COVID-19 Teaches Higher Education Institutes to Embrace Latest IT to Advance Remote Learning

Transcript of a discussion on how colleges and universities must rapidly redefine and implement a new and dynamic and blended balance between in-person and remote learning interactions.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

 

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

Gardner

Like many businesses, innovators in higher education have been transforming themselves for the digital age for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic nearly overnight accelerated the need for flexible new learning models.

 

As a result, colleges and universities must rapidly redefine and implement a new and dynamic balance between in-person and remote interactions. This new normal amounts to more than a repaving of centuries-old, in-class traditions of higher education with a digital wrapper. It requires re-invention -- and perhaps new ways of redefining – of the very act of learning itself.

 

Stay with us now as we explore how such innovation today in remote learning may also hold lessons for how businesses and governments interact with and enlighten their workers, customers, and ultimately citizens.

 

Here to share recent experiences in finding new ways to learn and work during a global pandemic are Chris Foward, Head of Services for IT Services at The University of Northampton in the UK. Welcome, Chris.

 

Chris Foward: Hi, Thanks. Nice to meet you, Dana.

 

Dana Gardner: We are also here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Tim.

 

Tim Minahan: Hey, Dana, I’m excited to be here.

 

Gardner: And we’re here with Dr. Scott Ralls, President of Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome, Dr. Ralls.

 

Dr. Scott Ralls: Thank you, Dana. I’m glad to be with you.

 

Education sprints online

 

Gardner: Scott, tell us about Wake Tech Community College and why you’ve been able to accelerate your path to broader remote learning?

 

Ralls: Wake Tech is the largest college in North Carolina, one of the largest community colleges in the United States. We have 75,000 total students across all of our different program areas spread over six different campuses.

 

Ralls

In mid-March, we took an early step in moving completely online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But if we had just started our planning at that point, I think we would have been in trouble; it would have been a big challenge for us, as it has been for much of higher education.

 

The journey really began six years earlier with a plan to move to a more online-supported, virtual-blended world. For us, the last six months have been about sprinting. We are on a journey that hasn’t been so much about changing our direction or changing our efficacy, but really sprinting the last one-fourth of the race. And that’s been difficult and challenging.

 

But it’s not been as challenging as if you were trying to figure out the directions from the very beginning. I’ve been very proud of our team, and I think things are going remarkably well here despite a very challenging situation.

 

Gardner: Chris, please tell us about The University of Northampton and how the pandemic has accelerated change for you.

 

Foward

Foward: The University of Northampton has invested very heavily in its campus. A number of years ago and we built a new one called Waterside campus. The Waterside campus was designed to work with active blended learning (ABL) as an approach to delivering all course works, and -- similar to Wake Tech -- we’ve faced challenges around how we deliver online teaching.

 

We were in a fortunate position because during the building of our new campus we implemented all-new technology from the ground up -- from our plant-based systems right through to our backend infrastructure. We aimed at taking on new technologies that were either cloud-based or that allowed us to deliver teaching in a remote manner. That was done predominantly to support our ABL approach to delivery of education. But certainly the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the uptake of those services.

 

Gardner: Chris, what was the impetus to the pre-pandemic blended learning? Why were you doing it? How did technology help support it?

 

Foward: The University of Northampton since 2014 has been moving toward its current institutional approach to learning and teaching. We never perceived of this as a large-scale online learning or a distance learning solution. But ABL does rely on fluent and thoughtful use of technologies for learning.

Our teachers found that the work they've done since 2014 really did stand us in good stead as we were able to very quickly change from an on-campus-taught environment to a digital experience for our students.

 

And this has stood the university in good stead in terms of how we actually deliver to our students. What our lecturers and teachers found is that the work they’ve done since 2014 really did stand us in a good stead as we were able to very quickly change from an on-campus-taught environment to a digital experience for our students.

 

Gardner: Scott, has technology enabled you to seek remote learning, or was remote learning the goal and then you had to go find the technology? What’s the relationship between remote learning and technology?

 

Ralls: For us, particularly in community colleges, it was more the second in that remote learning is an important priority for us because a majority of our students work. So the issues of just having the convenience of remote learning started community colleges in the United States down the path of remote learning much more quickly than for other forms of higher education. And so that helped us years ago to start thinking about what technologies are required.

 

Our college has been very thoughtful about the equity issues in remote learning. Some students succeed in more remote learning platforms, while others struggle with what those solutions may be. It was much more about the need for remote learning to allow working students with the capacities and conveniences, and then looking at what the technologies are and the best practices to achieve those goals.

 

Businesses learn from schools’ success

 

Gardner: Tim, when you hear Chris and Scott describing what they are doing in higher education, does it strike you that they are leaders and innovators compared generally to businesses? Should businesses pay attention to what’s going on in higher education these days, particularly around remote, balanced, and blended interactions?

 

Minahan

Minahan: Yes, I certainly think they are leading, Dana. That leadership comes from having been prepared for this in advance. If there’s any silver lining to this global crisis we are all living through, it’s that it’s caused organizations and participants in all industries to rethink how they work, school, and live.

 

Employers, having seen that work can now actually happen outside of an office, are catching up similarly. They’re rethinking their long-term workforce strategies and work models. They’re embracing more flexible and hybrid work approaches for the long-term.

 

And lower costs and improved productivity and engagement are giving them access to new pools of talent that were previously inaccessible to them in the traditional work-hub model, where you build a big office or call center and then you hire folks to fill them. Now, they can remotely reach talent in any location, including retirees or stay-at-home parents, and caretakers. They can be reactivated into the workforce.

As Kids Do More Remote School,

Managers Have Extra Homework, Too

Similarly to the diversity of the student body you’re seeing at Wake Tech, to do this they need a foundation, a digital workspace platform, that allows them to deliver consistent and secure access to the resources that employees or staff -- or in this case, students -- need to do their very best work across any channel or location. That can be in the classroom, on the road, or as we’ve seen recently in the home.

