knowledge, skill, and experience around managing these outsourcing capabilities? It may be in the IT organization or it may be in the business unit, but you have to assess where that is.

Under normal circumstances the IT organizations are very good at interacting with other technology areas of the business.

That's one of the functions that the architecture approaches. You need to assess what it is that's going to make you successful in this. If what you need happens to be in the IT organization, then go with that ability. If it is more effective in the business unit, then go with that. And perhaps the answer is that you need to combine or create a new functional organization for the specific purpose of meeting that activity and outsource need.

I'm hedging a little bit, Dana, in saying that it depends.

Gardner: It certainly raises some very interesting issues. At the same time that we're seeing this big question mark around sourcing and how to do that well, we're also in a period where more organizations are being data-driven and looking to have deeper, more accessible, and real-time analytics applied to their business decisions. Just as with sourcing, IT also has an integral role in this, having been perhaps the architects or implementators of warehousing, data marts, and business intelligence (BI).

Back to you Jason. As we enter into a phase where organizations are also trying to measure and get scientific and data-driven about their decisions, how does IT, and more importantly, how does TOGAF and EA come to help them do that?

Uppal: We have a number of experiences like that, Dana. One is a financial services organization. The entire organization’s function is that they manage some 100-plus billion dollars worth of assets. In that kind of organization, all the decision making process is based on the data that they get. And 95 percent of the data is not within the organization. It is vendor data that they're getting from outside.

So in that kind of conversation, we look and say that the organization needs a capability to manage data. Once we define a capability, then we start putting metrics on this thing. What does this capability need to be able to do?

In this particular example, we put a metric on this and said that the data gets identified in the morning, by the afternoon we bring it into the organization, and by the end of the day we get rid of it. That’s how fast the data has to be procured, transformed into the organization, brought it in, and delivered it to end-use. That end-user makes the decision whether we will never look at the data again.

Data capability

Having that fast speed of data management capability in the organization, and this is one of the areas where architects can take a look at, this is the capability you need. Now I can give you a roadmap to get to that capability.

Gardner: Chris Forde, how do you see the need for a data-driven enterprise coincide with IT and EA?

Forde: For most, if not all, companies, information and data are critical to their operation and planning activities, both on a day-to-day basis, month-to-month, annually, and in longer time spans. So the information needs of a company are absolutely critical in any architected approach to solutions or value-add type of activities.

I don’t think I would accept the assumption that the IT department is best-placed to understand what those information needs are. The IT organization may be well-placed to provide input into what technologies could be applied to those problems, but if the information needs are normally being applied to business problems, as opposed to technology problems, I would suggest that it is probably the business units that are best-placed to decide what their information needs are and how best to apply them.

The technologist’s role, at least in the model I'm suggesting, is to be supportive in that and deliver the right technology, at the right time, for the right purpose.

Gardner: Then, how would a well-advanced applied architecture methodology and framework help those business units attain their information needs, but also be in a position to exploit IT’s helping hand when needed?

We have good enough frameworks. We're moving to the next phase of what we do with these frameworks.

Forde: It's mostly providing the context to frame the problem in a way that it can be addressed, chunked down to reasonable delivery timeframes, and then marshaling the resources to bring that to reality.

From a pure framework and applied methodology standpoint, if you're coming at it from an idealized situation, you're going to be doing it from a strategic business need and you're going to be talking to the business units about what their capability and functional needs are. And at that time, you're really in the place of what business processes they're dealing with and what information they need in order to accomplish what the particular set of goals is.

This is way in advance of any particular technology choice being made. That's the idealized situation, but that’s typically what most frameworks, and in particular, the TOGAF 9 Framework from The Open Group, would go for.

Gardner: We're just beginning these conversations about advanced concepts in EA and there are going to be quite a bit more offerings and feedback and collaboration around this subject at The Open Group Conference in Austin. Perhaps before we sign off, Jason, you can give us a quick encapsulation of what you will be discussing in terms of your presentation at the conference.

Uppal: One of the things that we've been looking at from the industry’s point of view is saying that this conversation around the frameworks is a done deal now, because everybody accepted that we have good enough frameworks. We're moving to the next phase of what we do with these frameworks.

