Showing posts with label enterprise architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enterprise architecture. 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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Monday, July 15, 2019

How an Agile Focus for Enterprise Architects Builds Competitive Advantage in the Digital Transformation Age

http://www.opengroup.org/

Transcript of a panel discussion on how Enterprise Architects should embrace agile approaches to build more competitive advantage for their companies.

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. Our next business trends discussion explores the reinforcing nature of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and agile methods.

Gardner
We’ll now learn how Enterprise Architects can embrace agile approaches to build competitive advantages for their companies. To learn more about retraining and rethinking for EA in the Digital Transformation (DT) era, we are now joined by Ryan Schmierer, Director of Operations at Sparx Services North America. Welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Schmierer: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We are also joined by Chris Armstrong, President at Sparx Services North America. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Armstrong: How are you, Dana?


Gardner: I’m great, thanks. Ryan, what's happening in business now that’s forcing a new emphasis for Enterprise Architects? Why should Enterprise Architects do things any differently than they have in the past?

Schmierer: The biggest thing happening in the industry right now is around DT. We been hearing about DT for the last couple of years and most companies have embarked on some sort of a DT initiative, modernizing their business processes.

Schmierer
But now companies are looking beyond the initial transformation and asking, “What’s next?” We are seeing them focus on real-time, data-driven decision-making, with the ultimate goal of enterprise business agility -- the capability for the enterprise to be aware of its environments, respond to changes, and adapt quickly.

For Enterprise Architects, that means learning how to be agile both in the work they do as individuals and how they approach architecture for their organizations. It’s not about making architectures that will last forever, but architectures that are nimble, agile, and adapt to change.

Gardner: Ryan, we have heard the word, agile, used in a structured way when it comes to software development -- Agile methodologies, for example. Are we talking about the same thing? How are they related?

Agile, adaptive enterprise advances 

Schmierer: It’s the same concept. The idea is that you want to deliver results quickly, learn from what works, adapt, change, and evolve. It’s the same approach used in software development over the last few years. Look at how you develop software that delivers value quickly. We are now applying those same concepts in other contexts.

First is at the enterprise level. We look at how the business evolves quickly, learn from mistakes, and adapt the changes back into the environment.

Second, in the architecture domain, instead of waiting months or quarters to develop an architecture, vision, and roadmap, how do we start small, iterate, deliver quickly, accelerate time-to-value, and refine it as we go?

Gardner: Many businesses want DT, but far fewer of them seem to know how to get there. How does the role of the Enterprise Architect fit into helping companies attain DT?
The core job responsibility for Enterprise Architects is to be an extension of the company leadership and its executives. They need to look at where a company is trying to go ... and develop a roadmap on how to get there.

Schmierer: The core job responsibility for Enterprise Architects is to be an extension of company leadership and its executives. They need to look at where a company is trying to go, all the different pieces that need to be addressed to get there, establish a future-state vision, and then develop a roadmap on how to get there.

This is what company leadership is trying to do. The EA is there to help them figure out how to do that. As the executives look outward and forward, the Enterprise Architect figures out how to deliver on the vision.

Gardner: Chris, tools and frameworks are only part of the solution. It’s also about the people and the process. There's the need for training and best practices. How should people attain this emphasis for EA in that holistic definition?

Change is good 

Armstrong: We want to take a step back and look at how Ryan was describing the elevation of value propositions and best practices that seem to be working for agile solution delivery. How might that work for delivering continual, regular value? One of the major attributes, in our experience, of the goodness of any architecture, is based on how well it responds to change.

In some ways, agile and EA are synonyms. If you’re doing good Enterprise Architecture, you must be agile because responding to change is one of those quality attributes. That’s a part of the traditional approach of architecture – to be concerned with the interoperability and integration.

As it relates to the techniques, tools, and frameworks we want to exploit -- the experiences that we have had in the past – we try to push those forward into more of an operating model for Enterprise Architects and how they engage with the rest of the organization.
Learn About Agile Architecture
At The Open Group July Denver Event
So not starting from scratch, but trying to embrace the concept of reuse, particularly reuse of knowledge and information. It’s a good best practice, obviously. That's why in 2019 you certainly don't want to be inventing your own architecture method or your own architecture framework, even though there may be various reasons to adapt them to your environment.

Starting with things like the TOGAF® Framework, particularly its Architecture Development Method (ADM) and reference models -- those are there for individuals or vertical industries to accelerate the adding of value.

The challenge I've seen for a lot of architecture teams is they get sucked into the methodology and the framework, the semantics and concepts, and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do things with the tools. What we want to think about is how to enable the architecture profession in the same way we enable other people do their jobs -- with instant-on service offerings, using modern common platforms, and the industry frameworks that are already out there.

http://www.opengroup.org/
We are seeing people more focused on not just what the framework is but helping to apply it to close that feedback loop. The TOGAF standard, a standard of The Open Group, makes perfect sense, but people often struggle with, “Well, how do I make this real in my organization?”