 

I think going forward, you’re going to see not just higher education, which we are hearing about here, but all industries begin to embrace this blended model for some very real benefits, both to their employees and their constituents, but to their own organizations as well.

 

Gardner: Chris, because Northampton put an emphasis on technology to accomplish blended learning, was the technology typical a few years back – traditional, stack-based enterprise IT -- a hindrance? Did you need to rethink technology as you were trying to accomplish your education goals?

 

Tech learning advances agility

 

Foward: Yes, we did. When we built our new campus, we looked at what new technologies were coming onto the market. We then moved toward a couple of key suppliers to ensure that we received best-in-class services as well as easy-to-use products. We chose partners like Microsoft for our software programs, like Office, and those sorts of productivity products.

 

We chose Cisco for networking and servers, and we also pulled in Citrix for delivery of our virtual applications and desktops from any location, anywhere, anytime. It allows flexibility for our students to access the systems from a smartphone and see a specific CAB-type models if we join those through solutions we have. It allows our factor of business and law to be able to present some of this bespoke software that they use. We can tailor the solutions that they see within these environments to meet the educational needs and courses that they are attending.

 

Gardner: Scott, at Wake Tech, as president of the university, you’re probably not necessarily a technologist. But how do you not be a technologist nowadays when you’re delivering everything as remote learning? How has your relationship with technology evolved? Have you had to learn a lot more tech?

 

Ralls: Oh, absolutely, yes. And even my own use of technology has evolved quite a bit. I was always aware and had broad goals. But, as I mentioned, we started sprinting very quickly, and when you are sprinting you want to know what’s happening.

 

We are very fortunate to have a great IT team that is both thoughtful in its direction and very urgent in their movement. So those two things gave me a lot of confidence. It’s also allowed us to sprint to places that we wouldn’t have been able to had these circumstances not come along.

We are very fortunate to have a great IT team that is both thoughtful in its direction and very urgent in their movement. Those two things gave me a lot of confidence. It also allowed us to sprint to places that we wouldn't have been able to.

 

I will use an example. We have six campuses. I would do face-to-face forums with faculty, staff, and students, so three meetings on every campus but once a semester. Now, I do those kinds of forums most days with students, faculty, or staff using the technology. Many of us have found that with the directions we were going that there are greater efficiencies to be achieved in many ways that we would not have tried had it not been for the [pandemic] circumstances.

 

And I think after we get past the issues we are facing with the pandemic; our world will be completely changed because this has accelerated our movement in this direction and accelerated our utility of the usage as well.

 

Gardner: Tim, we have seen over the years that the intersection between business and technology is not always the easiest relationship. Is what we’re seeing now as a result of the pandemic helping organizations attain the agility that they perhaps struggled to find before? 

 

Minahan: Yes, indeed, Dana. As you just heard, another thing the pandemic has taught us is that agility is key. Fixed infrastructure -- whether it’s real estate, the work-hub-centric models, data centers with loads of servers, and on-premise applications -- has proven to be an anchor during the pandemic. Organizations that rely heavily on such fixed infrastructure have had a much more difficult time shifting to a remote work or remote learning model to keep their employees and students safe and productive.

 

In fact, by an anecdote, we had one financial services customer, a CIO, recently say, “Hey, we can’t add servers and capacity fast enough.” And so, similar to Scott and Chris, we’re seeing an increasing number of our customers moving to adopt more variable operating models in everything they do. They are rethinking the real estate, staffing, and their IT infrastructure. As a result, we’re seeing customers take their measured plans for a one- to three-year transition to the cloud and accelerated that to three months, or even a few weeks.

 

They’re also increasing adoption of digital workspaces so that they can provide a consistent and secure work or learning experience for employees or students across any channel or location. It really boils down to organizations building agility into their operations so they can scale up quickly in the face of the next inevitable, unplanned crisis -- or opportunity.

 

Gardner: We’ve been talking about this through the lens of the higher education institute and the technology provider. But what’s been the experience over the past several months for the user? How are your students at Northampton adjusting to this, Chris? Is this rapid shift a burden or is there a silver lining to more blended and remote learning?

 

Easy-to-use options for student adoption

 

Foward: I’ll be honest, I think our students have yet to adopt it fully.

 

There are always challenges with new technology when it comes in. The uptake will be mainly driven in October when we see our mainstream student cohorts come onboard. I do think the types of technologies we have chosen are key, because making technology simple to use and easy to access will drive further adoption of those products.

 

What we have seen is that our staff’s uptake on our Citrix environment was phenomenal. And if there’s one positive to take from the COVID-19 situation it is the adoption of technology. Our staff has taken to it like ducks to water. Our IT team has delivered something exceptional, and I think our students will also see a massive benefit from these products, and especially the ease of use of these products.

 

So, yes, the key thing is making the products easily accessible and easy to use. If we overcomplicate it, you won’t get adoption and you won’t get an experience that customers need when they come to our education institutions.

 

Gardner: Dr. Ralls, have the students adjusted to these changes in a way that gives them agility as they absorb education?

 

Ralls: They have. All of us -- whether we work, teach, or are students at Wake Tech – have gained more confidence in these environments than we had before. I have regular conversations with these students. There was a lot of uncertainty, just like for many of us working remotely. How would that all work?

 

And we’ve now seen that we can do it. Things will still change around the notions of making the adjustments we need to. And for many of our students, it isn’t just how things will it change in the class, but in all of the things that they need around that class. For example, we have tutoring centers in our libraries. How do we make those work remotely and by appointment? We all wondered how that would work. And now we’ve seen that it can work, and it does work; and there’s an ease of doing that.

Reimagining Education

In a Remote World

Because we are a community college, we’re an open-admissions college. Many of our students haven’t had the level of academic preparation or opportunity that others have had. And so for some of our students who have a sense of uncertainty or anxiety, we have found that there is a challenge for them to move to remote learning and to have confidence initially.

 

Sometimes we can see that in withdrawals, but we’ve also found that we can rally around our students using different tools. We have found the value of different types of remote learning that are effective. For example, we’re doing a lot of the HyFlex model now, which is a combination of hybrid and remote, online-based education.