In our future conferences, we're going to be addressing that and saying what people are specifically doing with these frameworks, not to debate the framework itself, but the application of it.

Continuous planning

In Austin we'll be looking at how we're using a TOGAF framework to improve ongoing annual business and IT planning. We have a specific example that we are going to bring out where we looked at an organization that was doing once-a-year planning. That was not a very effective way for the organizations. They wanted to change it to continuous planning, which means planning that happens throughout the year.

We identified four or five very specific measurable goals that the program had, such as accuracy of your plan, business goals being achieved by the plan, time and cost to manage and govern the plan, and stakeholders’ satisfaction. Those are the areas that we are defining as to how the TOGAF like framework will be applied to solve a specific problem like enterprise planning and governance.

That's something we will be bringing to our conference in Austin and that event will be held on a Sunday. In the future, we'll be doing a lot more of those specific applications of a framework like a TOGAF to a unique set of problems that are very tangible and they very quickly resonate with the executives, not in IT, but in the entire organization.

Forde: Can I follow along with a little bit of a plug here, Dana.

Gardner: Certainly.

Forde: Jason is going to be talking as a senior architect on the applied side of TOGAF on this Sunday. For the Monday plenary, this is basically the rundown. We have David Baker, a Principal from PricewaterhouseCoopers, talking about business driven architecture for strategic transformations.

This is a time now for the enterprise architects to really step up to the plate and be accountable for real performance influence on the organization’s bottom line.

Following that, Tim Barnes, the Chief Architect at Devon Energy out of Canada, covering what they are doing from an EA perspective with their organization.

Then, we're going to wrap up the morning with Mike Wolf, the Principal Architect for EA Strategy and Architecture at Microsoft, talking about IT Architecture to the Enterprise Architecture.

This is a very powerful lineup of people addressing this business focus in EA and the application of it for strategic transformations, which I think are issues that many, many organizations are struggling with.

Gardner: Looking at, again, the question I started us off with, how do TOGAF and EA affect the bottom line? We've heard about how it affects the implementation for business transformation processes. We've talked about operational governance. We looked at how sourcing, business process management and implementation, and ongoing refinement are impacted. We also got into data and how analytics and information sharing are affected. Then, as Jason just mentioned, planning and strategy as a core function across a variety of different types of business problems.

So, I don’t think we can in any way say that there's a minor impact on the bottom line from this. Last word to you, Jason.

Uppal: This is a time now for the enterprise architects to really step up to the plate and be accountable for real performance influence on the organization’s bottom line.

If we can improve things like exploiting assets better today than what we have, improve our planning program, and have very measurable and unambiguous performance indicator that we're committing to, this is a huge step forward for enterprise architects and moving away from technology and frameworks to real-time problems that resonate with executives and align to business and in IT.

Gardner: Well, great. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas, the week of July 18, 2011.

I would like to thank our guests. We have been joined by Chris Forde, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Membership Capabilities for The Open Group. Thanks, Chris.

Forde: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And also Jason Uppal, Chief Architect at QR Systems. Thank you, Jason.

Uppal: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, in conjunction with The Open Group Austin 2011 Conference, on advances in enterprise architecture and The Open Group's Architectural Framework use for business benefits. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

Join The Open Group in Austin, Texas July 18-22 to learn more about enterprise architecture, cloud computing, and TOGAF 9. To register, go to http://www.opengroup.org/austin2011/register.htm.

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TOGAF 9 Advances IT Maturity While Offering More Paths to Architecture-Level IT Improvement

Transcript of a podcast on the evolution of the TOGAF 9 architectural framework, announced at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, February 2009.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we welcome our listeners to a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, Feb. 3, 2009. Our topic for this podcast, which is part of a series of podcasts on events and major topics of this conference, centers on TOGAF 9, the newly released enterprise architecture framework.

The framework, the latest in the series, was released here Feb. 2 at the conference, and it really represents a departure for The Open Group and for enterprise architecture frameworks in general. It's larger, more mature, and modular to allow folks to enter it from a variety of perspectives. It takes on a much more significant business services and accomplishments perspective.