Partnering with organizations that have had that kind of experience helps close that gap and accelerates the use in a valuable fashion. It’s pretty important.

Gardner: It’s ironic that I've heard of recent instances where Enterprise Architects are being laid off. But it sounds increasingly like the role is a keystone to DT. What's the mismatch there, Chris? Why do we see in some cases the EA position being undervalued, even though it seems critical?

EA here to stay 

Armstrong: You have identified something that has happened multiple times. Pendulum swings happen in our industry, particularly when there is a lot of change going on. People are getting a little conservative. We’ve seen this before in the context of fiscal downturns in economic climates.

But to me, it really points to the irony of what we perceive in the architecture profession based on successes that we have had. Enterprise Architecture is an essential part of running your business. But if executives don't believe that and have not experienced that then it’s not surprising when there's an opportunity to make changes in investment priorities that Enterprise Architecture might not be at the top of the list.

We need to be mindful of where we are in time with the architecture profession. A lot of organizations struggle with the glass ceiling of Enterprise Architecture. It’s something we have encountered pretty regularly, where executives are, “I really don’t get what this EA thing is, and what's in it for me? Why should I give you my support and resources?”
Learn About Agile Architecture
At The Open Group July Denver Event
But what’s interesting about that, of course, is if you take a step back you don’t see executives saying the same thing about human resources or accounting. Not to suggest that they aren’t thinking about ways to optimize those as a core competency or as strategic. We still do have an issue with acceptance of enterprise architecture based on the educational and developmental experiences a lot of executives have had.

We’re very hopeful that that trend is going to be moving in a different direction, particularly as relates to new master’s programs and doctorate programs, for example, in the Enterprise Architecture field. Those elevate and legitimize Enterprise Architecture as a profession. When people are going through an MBA program, they will have heard of enterprise architecture as an essential part of delivering upon strategy.

Gardner: Ryan, looking at what prevents companies from attaining DT, what are the major challenges? What’s holding up enterprises from getting used to real-time data, gaining agility, and using intelligence about how they do things?

Schmierer: There are a couple of things going on. One of them ties back to what Chris was just talking about -- the role of Enterprise Architects, and the role of architects in general. DT requires a shift in the relationship between business and IT. With DT, business functions and IT functions become entirely and holistically integrated and inseparable.

When there are no separate IT processes and no businesses process -- there are just processes because the two are intertwined. As we use more real-time data and as we leverage Enterprise Architecture, how do we move beyond the traditional relationship between business and IT? How do we look at such functions as data management and data architecture? How do we bring them into an integrated conversation with the folks who were part of the business and IT teams of the past?

A good example of how companies can do this comes in a recent release from The Open Group, the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge™ (DPBoK™). It says that there's a core skill set that is general and describes what it means to be such a practitioner in the digital era, regardless of your job role or focus. It says we need to classify job roles more holistically and that everyone needs to have both a business mindset and a set of technical skills. We need to bring those together, and that's really important.
As we look at what's holding up DT we need to take functions that were once considered centralized assets like EA and data management and bring them into the forefront. ... Enterprise Architects need to be living in the present.

As we look at what's holding up DT -- taking the next step to real-time data, broadening the scope of DT – we need to take functions that were once considered centralized assets, like EA and data management, and bring them into the forefront, and say, “You know what? You’re part of the digital transmission story as well. You’re key to bringing us along to the next stage of this journey, which is looking at how to optimize, bring in the data, and use it more effectively. How do we leverage technology in new ways?”

The second thing we need to improve is the mindset. It’s particularly an issue with Enterprise Architects right now. And it is that Enterprise Architects -- and everyone in digital professions -- need to be living in the present.

You asked why some EAs are getting laid off. Why is that? Think about how they approach their job in terms of the questions that would be asked in a performance review.

Those might be, “What have you done for me over the years?” If your answer focuses on what you did in the past, you are probably going to get laid off. What you did in the past is great, but the company is operating in the present.

What’s your grand idea for the future? Some ideal situation? Well, that’s probably going to get you shoved in a corner some place and probably eventually laid off because companies don't know what the future is going to bring. They may have some idea of where they want to get to, but they can’t articulate a 5- to 10-year vision because the environment changes so quickly.

http://www.opengroup.org/

What have you done for me lately? That’s a favorite thing to ask in performance-review discussions. You got your paycheck because you did your job over the last six months. That’s what companies care about, and yet that’s not what Enterprise Architects should be supporting.

Instead, the EA emphasis should be what can you do for the business over the next few months? Focus on the present and the near-term future.