 

Over time we have seen in many of our classes that where classes started as hybrid, students then shifted to more fully remote and online. So you see the confidence grow over time.

 

Gardner: Scott, another benefit of doing more online is that you gain a data trail. When it comes to retention, and seeing how your programs are working, you have a better sense of participation -- and many other metrics. Does the data that comes along with remote learning help you identify students at risk, and are there other benefits?

 

Remote learning delivers data

 

Ralls: We’re a very data-focused college. For instance, even before we moved to more remote learning, every one of our courses had an online shell. We had already moved to where every course was available online. So we knew when our students were interacting.

 

One of the shifts we’ve seen at Wake Tech with more remote services is the expansion of those hours, as well as the ability to access counseling -- and all of our services remotely -- and through answer centers and other things.

 

But that means we had to change our way of thinking. Before, we knew when students took our courses, because they took them when you scheduled the courses. Now, as they are working remotely, we can also tell when they are working. And we know from many of our students that they are more likely to be online and engaged in our coursework between the hours of 5 pm and 10 pm, as opposed to 8 am and noon. Most of when we had been operating, from just having physical sites, was 8 am to 5 pm. Consequently, we have had to move the hours, and I think that’s something that will always be different about us and so that does give us that indication.

We had to change our way of thinking. Before, we knew when students took our courses because they took them when you scheduled the courses. Now, remotely we can also tell when they are working. We have had to move the hours to when they are actually operating.

 

One other thing about us that has been unique is because of who we are, because we do so much technical education -- that’s why we are called Wake Tech – and much of that is hands-on. You can’t do it fully remotely. But every one of our programs has found out the value of remote-based access through the support.

 

For example, we have a remarkable baking and pastry program. They have figured out how help the students get all of their hands-on resources at home in their own kitchens. They no longer have to come into the labs for what they do. Every program has found that value, the best aspects of their program being remote, even if their full program cannot be remote because of the hands-on matrix.

 

Gardner: Chris, is the capability to use the data that you get along the way at Northampton a benefit to you, and how?

 

Foward: Data is key for us in IT Services. We like to try and understand how people are using our systems and which applications they are using. It allows us to then fix the delivery of our applications more effectively. Our courses are also very data-driven. In our games art courses, for example, data allows us to design the materials more effectively for our students.

 

Gardner: Tim, when you are providing more value back through your technology, the data seems to be key as well. It’s about optimization and even reducing costs with better business and education outcomes. How does the data equation benefit Citrix’s customers, and how do you expect to improve on that?

 

Data enhances experiences

 

Minahan: Dana, data plays a major role in every aspect of what we do. When you think about the need to deliver digital workspaces by providing consistent and secure access to the resources -- whether it’s employees or students – they need to be able to perform at their best wherever that work needs to get done. The data that we are gathering is applied in a number of different ways.

 

Number one is around the security model. I use the analogy of not just having security access in -- the bouncer at the front door to make sure you have authenticated and are on the list to be access the resources you need -- but also having the bodyguard that follows you around the club, if you will, to constantly monitor your behavior and apply additional security policies.

 

The data is valuable for that because we understand the behavior of the individual user, whether they are typically accessing from a particular device or location or via the types of information or applications they access.

 

The second area is around performance. If we move to a much more distributed model, or a flexible or a blended model, vital to that is ensuring that those employees or students have reliable access to the applications and information they need to perform at their best. Being able to constantly monitor that environment allows for increasing bandwidth, or moving to a different channel as needed, so they get the best experience.

 

And then the last one gets very exciting. It is literally about productivity. Being able to push the right information or the right tasks, or even automate a particular task or remove it from their work stream in real time is vital to ensuring that we are not drowning in this cacophony of different apps and alerts -- and all the noise that gets in the way of us actually doing our best work or learning. And so data is actually vital to our overall digital workspace strategy at Citrix.

 

Gardner: Chris, to attain an improved posture around ABL, that can mean helping students pick up wherever they left off -- whether in a classroom, their workplace, at a bakery or in a kitchen at home. It requires a seamless transition regardless of their network and end device. How important is it to allow students to not have to start from scratch or find themselves lost in this collaboration environment? How is Citrix an important part of that?

 

Foward: With our ABL approach, we have small collaborative groups that work together to deliver or gain their learning.

 

We also ensure that the students have face-to-face contact with tutors, other distance learning, or while on campus. And with the technology, we store all of the academic materials in one location, called our mail site, which allows students to be able to access and learn as and when they need to. 

 

Citrix plays a key part in that because we can deliver applications into that state quickly and seamlessly. It allows students to always be able to understand and see the applications they need for their specific courses. It allows them to experiment, discuss ideas, and get more feedback from our lecturers because they understand what materials are being stored and how to access them.

 

Gardner: Dr. Ralls, how do you at Wake Tech prevent learning gaps from occurring? How does the technology help students move seamlessly throughout their education process, regardless of the location or device?

 

Seamless tracking lets students thrive

 

Ralls: There are different types of gaps. In terms of courses, one of the things we found recently is our students are looking for different types of access. Many of our students are looking for additional types of access -- perhaps replicating our seated courses to gain the value of synchronous experiences. We have had to make sure that all of our courses have that capacity, and that it works well. 

 

Then, because many of our students are also in a work environment, they want an asynchronous capability. And so we are now working on making sure students know the difference and how to match those expectations.

 

Also, because we are an open access college -- and as I like to say, we take the top 100 percent of our applicant students -- for many of our students, gaps come not just within a course, but between courses or toward their goals. For many of our students who are first-generation students, higher education is new. They may have also been away from education for a period of time.

We have to be much more intrusive and to help students and monitor to make sure our students are making it from one place to the next. We need to make sure that learning makes sense to them.

 

So we have to be much more intrusive and to help students and monitor to make sure our students are making it from one place to the next. We need to make sure that learning makes sense to them and that they are making it to whatever their ultimate goals are.