While IT practitioners and architects will be looking over TOGAF 9 deeply, it’s also going to be of interest to the business side of the enterprise and will be a way for them to understand more about how IT can service their business needs.

To guide us through our discussion on the evolution of TOGAF 9, where it's come from and where it is today, we're joined by Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision, based in Ottawa. Welcome to show, Robert.

Robert Weisman: Delighted to be here.

Gardner: We're also joined by Mike Turner, an enterprise architect at Capgemini, based in London. Welcome to the show.

Mike Turner: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: It's been my contention for some time now that architecture is destiny. How well you do architecture has a deep impact on your cost, your benefits, your quality of services, and ultimately, how competitive and well run you are as an enterprise.

Let’s go first to Robert. Do you agree that architecture is destiny, and is it perhaps more so now than ever?

Weisman: I can see architecture being an integral part of the business planning process. It structures the business plans and makes sure that the objectives are realizable. In other words, we can use the acronym SMART, specific, measurable, actionable, realizable, and time bound. What TOGAF 9 does is provide an overarching vision and capability with which to cooperate.

Gardner: Let’s take the same question over to you, Mike, this notion that how well you do architecture is a rather important aspect of your competencies of business. [Read more on a panel discussion about the importance of enterprise architecture.]

Turner: Architecture is definitely a factor. I see architecture as a set of tools and techniques that can help you achieve what you want to do as a business. Taking architecture in isolation is not necessarily going to achieve the right things for your organization, because you actually need to have the direction as an input for architecture to support achievement of a particular outcome.

Architecture is really a vital tool for is being able to assure that the correct business outcome is achieved. You need to have a structured approach to how you define the problem space that businesses are facing, then define the solution space, and define how you move from where you are right now to where you want to be.

If that’s not managed in a structured and traceable way that takes you from strategy through to realization, it’s very easy to go off track. It’s very easy for people to reinterpret what the business needs. It's very easy for technology projects, in particular, to take on a life of their own and deliver something, but not necessarily the thing that was originally intended.

So, in some way, architecture is that essential toolkit to make sure that the achievement of change is realized effectively from a content perspective.

Gardner: Change, of course, is a very important aspect of business nowadays, with a difficult economic climate and rapid change across many different industries, how they finance themselves, what their customers are doing, as well as the supply chain. Before we get more deeply into TOGAF 9 and frameworks, what does architecture bring to the ability of an organization to change rapidly?

Mergers and acquisitions

Weisman: When you're talking about change in this climate, there's going to be a great many mergers and acquisitions. Having been through them, there are two ways of going through them -- painful and less painful. Architecture is certainly a less painful way of doing it.

If you want to use knowledge in a knowledge-based economy, you want to make sure, when you actually acquire a company, that they stay acquired, that they don’t just walk. You have to know what they have. You have to also know the value of the soft assets within a company, and that’s what architecture brings to the fore. It brings out clearly the full value of the company, and make sure, before you do an acquisition or a merger, that you can compare the companies and do due diligence to determine whether there is actually a fit.

Gardner: Mike Turner, how about this change aspect and how architecture might be a serious foundation for good change management?

Turner: That question would have a different answer depending on the type of change that you are looking and dealing with. There are some changes that organizations are prepared to encounter and are anticipating. In those cases, architecture is a really good tool to help you to become more effective at dealing with those changes as they happen.

A good example of that would be a large organization that’s on an acquisition trail of buying up small organizations that operate in a similar business model as they do. Using architecture as a technique, you can actually say, "When we acquire a business, we expect it to have these capabilities. This is how we would take those capabilities into our environment." You can quite quickly absorb that change by having a repeatable approach to deal with it.

In those kind of spaces, architecture is really key, because you're anticipating the change, can plan for it, and can manage it strategically. If you don’t do that, then you end up having to face the problem afresh every time you encounter this situation and become ineffective at dealing with those kinds of repeatable processes.

Gardner: What about the discipline that’s required through adoption of a framework, that then puts you in a position to be able to be fleet and agile, when the unanticipated changes are required?

Turner: The other class of change is the change that you weren’t expecting. In those situations, your organization needs to be structured or siloed in ways that actually allow you to quickly reorganize and do things that are unexpected.