That’s what gets Enterprise Architects a seat at the table. That’s what gets the entire organization, and all the job functions, contributing to DT. It helps them become aligned to delivering near-term value. If you are entirely focused on delivering near-term value, you’ve achieved business agility.

Gardner: Chris, because nothing stays the same for very long, we are seeing a lot more use of cloud services. We’re seeing composability and automation. It seems like we are shifting from building to assembly.

Doesn’t that fit in well with what EAs do, focusing on the assembly and the structure around automation? That’s an abstraction above putting in IT systems and configuring them.

Reuse to remain competitive 

Armstrong: It’s ironic that the profession that’s often been coming up with the concepts and thought-leadership around reuse struggles a with how to internalize that within their organizations. EAs have been pretty successful at the implementation of reuse on an operating level, with code libraries, open-source, cloud, and SaaS.

There is no reason to invent a new method or framework. There are plenty of them out there. Better to figure out how to exploit those to competitive advantage and focus on understanding the business organization, strategy, culture, and vision -- and deliver value in the context of those.

For example, one of the common best practices in Enterprise Architecture is to create things called reference architectures, basically patterns that represent best practices, many of which can be created from existing content. If you are doing cloud or microservices, elevate that up to different types of business models. There’s a lot of good content out there from standards organizations that give organizations a good place to start.
Learn About Agile Architecture
At The Open Group July Denver Event
But one of the things that we've observed is a lot of architecture communities tend to focus on building -- as you were saying -- those reference architectures, and don't focus as much on making sure the organization knows that content exists, has been used, and has made a difference.

We have a great opportunity to connect the dots among different communities that are often not working together. We can provide that architectural leadership to pull it together and deliver great results and positive behaviors.

Gardner: Chris, tell us about Sparx Services North America. What do you all do, and how you are related to and work in conjunction with The Open Group?


Armstrong: Sparx Services is focused on helping end-user organizations be successful with Enterprise Architecture and related professions such as solution architecture and solution delivery, and systems engineering. We do that by taking advantage of the frameworks and best practices that standards organizations like The Open Group create, helping make those standards real, practical, and pragmatic for end-user organizations. We provide guidance on how to adapt and tailor them and provide support while they use those frameworks for doing real work.

And we provide a feedback loop to The Open Group to help understand what kinds of questions end-user organizations are asking. We look for opportunities for improving existing standards, areas where we might want to invest in new standards, and to accelerate the use of Enterprise Architecture best practices.

Gardner: Ryan, moving onto what's working and what's helping foster better DT, tell us what's working. In a practical sense, how is EA making those shorter-term business benefits happen?

One day at a time 

Schmierer: That’s a great question. We have talked about some of the challenges. It’s important to focus on the right path as well. So, what's working that an enterprise architect can do today in order to foster DT?

Number one, embrace agile approaches and an agile mindset in both architecture development (how you do your job) and the solutions you develop for your organizations. A good way to test whether you are approaching architecture in an agile way is the first iteration in the architecture. Can you go through the entire process of the Architecture Development Method (ADM) on a cocktail napkin in the time it takes you to have a drink with your boss? If so, great. It means you are focused on that first simple iteration and then able to build from there.

Number two, solve problems today with the components you have today. Don’t just look to the future. Look at what you have now and how you can create the most value possible out of those. Tomorrow the environment is going to change, and you can focus on tomorrow's problems and tomorrow’s challenges tomorrow. So today’s problems today.

Third, look beyond your current DT initiative and what’s going on today, and talk to your leaders. Talk to your business clients about where they need to go in the future. That goal is enterprise business agility, which is helping the company become more nimble. DT is the first step, then start looking at steps two and three.
Architects need to understand technology better, such things as new cloud services, IoT, edge computing, ML, and AI. These are going to have disruptive effects on your businesses. You need to understand them to be a trusted advisor to your organization.

Fourth, Architects need to understand technology better, such things as fast-moving, emerging technology like new cloud services, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) -- these are more than just buzz words and initiatives. They are real technology advancements. They are going to have disruptive effects on your businesses and the solutions to support those businesses. You need to understand the technologies; you need to start playing with them so you can truly be a trusted advisor to your organization about how to apply those technologies in business context.

Gardner: Chris, we hear a lot about AI and ML these days. How do you expect Enterprise Architects to help organizations leverage AI and ML to get to that DT? It seems really essential to me to become more data driven and analytics driven and then to re-purpose to reuse those analytics over and over again to attain an ongoing journey of efficiency and automation.

Better business outcomes 

Armstrong: We are now working with our partners to figure out how to best use AI and ML to help run the business, to do better product development, to gain a 360-degree view of the customer, and so forth.