 

We use technology to track that and to know when our students are getting close to leaving. We call that being like rumble strips on the side of the road. There are gaps that we are looking at, not just within courses, but between courses, on the way to our students’ academic goals.

 

Gardner: Tim, when I hear Chris and Scott describe these challenges in education, I think how impactful this can be for other businesses in general as they increasingly have blended workforces. They are going to face similar gaps too. What, from Citrix’s point of view, should businesses be learning from the experiences at University of Northampton and Wake Tech?

 

Minahan: I think Winston Churchill summed it up best: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Smart organizations are using the current crisis -- not just to survive, but to thrive. They are using the opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation and rethink long-held work and operating models in ways they probably hadn’t before.

 

So as demonstrated both at Wake Tech and Northampton, and as Scott and Chris both said, for both school and work the future is definitely going to be blended.

 

We have, for example, another higher education customer, the University of Sydney that was able to get 20,000 students and faculty transition to an online learning environment last March, literally within a week. But that’s not the real story, it’s where they are going next with this.

 

As they entered the new school year in Sydney, they now have 100 core and software as a service (SaaS) applications that students can access through the digital workspace regardless of the type of device or their location. And they can ensure they have that consistent and secure and reliable experience with those apps. They say the student experience is as good, and sometimes even better, than what a student would have when using a locally installed app on a physical computer.

 

And now the university, most importantly, has used this remote learning model as an opportunity to reach new students -- and even new faculty -- in locations that they couldn’t have supported before due to geographic limitations of largely classroom-based models.

 

These are the types of things that businesses also have to think through. And as we hear from Wake Tech and Northampton, businesses can take a page from the courseware from many forward-thinking higher education organizations that are already in a blended learning model and see how that applies to their own business.

 

Gardner: Dr. Ralls, when you look to the future, what comes next? What would you like to see happen around remote learning, and what can the technologists like Citrix do to help?

 

Blended learning without walls

 

Ralls: Right now, there is so much greater efficiency than we had before. I think there is a way to bring that greater efficiency even more into our classrooms. For years we have talked about a flipped classroom, which really means those things that are better accomplished outside in a lab or in a shop, to do those outside of the classroom.

 

We have to all get to a place where the learning process just doesn’t happen within the walls of the classrooms. So the ability for students to go back and review work, to pick up on work, to use multiple different tools to add and supplement what they are getting through a classroom-based experience, a shop-based experience -- I think that’s what we are moving to.

See How Leading Institutes Use

Technology to Transform Education Delivery

For Wake Tech, this really hit us about March 15, 2020 when we went fully remote. We don’t want to go back to the way we were in April. We don’t want to be a fully remote, online college. But we also don’t want to be where we were in February.

 

This pandemic crisis has presented to us a greater acceleration of where we want to be, of where we can be. It’s what we aspire to be in terms of better education -- not just more convenient access of education -- but better educational opportunities through the multiple different opportunities that are brought to us by technology to supplement the core work that we have always done through our seat-based environment.

 

Gardner: Chris, at Northampton, what’s the next step for the technology enabling these higher goals that Dr. Ralls just described? Where would you like to see the technology take Northampton students next?

 

Foward: The technology is definitely key to what we are trying to do as education providers, to provide the right skill sets wherein students move from higher education into business. Certainly, with the likes of Citrix, with what was originally a commercial-focused application, and bringing it into our institution, we have allowed our students to gain access and understand how the system works -- and understand how to use it.

 

And that’s similar with most of our technologies that we have brought in. It gives students more of a commercial feel for how operations should be running, how systems should be accessed, and the ways to use those systems.

 

Gardner: Tim, graduates from Wake Tech and from University of Northampton a year or two from now, they are going to be well-versed in these technologies, and this level of collaboration and seamless transitions between blended approaches. How are the companies they go to going to anticipate these new mindsets? What should businesses be doing to take full advantage of what these students have already been doing in these universities?

 

Students become empowered employees

 

Minahan: That’s a great point, and it is certainly something that business is grappling with now as we move beyond hiring Millennials to the next generation of highly educated, grown-up-on-the-Internet students with high expectations who are coming out of universities today.

 

For the next few years, it all boils down to the need to deliver a superior employee experience, to empower employees to perform at their best, and to do the jobs they were hired to do. We should not burden them, as we have in a lot of corporate America, with a host of different distractions, apps, and rules and regulations that keep them away from doing their core jobs.

We need to deliver a superior employee experience. We should not burden them with a host of different distractions, apps, and rules that keep them from doing their core jobs.

 

And key to that, not surprisingly, is going to require a digital workspace environment that empowers and provides unified access to all of the resources and information that the employee needs to perform at their best across any work channel or location. They need a behind-the-scenes security model that ensures the security of the corporate assets, applications, and information -- as well as the privacy of individuals -- without getting in the way of work. 

 

And then, at a higher level, as we talked about earlier, we need an intelligence model with more analytics built into that environment. It will then not just offer up a launch pad to access the resources you need, but will actually guide you through your day, presenting the right tasks and insights as you need them, and allowing you to get the noise out of your day so you can really create, innovate, and do your best work. And that will be whether work is in an office, on the road, or work as we have seen recently, in the home.

 

Gardner: I wouldn’t be surprised if the students coming out of these innovative institutes of higher learning are going to be the instigators of change and innovation in their employment environments. So a point on the arrow from education into the business realm.

 

I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how innovators in higher education have been transforming themselves to meet the needs for flexible, new ways of learning.

 

And we have heard how innovation today in remote learning may hold valuable lessons for how businesses and governments will newly interact and enlighten their workers, customers, and even citizens.

 

So a big thank you to our guests, Chris Foward, Head of Services for IT Services at the University of Northampton in the UK. Thank you so much, Chris.

 

Foward: Thank you.

 

Gardner: We have also been here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Thank you, Tim.

 

Minahan: Thanks, Dana. I appreciate the opportunity.

 

Gardner: And we have been joined by Dr. Scott Ralls, President of Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thank you so much, Dr. Ralls.