In those kind of situations, there's a component where architecture is helpful and then there's a piece where a architecture probably isn’t going to help you at all, because you're dealing with something that’s outside of what you understand today.

Architecture can help you structure your organization so that it's flexible. Outside of that, you're really into the space of a more agile-type approach, where you're not prepared to deal with things, and you just need to try something out, do something quickly, do something tactical, and build from that.

Plan for change

Weisman: There's an old adage that a plan is a common basis for change. If you don’t have the plan or your architectural framework, change is very difficult. Secondly, there is the old Roman adage, which basically says that luck is only where opportunity meets preparation. Architecture is that preparation or part of the preparation for that.

Gardner: Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane. I spoke to Allen Brown, the CEO of The Open Group, and he said that 9 coming out was, in a sense, like giving birth. It was a long gestation period and then a rather difficult last few days. So now that its out, tell us what the frameworks were like leading up to TOGAF 9, and then particularly what differentiates or distinguishes 9. We'll start with you Robert.

Weisman: TOGAF 9, first of all, is more business focused. Before that it was definitely in the IT realm, and IT was essentially defined as hardware and software. The definition of IT in TOGAF 9 is the lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization. It puts much more emphasis on the actual information, its access, presentation, and quality, so that it can provide not only transaction processing support, but analytical processing support for critical business decisions.

The gestation took five years. I've been part of the forum for five years working on the TOGAF 9. Part of the challenge was that we had such an incredible take up of TOGAF 8. Once a standard has been taken up, you can’t change it on a dime. You don’t want to change it on a dime, but you want to keep it dynamic, update it, and incorporate best practices. That would explain some of the gestation period. TOGAF 8 was very successful, and to get TOGAF 9 right, it was a little longer cycle, but I think it’s been well worth the wait.

Gardner: Mike, what more generally has been the shift or change over time in how frameworks have been developed? Obviously, they've gotten larger and are more inclusive, but more generally, as a character of what they're trying to accomplish, how have frameworks changed over the past 20 years?

Turner: If you look at the industry in general, we're going through a process where the IT industry is maturing and becoming more stable, and change is becoming more incremental in the industry. What you see in architecture frameworks is a cycle of discovery, invention, and then consolidation that follows, as consensus is reached.

One thing that’s really key about TOGAF 9 is that it takes a lot of ideas and practices that exist within individual organizations or proprietary frameworks, building a consensus around it, and releasing it into a public-domain context.

Once that happens, the value you can get from that approach increases exponentially. Now, you're not talking about going to one vendor and having to deal with one particular set of concepts, and then going to a different vendor and having to deal with another set of concepts, and dealing with the interoperability between those.

You're in a situation where the industry agrees this is the way to do things. Suddenly, the economies of scale that you can get from that, as all the participants in the industry starts to converge on that consensus, mean that you get a whole set of new opportunities about how you can use architecture.

Vendor and technology neutral

Gardner: For those listeners who might not be familiar, The Open Group is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium. TOGAF, which is The Open Group Architecture Framework, is free in its online form, and there's a charge for the printed version.

About 7,500 individuals currently hold TOGAF certification, which is another important aspect of TOGAF, basically approving that you have the knowledge, experience, and understanding to carry it through. To date, 90,000 copies of TOGAF framework have been downloaded and 20,000 hard copies have been sold.

Let’s go back to Robert Weisman. Let’s look a little deeper at what distinguishes TOGAF 9. We mentioned the modularity. There is also the deeper use of the architecture development method. There is also a bit more inclusive comfort, if you will, with cloud computing and service-oriented architecture (SOA), and thinking more of security, start to finish and holistically. Maybe we could go through a laundry list of what distinguishes TOGAF 9.

Weisman: There are many particular factors. TOGAF 9 is, in certain ways, an evolutionary change and in certain other ways a revolutionary change. The architecture development methodology has basically remained similar. However, transforming the architecture from concept into a reality has basically been expanded pretty dramatically, with a great many lessons learned. So, architecture transformation is a large one. Various architectural frameworks have been incorporated into it.