It’s one of those weird things where we see the shoemaker’s children not having any shoes because they are so busy making shoes for everybody else. There is a real opportunity, when we look at some of the infrastructure that’s required to support the agile enterprise, to exploit those same technologies to help us do our jobs in enterprise architecture.

It is an emerging part of the profession. We and others are beginning to do some research on that, but when I think of how much time we and our clients have spent on the nuts and bolts collection of data and normalization of data, it sure seems like there is a real opportunity to leverage these emerging technologies for the benefit of the architecture practice. Then, again, the architects can be more focused on building relationships with people, understanding the strategy in less time, and figuring out where the data is and what the data means.

Obviously humans still need to be involved, but I think there is a great opportunity to eat your own dog food, as it were, and see if we can exploit those learning tools for the benefit of the architecture community and its consumers.

Gardner: Chris, do we have concrete examples of this at work, where EAs have elevated themselves and exposed their value for business outcomes? What’s possible when you do this right?

Armstrong: A lot of organizations are working things from the bottoms up, and that often starts in IT operations and then moves to solution delivery. That’s where there has been a lot of good progress, in improved methods and techniques such as scaled agile and DevOps.

http://www.opengroup.org/
But a lot of organizations struggle to elevate it higher. The DPBoK™  from The Open Group provides a lot of guidance to help organizations navigate that journey, particularly getting to the fourth level of the learning progression, which is at the enterprise level. That’s where Enterprise Architecture becomes essential. It’s great to develop software fast, but that’s not the whole point of agile solution delivery. It should be about building the right software the right way to meet the right kind of requirements -- and do that as rapidly as possible.

We need an umbrella over different release trains, for example, to make sure the organization as a whole is marching forward. We have been working with a number of Fortune 100 companies that have made good progress at the operational implementation levels. They nonetheless now are finding that particularly trying, to connect to business architecture.

There have been some great advancements from the Business Architecture Guild and that’s been influencing the TOGAF framework, to connect the dots across those agile communities so that the learnings of a particular release train or the strategy of the enterprise is clearly understood and delivered to all of those different communities.

Gardner: Ryan, looking to the future, what should organizations be doing with the Enterprise Architect role and function?

EA evolution across environments 

Schmierer: The next steps don’t just apply to Enterprise Architects but really to all types of architects. So look at the job role and how your job role needs to evolve over the next few years. How do you need to approach it differently than you have in the past?

For example, we are seeing Enterprise Architects increasingly focus on issues like security, risk, reuse, and integration with partner ecosystems. How do you integrate with other companies and work in the broader environments?

We are seeing Business Architects who have been deeply engaged in DT discussions over the last couple of years start looking forward and shifting the role to focus on how we light up real-time decision-making capabilities. Solution Architects are shifting from building and designing components to designing assembly and designing the end systems that are often built out of third-party components instead of things that were built in-house.

Look at the job role and understand that the core need hasn’t changed. Companies need Enterprise Architects and Business Architects and Solution Architects more than ever right now to get them where they need to be. But the people serving those roles need to do that in a new way -- and that’s focused on the future, what the business needs are over the next 6 to 18 months, and that’s different than what they have done in past.

Gardner: Where can organizations and individuals go to learn more about Agile Architecture as well as what The Open Group and Sparx Services are offering?

Schmierer: The Open Group has some great resources available. We have a July event in Denver focused on Agile Architecture, where they will discuss some of the latest thoughts coming out of The Open Group Architecture Forum, Digital Practitioners Work Group, and more. It’s a great opportunity to learn about those things, network with others, and discuss how other companies are approaching these problems. I definitely point them there.
Learn About Agile Architecture
At The Open Group July Denver Event
I mentioned the DPBoK™. This is a recent release from The Open Group, looking at the future of IT and the roles for architects. There’s some great, forward-looking thinking in there. I encourage folks to take a look at that, provide feedback, and get involved in that discussion.

And then Sparx Services North America, we are here to help architects be more effective and add value to their organizations, be it through tools, training, consulting, best practices, and standards. We are here to help, so feel free to reach out at our website. We are happy to talk with you and see how we might be able to help.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on reinforcing the relationship between Enterprise Architecture and agile businesses. And we have learned how Enterprise Architects should embrace new approaches and digital practitioner, leading-edge thinking to build competitive advantages for their companies.

So a big thank you to our guests, Ryan Schmierer, Director of Operations at Sparx Services North America. Thank you so much, Ryan.

Schmierer: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thank you, too, to Chris Armstrong, President at Sparx Services North America.

Armstrong: You are more than welcome, Dana. 


Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect agile business innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect discussions sponsored by The Open Group.

Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your IT 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 panel discussion how Enterprise Architects should embrace agile approaches to build more competitive advantage for their companies. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The Open Group, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.

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