 

Ralls: Thank you, Dana. I have enjoyed being with you.

 

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect remote work and learning innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

 

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

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

 

Transcript of a discussion on how colleges and universities must rapidly redefine and implement a new and dynamic and blended balance between in-person and remote learning interactions. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

 

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The Path to a Digital-First Enterprise is Paved with an Emergence Model and Digital Transformation Playbook

Transcript of a discussion on how open standards help support a playbook approach for organizations to improve and accelerate their digital transformation.

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 digital business optimization discussion explores how open standards help support a playbook approach for organizations to improve and accelerate their digital transformation.

Gardner

As companies chart a critical journey to become digital-first enterprises, they need new forms of structure to make rapid adaptation a regular recurring core competency. Stay with us now as we explore how standards, resources, and playbooks around digital best practices can guide organizations through unprecedented challenges -- and allow them to emerge even stronger as a result.

Here to explain how to architect for ongoing disruptive innovation is our panel. Please join me in welcoming Jim Doss, Managing Director at IT Management and Governance, LLC, and Vice Chair of the Digital Practitioner Work Group (DPWG) at The Open Group. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Doss: Good morning.

Gardner: We’re also here with Mike Fulton, Associate Vice President of Technology Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide and Academic Director of Digital Education at The Ohio State University. Welcome back, Mike.

Mike Fulton: Great to be here, Dana.

Gardner: We’re also here with Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. Good to have you with us, Dave.

Dave Lounsbury: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: Dave, the pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic response has focused a large, 40-year gathering of knowledge into a new digitization need. What is that new digitization need, and why are standards a crucial part of it?

Pandemic survival is digital

Lounsbury: It’s not just digitization, but also the need to move to digital. That’s what we’re seeing here. The sad fact of this terrible pandemic is that it has forced us all to live a more no-contact, touch-free, and virtual life.

Lounsbury

We’ve all experienced having to be on Zoom, or not going into work, or even when you’re out doing take-out at a restaurant. You don’t sign a piece of paper anymore; you scan something on your phone, and all of that is based on having the skills and the business processes to actually deliver some part of your business’s value digitally.

This was always an evolution, and we’ve been working on it for years. But now, this pandemic has forced us to face the reality that you have to adopt digital in order to survive. And there’s a lot of evidence for that. I can cite McKinsey studies where the companies that realized this early and pivoted to digital delivery are reaping the business benefits. And, of course, that means you have to have both the technology, the digitization part, but also embrace the idea that you have to conduct some part of your business, or deliver your value, digitally. This has now become crystal clear in the focus of everyone’s mind.

Gardner: And what is the value in adopting standards? How do they help organizations from going off the rails or succumbing to complexity and chaos?

Lounsbury: There’s classically been a split between information technology (IT) in an organization and the people who are in the business. And, something I picked up at one of the Center for Information Research meetings was, the minute an IT person talks about “the business” you’ve gone off the rails.

If you’re going to deliver your business value digitally -- even if it’s something simple like contactless payments or an integrated take-out order system -- that knowledge might have been previously in an IT shop or something that you outsourced. Now it has to be in the line of business.

There has to be some awareness of these digital fundamentals at almost all levels of the business. And, of course, to do that quickly, people need a structure and a guidebook for what digital skills they need at different points of their organizational evolution. And that is where standards, complemented by education and training, play a big role.

Fulton: I want to hit on this idea of digitization versus digital. Dave made that point and I think it’s a good one. But in the context of the pandemic, it’s incredibly critical that we understand the value that digitization brings -- as well as the value that digital brings.

Fulton

When we talk about digitization, typically what we’re talking about is the application of technology inside of a company to drive productivity and improve the operating model of the company. In the context of the pandemic, that value becomes much more important. Driving internal productivity is absolutely critical.

We’re seeing that here at Nationwide. We are taking steps to apply digitization internally to increase the productivity of our organization and help us drive the cost down of the insurance that we provide to our customers very specifically. This is in response to the adjustment in the value equation in the context of the pandemic.

But then, the digital context is more about looking externally. Digital in this context is applying those technologies to the customer experience and to the business model. And that’s where the contact list, as Dave was talking about, is so critically important.

There are so many ways now to interact with our customers, and in ways that don’t involve human beings. How to get things done in this pandemic, or to involve human beings in a different way -- in a digital fashion -- that’s where both digitization and digital are so critically important in this current context.

Gardner: Jim Doss, as organizations face a survival-of-the-fittest environment, how do we keep this a business transformation with technology pieces -- and not the other way around?

Project management to product journey

Doss: The days of architecting IT and the business separately, or as a pure cascade or top-down thing; those days are going. Instead of those “inside-out” approaches, “outside-in” architectural thinking now keenly focuses on customer experiences and the value streams aligned to those experiences. Agile Architecture promotes enterprise segmentation to facilitate concurrent development and architecture refactoring, guided by architectural guardrails, a kind of lightweight governance structure that facilitates interoperability and keeps people from straying into dangerous territory.

Doss

If you read books like Team Topologies, The Open Group Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge™️ (DPBoK), and Open Agile Architecture™️ Standards, they are designed for team cognitive load, whether they are IT teams or business teams. And doing things like the Inverse Conway Maneuver segments the organization into teams that deliver a product, a product feature, a journey, or a sub-journey.

Those are some really huge trends and the project-to-product shift is going on in business and IT. These trends have been going on for a few years. But when it comes to undoing 30 or 40 years of project management mentality in IT -- we’re still at the beginning of the project-to-product shift. It’s massive. 

To summarize what David was saying, the business can no longer outsource digital transformation. As matter of fact, by definition, you can’t outsource digital transformation to IT anymore. This is a joint-effort going forward.

Gardner: Dave, as we’re further defining digital transformation, this goes beyond just improving IT operations and systems optimization. Isn’t digital transformation also about redefining their total value proposition?

Lounsbury: Yes, that’s a very good point. We may have brushed over this point, but when we say and use the word digital, at The Open Group we really mean a change in the mindset of how you deliver your business.