A great many concepts that allow enterprise architecture to be molded with operations management, with system design, portfolio management, business planning, and the Governance Institute's COBIT guidelines and other industry standards have also been incorporated into TOGAF.

Also, there's been a major contribution by such companies as Capgemini, with respect to artifacts and structure. The content meta model is a huge contribution and as a core contribution, but Mike can elaborate upon that.

Overall, it’s much more extensive and it covers much more of the issues that most CIOs and IT architects have to confront on a daily basis. The nice thing about TOGAF is that you don’t have to use it all. You can use bits of it. You can use a large chunk of it, or you can basically choose to use in its entirety. It’s a very modular and flexible framework that way.

Gardner: As I understand it, with 9 they have made a pathway. If you've already adopted 8, you have a bit of a head start, but you don’t have to have gone to 8 in order to start adopting 9. You can work through different modules and start fresh, which I think is a bit of a departure from the past.

Let’s go over to Mike at Capgemini. Tell us about the meta model, and particularly how the use of repositories for policy driven governance and for the organization of assets across both IT and business become relevant now. [More on how Capgemini views cloud computing.]

Addressing challenges

Turner: If we rewind to TOGAF 8 and talk about some of our experiences using TOGAF 8, that's probably a good way to frame what we've tried to add into TOGAF 9 to address some of those challenges that we have encountered.

TOGAF 8, in our experience, was a very powerful process that you could follow to develop architectures. Where you started to hit limitations with TOGAF 8 was around the work products that you produced as a part of executing the architecture development method.

So TOGAF 8 has a lot of language that talks quite informally about the type of activities that an architect would carry out and the type of work products that they would create.

For example, it discusses creating business scenarios and process models and looking at logical data models and physical data models. There's a lot of language in TOGAF 8 that refers to modeling concepts, but then there is nothing actually in TOGAF 8 that says, "This is what a good deliverable looks like," or "This is actually how you would approach modeling those concepts formally."

What we find are organizations that are using TOGAF 8 effectively have two choices. They can adopt the process and leave the content side of things quite open-ended, or they can adopt the process and select something else to do with the content.

At Capgemini, we had a proprietary internal framework for content prior to TOGAF 9. We did a lot of work taking TOGAF 8 process and Capgemini content framework and putting the two together. We found that to be a really effective combination.

What we also found was that, because of the proprietary nature of the Capgemini framework, it became quite difficult for organizations to adopt that configuration. While we're working entirely within a Capgemini environment and we've got control over the people, the skills, the knowledge, and the approach, that works really well. But, when you're looking at multi-vendor sourcing models or looking at upskilling an end user organization, it becomes a lot more difficult.

What we wanted to do with TOGAF 9 was to address that problem head on and to try to create something equivalent to the Capgemini proprietary framework in a way that allows incremental evolution out of TOGAF 8. We took a lot of the informal concepts that were defined in TOGAF 8 and tried to formalize those around some of our internal thinking for content.

Gardner: What is the upside now, since we've made this transition to 9, for the strategic use of repositories?

Turner: One of the things that we've been working on quite heavily over the past few years is getting the various tool vendors to support the Capgemini framework. We've got quite a long list of tool vendors supporting this framework model. What we are expecting is a small incremental effort for those same vendors to transition and make what are essentially cosmetic changes to be able to support the TOGAF 9 content framework.

Very soon, we'll be in a position where we're looking at a market for enterprise architecture tools, where there is now a level of consensus about how to structure models and how to represent them in a way that didn’t exist before. That can only be a good thing for enterprise repositories, because we're moving closer and closer to that consensus point about how content should be structured.

The problem that we're unable to solve is then to take that model, go one step further, and look at the actual operating model within a particular enterprise, how that enterprise chooses to assign roles and responsibilities for carrying out architecture, and how it chooses to federate governance and those kind of concerns. This is fundamental to how you structure repository, because the repository needs to reflect the partitioning that you actually hold within your organizational structure.

We'll see a big improvement, but it’s not the solution in its entirety.

Gardner: Repositories will include a number of different types of artifacts and services, and each organization will have a unique way of approaching that, given their legacy and their history. We do seem to have reached somewhat of a tipping point in recognizing that to manage complexity, to adopt SOA principles effectively and extend them holistically to start dabbling in cloud computing and take advantage of resources and assets available through that particular model or set of models. Does this increasingly require this organizational framework of repository. Do you agree with that Robert?

Underlying rigor

Weisman: No. I've been an enterprise architect now since 1985, and many of these terms come and go. Underlying it is a certain degree of rigor that the frameworks provide.

It doesn’t matter what environment you go into, but if you have a client with 500 definitions of client, their customers, and you're trying to integrate that to take an overview of the customer throughout goodness knows how many databases, what happens is there is certainly a cogent case for consolidating that.

Many organizations carry orders of magnitude more information than they need. The implications for the information technology infrastructure are immense, and the quality of information because of that is pitiful, not allowing the business executives to make proper decisions.

Whether you do cloud computing or not is immaterial. Whatever paradigm you choose, as long as you apply it in a professional and effective manner, it will work. Trying to use a silver-bullet type of approach and a new name to circumscribe rigorous engineering and professional principles would be a grave error.

Gardner: Okay, fair enough. What is it about TOGAF 9, in particular, that does grease the skids a bit for organizations to better adopt and utilize SOA principles, services like software-as-a-service (SaaS), or infrastructure-as-a-service, what we loosely call cloud nowadays?

Weisman: TOGAF was based on a foundational architecture called the Technical Reference Model, which came out of the U.S. many years ago. It's all service oriented.

The term SOA is old wine in new bottles. It's been around for a long time. If you just have a service catalog, if you have duplicate services, it becomes very evident. That’s one of the advantages of the repositories -- you can have an insight into what you actually have.

TOGAF, from its outset in the early 1990s, has been service oriented for that. Just by applying TOGAF, you have a chance of doing your Gap Analysis, of having the visibility into what you have, which makes it not only efficient, but effective from a business perspective.

Gardner: Anything to offer, Mike?

Two points of view

Turner: When you look at SOA, there are probably two different ways that you can think about IT. One offers quite limited benefits to an organization, and the other offers much greater benefit. At a technical level, there are a bunch of standards and design approaches referred to as SOA, that really deal with standardizing the way the applications talk to one another at a software level.

Implementing SOA in this technical sense isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there are certainly benefits to be had in terms of interoperability at a software level from implementing SOA principles. But, just working at that level on its own is not going to give you any business advantages. It’s just going to make it easier to execute development projects.

The power of thinking about services is much more centered on how you look at your organizational capability and how you can more effectively break down your organization into discrete capabilities that are not replicating the same data, business processes, and IT systems in multiple silos.

If you can have a more granular business organization, where you are replicating capability less, it’s much easier to change more quickly, it’s much easier to use those capabilities to do different things, and you see a step change in the performance of your business.

We need to get those kinds of SOA benefits. The first and most important question to ask is, "What are the services that I need in my business? How should I structure my business to make it meet the goals of the industry?" That may be flexibility, but there are actually some organizations or some parts of your enterprise where you actually don’t desire flexibility. You want stability, cost efficiency, and effectiveness in a much more linear, repeatable sense.

TOGAF allows you to understand what makes your business good and then identify what your services are in a way that considers all the different angles. Once that’s defined, you can then put the right technology underneath that to realize what the business is actually looking for. That’s something that can have an absolutely transformational effect on your business.

Gardner: You mentioned that architecture and SOA by themselves don't necessarily aid a business in achieving its goals, but TOGAF 9 has taken steps over this past five years to increase its relevance to business. Robert, explain how that takes place and what that really means?

Weisman: We're talking about services here. The old TOGAF used to talk in terms of the Technical Reference Model. That's still in 9, but we're looking at business services, as Mike was alluding to. We're looking at rationalizing business services and making sure that they're basically well supported by that.

It also assumes that, when you're doing your preliminary planning, you come up with a framework that recognizes the business operation model within your organization and that you have identified your stakeholders and what they actually want to see in the enterprise architecture framework.

Lack of vision

Most projects fail, because they don’t have proper preliminary planning, and they don’t basically go through the problem. They don’t go through the effort of putting a vision in place. As a consequence, they just jump into the architecture -- usually into the applications and technology architecture -- and they find themselves in trouble very quickly for that. They get a great deal of dissatisfaction.