This is not something that the technology team does. It’s a reorientation of your business focus and how you think about your interactions with the customer, as well as how you deliver value to the customer. How do you give them more ways of interacting with you? How do you give them more ways of personalizing their experience and doing what they want to do?

This goes very deep into the organization, to how you think about your value chains, in business model leverage, and things like that.

One of the things we see a lot of is people thinking about is trying to do old processes faster. We have been doing that incremental improvement and efficiency forever and applying machines to do part of the value-delivery job. But the essential decision now is thinking about the customers’ view as being primarily a digital interaction, and to give them customization, web access, and let them do the whole value chain in digital. That goes right to the top of the company and to how structure your business model or value delivery.

Balanced structure for flexibility

Gardner: Mike Fulton, more structure comes with great value in that you can manage complexity and keep things from going off of the rails. But some people think that too much structure slows you down. How do you reach the right balance? And does that balance vary from company to company, or there are general rules about finding that Nirvana between enough structure and too little?

Fulton: If we want to provide flexibility and speed, we have to move away from rules and start thinking more about guardrails, guidelines, and about driving things from a principled perspective.

That’s one of the biggest shifts we’re seeing in the digital space related to enterprise architecture (EA). Whereas, historically, architecture played a directional, governance role, what we’re seeing now is that architecture in a digital context provides guardrails for development teams to work within. And that way, it provides more room for flexibility and for choice at the lower levels of an organization as you’re building out your new digital products.

Historically, architecture played a directional, governance role. Now architecture in a digital context provides guardrails for development teams to work within. It provides more room for flexibility and for choice at the lower levels of an organization as you're building out your new digital products.

Those digital products still need to work in the context of a broader EA, and an architecture that’s been developed leveraging potentially new techniques, like what’s coming out of The Open Group with the Open Agile Architecture standard. That’s new, different, and critically important for thinking about architecture in a different way. But, I think, that’s where we provide flexibility -- through the creation of guardrails.

Doss: The days are over for “Ivory Tower” EA – the top-down, highly centralized EA. Today, EA is responding to right-to-left and outside-in versus inside-out pressures. It has to be more about responding, as Mike said, to the customer-centric needs using market data, customer data, and continuous feedback.

EA is really different now. It responds to product needs, market needs, and all of the domain-driven design and other things that go along with that.

Lounsbury: Sometimes we use the term agile, and it’s almost like a religious term. But agile essentially means you’re structured to respond to changes quickly and you learn from your mistakes through repeatedly refining your concepts. That’s actually a key part of what’s in the Open Agile Architecture Standard that Mike referred to.

The reason for this is fundamental to why people need to worry about digital right now. With digital, your customer interface is no longer your fancy storefront. It’s that black mirror on your phone, right? You have exactly the same six-by-two-and-a-half-inch screen that everybody else has to get your message across.

And so, the side effect of that, is that the customer has much more power to select among competitors than they did in the past. There’s been plenty of evidence that customers will pick convenience or safety over brand loyalty in a heartbeat these days.

Internally that means as a business that you have to have your team structured so they can quickly respond to the marketplace, and not have to go all the way up the management chain for some big decision and then bring it all way back down again. You’ll be out-competed if you do it that way. There is a hyper-acceleration to “survival of the fittest” in business and IT; this has been called the Red Queen effect.

That’s why it’s essential to have agile not as a religion, but as the organizational agility to respond to outside-in customer pressures as a competitive factor in how you run your business. And, of course, that then pulls along the need to be agile in your business practices and in how you empower your agile teams. How do you give them the guardrails? How do you give them the infrastructure they need to succeed at all of those things?

It’s almost as if the pyramid has been turned on its head. It’s not a pyramid that comes down from the top of some high-level business decisions, but the pyramid grows backward from a point of interaction with the customers.

Gardner: Before we drill down on how to attain that organizational agility, let’s dwell on the challenges. What’s holding up organizations from attaining digital transformation now that they face an existential need for it?

Digital delivers agile advantage

Doss: We see a lot of companies try to bring in digital technologies but really aren’t employing the needed digital practices to bring the fuller intended value, so there’s a cultural lag. 

The digital technologies are often used in combination and mashed up in amazing ways to bring out new products and business models. But you need digital practices along with those digital technologies. There’s a growing body of evidence that the difference between companies that actually get that are not just outperforming their industry peers by percentages -- it’s almost exponential.

The findings from the “State of DevOps” Reports for the last few years gives us clear evidence on this. Product teams are really driving a lot of the work and functionality across the silos, and increasingly into operations.

And this is why the standards and bodies knowledge are so important -- because you need these ideas. With The Open Group DPBoK, we’ve woven all of this together in one Emergence Model and kept these digital practices connected. That’s the “P” in DPBoK, the practitioner. It’s those digital practices that bring in the value.

Fulton: Jim makes a great point here. But in my context with Digital Executive Education at Ohio State, when we look at that journey to a digital enterprise we think of it in three parts: The vision, the transformation, and the execution.

You have to be able to envision, as a leadership team of an organization, what a digital enterprise looks like. What is your blueprint for that digital enterprise? Once you have aligned that blueprint with your leadership team, you have to lead that digital transformation journey.

The piece that Jim was just talking about talks to execution. Once you’re in a digital enterprise, how do you have the right capabilities and practices to create new digital products day to day?  And that’s absolutely critical.

But you also have to set the vision upfront. You have to be able to envision, as a leadership team of an organization, what a digital enterprise looks like. What is your blueprint for that digital enterprise? And so, you have to be able to figure that out. Then, once you have aligned that blueprint with your leadership team, you have to lead that digital transformation journey.

And that transformation takes you from the vision to the execution. And that’s what I really love about The Open Group and the new direction around an open digital portfolio, the portfolio digital standards that work together in concert to take you across that entire journey. 

These are the standards help you envision the future. Standards that help you drive that digital transformation like the Open Agile Architecture Standard. Standards that help you with digital delivery such as IT4IT. A critically important part of this journey is rethinking your digital delivery because the vast majority of products that companies produce today are digital products.

But then, how do you actually deliver the capabilities and practices, and uplift the organization with the new skills to function in this digital enterprise once you get there? And you can’t wait. You have to bring people along that journey from the very start. The entire organization needs to think differently, and it needs to act differently, once you become a digital enterprise.

Lounsbury: Right. And that’s an important point, Mike, and one that’s come out of the digital thinking going on at The Open Group. A part of the digital portfolio is understanding the difference between “what a company is” and “what a company does” -- that vision that you talked about – and then how we operate to deliver on that vision.

Dana, you began this with a question about the barriers and what’s slowing progress down. Those things used to be vertically aligned. What the business is and does used to be decomposed through some top-down, reductionist, refactor or delegate, decompose and delegate of all of the responsibilities. And if everybody does their job at the edge, then the vision will be realized. That’s not true anymore because of the outside-in digital reality.

A big part of the challenge for most organizations is the old idea that, “Well, if we do that all faster, we’ll somehow be able to compete.” That is gone, right? That fundamental change and challenge for top- and middle-management is, “How do we make the transition to the structure that matches the new competitive environment of outside-in?”

“What does it mean to empower our team? What is the culture we need in our company to actually have a productive team at the edge?” Things like, “Are you escalating every decision up to a higher level of management?” You just don’t have time for that anymore.

Are people free to choose the tools and interfaces with the customers that they believe will maximize the customer experience? And if it doesn’t work out, how do you move on to the next step without being punished for the failure of your experiment? If it reflects negatively on you, that’s going to inhibit your ability to respond, too.

All of these techniques, all of these digital ways of working, to use Jim’s term, have to be brought into the organization. And, as Mike said, that’s where the power of standards comes in. That’s where the playbooks that The Open Group has created in the DPBoK Standard, the Open Agile Architecture Standard, and the IT4IT Reference Architecture actually give you the guidance on how to do that.

Part of the Emergence Model is knowing when to do what, at the right stage in your organization’s growth or transformation.

Gardner: And leading up to the Emergence Model, we’ve been talking about standards and playbooks. But what is a “playbook” when it comes to standards?  And why is The Open Group ahead of the curve to extend the value when you have multiple open standards and playbooks?

Teams need playbook to win

Lounsbury: I’ll be honest, Dana, The Open Group is at a very exciting time. We’re in a bit of a transition. When there was a clear division between IT and business, there were different standards and different bodies of knowledge for how you adapt to each of those. A big part of the role of the enterprise architect was in bridging those two worlds.

The world has changed, and The Open Group is in the process of adapting to that. We’re looking to build on the robust and proven standards and build those into a much more coherent and unified digital playbook, where there is easy discoverability and navigability between the different standards.

People today want to have quick access. They want to say, “Oh, what does it mean to have an agile team? What does it mean to have an outside-in mindset?” They want to quickly discover that and then drill in deeper. And that’s what we pioneered with the DPBoK, with the architecture of the document called the Emergence Model, and that’s been picked up by other standards of The Open Group. It’s clearly the direction we need to do more in.

Gardner: Mike, why are multiple standards acting in concert good?

Fulton: For me, when I think about why you need multiple standards, it’s because if you were to try to create a single standard that covered everything, that standard would become incomprehensible.

If you want an industry standard, you need to bring the right subject matter experts together, the best of the best, the right thought leaders -- and that’s what The Open Group does. It brings thought leaders from across the world together to talk about specific topics to develop the best information that we have as an industry and to put that into our standards.

The Open Group, with the digital portfolio, is intentionally bringing the standards together to make sure that the standards align. That brings the standards together to make sure we're thinking about big, broad concepts in the same way and then dig down into the details with the right subject matter experts.

But it’s a rare bird, indeed, that can do that across multiple parts of an organization, or multiple capabilities, or multiple practices. And so by building these standards up individually, it allows us to tap into the right subject matter experts, the right passions, and the right areas of expertise.

But then, what The Open Group is now doing with the digital portfolio is intentionally bringing those standards together to make sure that the standards align. It brings the standards together to make sure that they have the same messaging, that we’re all working on the same definitions, and that we’re all thinking about big, broad concepts together in the same way and then allow us to dig down into the details with the right subject matter experts at the level of granularity needed to provide the appropriate levels of benefits for industry.

Gardner: And how does the Emergence Model help harmonize multiple standards, particularly around the Digital Practitioner’s Workgroup?

Emergence Model scales

Lounsbury: We talked about outside-in, and there are a couple of ways you can approach how you organize such a topic. As Mike just said, there’s a lot of detail that you need to understand to fully grasp it.

But you don’t always have to fully grasp everything at the start. And there are different ways you can look at organizations. You can look at the typical stack, decomposition, and the top-down view. You can look at lifecycles, that when you start at the left and you go to the right, what are all the steps in-between?

And the third dimension, which we’re picking up on inside The Open Group, is the concept of scale through the Emergence Model. And that’s what we’ve tried to do, particularly in the DPBoK Standard. It’s the best example we have right now. And that approach is coming into other parts of our standards. The idea comes out of lean startup thinking, which comes out of lean manufacturing.

When you’re a startup, or starting a new initiative, there are a few critical things you have to know. What is your concept of digital value? What do you need to deliver that value? Things like that.

Then you ideally succeed and grow and then, “Wow, I need more people.” So now you have a team. Well, that brings in the idea of, “What does team management mean? What do I have to do to make a team productive? What infrastructure does it need?”

And then, with that, the success goes on because of the steps you’ve taken from the beginning. As you get into more complexity, you get into multiple teams, which brings in budgeting. You soon have large-scale enterprises, which means you have all sorts of compliance, accounting, and auditing. These things go on and on.

But you don’t know those things at the start. You do have to know them at the end. What you need to know at the start is that you have a map as to how to get there. And that’s the architecture, and the process to that is what we call the Emergence Model.