Outsourcing is an excellent example where a high degree of enterprise architecture maturity correlates to a high degree of satisfaction from both the client and vendor of outsourcing services.

Satisfaction, according to Peter Weill’s book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, essentially goes from 50-50 with poorer enterprise architecture maturity to 90-90 with enterprise architecture maturity, and that’s satisfaction both for a client and vendor.
So it ends up being a win-win.

When I talk about outsourced services, they are not necessarily all technology either. They can be business processes that are now being outsourced as well, and it will work its way up the stack.

Gardner: We've talked about architecture as important, of course, but the people who then implement the architecture are quite important. To what degree is certification now a particularly relevant aspect of success in a down economy?

Labor issues and getting good people have been a challenge. There have been significant layoffs, but there has also been an increase in the demand for strong IT to support change in a dynamic business environment. Let’s start with you Robert, the role of certification in the year 2009?

Weisman: First of all, there are two dimensions of certification. For example in The Open Group, you have certification with respect to knowledge of the TOGAF methodology, and then you have IT architecture certification. IT architecture is much broader. It includes business architects and enterprise architects as well, and that takes a look at competencies.

There are no international standards for IT architecture. There are many consultancies that work globally. So, all of a sudden, you're called upon, but this provide a global standard and a global level of confidence with respect to the individuals.

The IT Architect Certification (ITAC) and the IT Services Certification (ITSC) that The Open Group are doing, will provide a level of comfort and assurance to clients that basically they are getting people with a uniform degree of competence.

With respect to the downturn, this is going to become important. Right now, most architects call themselves architects, but there is no international standard against which to measure them. That’s led to a great many architecture failures, which, when you examine them, are not surprising.

Using a standard methodology will also enable RFPs to be written rapidly. What happens is now when you say, "I want a vision as per TOGAF," everybody knows what the baseline is. Then, both suppliers and clients can come up with the assurance, saying, "These guys know what they're talking about," and they can put in a reasonable bid for that.

You're talking about the standardization of product and competencies. This is becoming increasingly important. Globally, there's a huge decrease in enrollment in computer science and computer engineering programs, because of the fact that clients aren’t recognizing these professional designations. Many people say there's no business case in going through an expensive degree program, when you can take a short course and have a very deep but very narrow competency in a particular field?

Certification, both from a competency point of view and from a product point of view, is the wave of the future and extremely important.

Gardner: Mike, how does Capgemini look at the certification process and how important it is for your clients?

Demonstrating capability

Turner: It’s very important, and there are two reasons why. If you look externally in trying to source resources from the market -- whether that’s through a subcontractor or to recruit individuals -- having certification is a good way for candidates to be able to demonstrate that they have reached a level of capability and also for potential employers to put in place a benchmark that filters out the noise.

They can spend much more time looking at individual candidates and assessing them as potential fits to the roles that they're trying to source. I wouldn’t say that certification necessarily guarantees that you get the right person, but it gets you to a short list much quicker.

Gardner: How about practitioners themselves? Is there a significant boost in the pay or ability to find the right jobs as a result of this TOGAF certification?

Turner: If you look at the UK market, there is a correlation between certification and higher pay, but I wouldn’t that that’s the absolute overriding factor.

Another angle to this is, if you look within an organization -- and Capgemini as an organization has a large number of architects, but our client base has architects that work in their organizations -- certification starts to outline a career path for architects within an organization and to allow them to develop themselves and demonstrate that they are improving in capability.

Capgemini has a very active certification program, which we run internally and which is based on experience, engagement, and community. We find that to be a very effective way to build and maintain a community and show professional development and mentoring within our internal environment. That’s something that we help our clients do as well.

Ultimately, architecture is about a network of people. It's about communicating effectively within that network, and then that network having a good face to all the stakeholders for architecture. Having training certification, professional development, and those factors can only be a good thing for building that practice.

Gardner: We're going to be wrapping up in a bit. It’s clearly too soon to look into the future. We just got TOGAF 9 out of the gate. I wonder if there isn’t any extrapolation or looking from the vision point of view where we have come from TOGAF 8 to TOGAF 9, to perhaps give some indication to our listeners as to where TOGAF and enterprise architecture frameworks in general are headed.

Let’s start with you, Robert, for our last question. What can we say, given what we now know about TOGAF 9, as to where the next TOGAF might lead us?

Weisman: There are many working groups right now working on TOGAF, the next generation, whatever it’s going to be called, for example, the Information Architecture Working Group and the like. They've been established and they're looking towards the future and the strategy for that.

Working together

What I see eventually is a lot of these architectural frameworks will start emerging. One of the beauties of TOGAF is that it works very well in conjunction with other architectural frameworks. Let’s say that you're using another architectural framework, which a lot of the industry verticals have. Normally they're model based and TOGAF is mainly process based. They come together, extremely well together, and this is a major strength.

You can’t say, "I'm using this. I can’t use TOGAF." TOGAF will help you deliver the other framework. One of the major issues with many of the other frameworks is that they're wonderfully detailed models, but there is no methodology in place with which to deliver them in a systematic manner. So, I see TOGAF not in terms of an über framework, but certainly a cooperative framework.

It’s also linked with other management frameworks and it’s going to be closer to project management, portfolio management, and the like, which should make it an easier transition. An integrative framework of choice might be a way of describing where TOGAF is going. It's going to be a pointer to other standards and how to integrate them within a company.

We're not there to duplicate the work of other wonderful organizations. It’s how to integrate all the wonderful work, because right now, for executives at the CIO and CEO level, it’s pretty confusing out there.

Gardner: Mike Turner, do you agree on that particular extrapolation in the future of more inclusivity and convergence across business types of frameworks, or are there other future elements of TOGAF we should consider?

Turner: Those are all valid points, and I'd add a few more. One thing we're going to see with TOGAF 9 being available now in the industry is that there would be a reaction to that. A lot of the frameworks and standards that sit around the edge of TOGAF are going to realign slightly to make themselves more consistent with how TOGAF works, which, as Bob mentioned, will help TOGAF integrate some of these different approaches. That will happen without changing TOGAF itself. It would just be that the industry will change to be more aligned around the TOGAF model.

In terms of TOGAF development, there's going to be a big focus on people and organizational aspects within TOGAF, trying to formalize the different skills that are required and the different places where you can use TOGAF within an organization.

Ultimately, that will lead to much greater specialization of the method that we have right now, because we have a single method that applies at a very strategic level and also at a very tactical level. As we understand the organizational context, we can start to be more specific about how the method is applied in different contexts.

Another trend is around the formalization of the specification content. We would expect to see, particularly around a standard for managing this kind of massive information that you are managing semantic content and mature, that TOGAF will start to embrace some of those standards. Looking at formal languages for specifying the methodology and putting the tool set itself within software tools that can be customized and configured is something that we would look to do.

Gardner: Well, that gives us quite a bit to look forward to, some more maturity, even though we have reached a significant milestone in the current level of maturity.

We have been talking about TOGAF 9, its introduction and where its come from and part of its evolution. Our conversation today comes to you through the support of The Open Group, and we are coming to you from the 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, in February 2009.

I want to thank our panelists. We have been joined by Robert Weisman, CEO and principal consultant for Build The Vision. Thank you Robert.

Weisman: You're very welcome.

Gardner: Also Mike Turner, enterprise architect at Capgemini. Thanks so much, Mike.

Turner: Thanks.

Gardner: I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes and Podcast.com. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a podcast on the development of the TOGAF 9 architectural framework, announced at The Open Group's 21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in San Diego, February 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

View more podcasts and resources from The Open Group's recent conferences and TOGAF 9 launch:

The Open Group's CEO Allen Brown interview

Live panel discussion on enterprise architecture trends

Reporting on the TOGAF 9 launch

Panel discussion on security trends and needs

Panel discussion on cloud computing and enterprise architecture

Access the conference proceedings

General TOGAF 9 information

Introduction to TOGAF 9 whitepaper

Whitepaper on migrating from TOGAF 8.1.1 to version 9

TOGAF 9 certification information

TOGAF 9 Commercial Licensing program information