It is how you map to scale. And I should say, people think of this quite often in terms of, “Oh it’s just for a startup. I’m not a startup, I’m in a big company.” But many big companies -- Mike, I think you’ve had some experience with this – have many internal innovation centers. You do entrepreneurial funding for a small group of people and, depending on their success, feed them more resources.

So you have the need for an Emergence Model even inside of big companies. And, by the way, there are many use cases for using a pattern for success in how to do digital transformation. Don’t start from the top-down; start with some experiments and grow from the inside-out.

Doss: I refer to that as downscale digital piloting. You may be a massive enterprise, but if you’re going to adapt and adopt new business models, like your competitors and smaller innovators who are in your space, you need to think more like them.

Though I’m in a huge enterprise, I’m going to start some smaller initiatives and fence them off from governance and other things that slow those teams down. I’m going to bring in only lean aspects for those initiatives.

You may be a massive enterprise, but if you're going to adapt and adopt new business models, like your competitors and smaller innovators, you need to think more like them. In a huge enterprise, you need to start some smaller initiatives and fence them off from the governance that could slow them down and bring in lean aspects.

And then, you amplify what works and scale that to the enterprise. As David said, you have the smaller organizations that have a great guidebook now for what’s right around the corner. They’re growing now, they don’t have just one product anymore, they have two or three products and so the original product owner can’t be in every product meeting.

So, all of those things are happening as a company grows and the DPBoK and Emergence Model is great for, “Hey, this is what’s around the corner.”

With a lot of other frameworks, you’d have to spend a lot of time extracting for scale-specific guidance on digital practices. So, you’d have to extract all that scale-specific stuff and it’s a lot of work, to be honest, and it’s hard to get right. So, in the DPBoK, we built the guidance so it’s much easier to move in either direction -- going up- and down-scale digital piloting as well.

Gardner: Mike, you’re on the pointy end of this, I think, in one of your jobs.

Intentional innovation

Fulton: Yes, at Nationwide, in our technology innovation team, we are doing exactly what Dave and Jim have described. We create new digital products for the organization and we leverage a combination of lean startup methodologies, agile methodologies, and the Emergence Model from The Open Group DPBoK to help us think about what we need at different points in time in that lifecycle of a digital product.

And that’s been really effective for us as we have brought new products to market. I shared the full story at The Open Group presentation about six months ago. But it is something that I believe is a really valuable tool for big enterprises trying to innovate. It helps you think about being very intentional about what are you using. What capabilities and components are you using that are lean versus more robust? What capabilities are you using that are implicit versus explicit, and what point in time do you actually need to start writing things down?

At what point in time do you absolutely need to start leveraging those slightly bigger, more robust enterprise processes to be able to effectively bring a digital product to market versus using processes that might be more appropriate in a startup world? And I found the DPBoK to be incredibly helpful and instructive as we went through that process at Nationwide. 

Gardner: Are there any other examples of what’s working, perhaps even in the public sector? This is not just for private sector corporations. A lot of organizations of all stripes are trying to align, become more agile, more digital, and be more responsive to their end-users through digital channels. Any examples of what is working when it comes to the Emergence Model, rapid digitization, and leveraging of multiple standards appropriately?

Good governance digitally

Doss: We’re really still in the early days with digital in the US federal government. I do a lot of work in the federal space, and I’ve done a lot of commercial work as well.

They’re still struggling in the federal space with the project-to-product shift.

There is still a huge focus on the legacy project management mentality. When you think about the legacy definition of a deliverable, the project is done at the deliverable. So, that supports “throw it over the wall and run the other way.”

Various forms of the plan-build-operate (PBO) IT organization structure still dominate in the federal space. Orgs that are PBO-aligned tend to push work from left to right across the P, B & O silos, and the space between these siloes are heavily stage-gated. So, this inside-out thinking and the stage-gating also supports “throw it over the wall and run the other way.” In the federal space, waterfall is baked into nearly everything.

These are two huge digital anti-patterns that the federal space is really struggling with.

Product management, for example, employs a single persistent team that remains with the work across the lifecycle and ties together those dysfunctional silos. Such “full product lifecycle teams” eliminate a lot of the communication and hand-off problems associated with such legacy structures.

The other problem in the federal space with the PBO IT org structure is that the real power resides in these silos and these silos’ management focus is downward into their silo….not as much across the silos; so there are a lot of cross functional initiatives such as EA, service ownership, product ownership or digital initiative that might get some traction for a while but such initiatives of functions have no real buying power or “go/no-go” decision authority so they get squashed eventually by the silo heads, where the real power resides in such organizations.

In the US, I look over time for Congressional, via new laws or Office of Management and Budget (OMB) via policy, to bring in some needed changes and governance about how IT orgs get structured and governed.

Ironically, these two digital anti-patterns also lead to the creation of lots of over-baked governance over decades to try to assure that the intended value was still captured, which is like chasing more bad money after that other bad money.

This is not just true in federal this is also true in the commercial world. Such over-baked governance just happens to be really, really bad in the federal space.

For federal IT, you have laws like Clinger-Cohen, Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), policies and required checks by the OMB, Capital Planning and Investment control, Acquisition Regulations, DoD Architecture Framework, and I could go on -- all which require tons of artifacts and evidence of sound decision making.

The problem is nobody is rationalizing these together… like figuring out what supersedes what when something new comes out. So, the governance just gets more and more un-lean, over-bloated and what you have at the end is agencies are either misguided by out-of-date guidance or overburdened by over-bloated governance.

Fulton: I don’t have nearly the level of depth in the government space that Jim does, but I do have a couple examples I want to point people to if they are trying to look for more government-related examples. I point you to a couple here in Ohio, both Doug McCollough and his work with the City of Dublin in Ohio. He’s done a lot of work with digital technologies; digital transformation at the city level.

And then again here in Ohio – and I’m just using Ohio references because I live in Ohio and I know a little bit more intimately what some of these folks are doing -- Ervan Rodgers, CEO of the State of Ohio, has done a really nice job of focusing on digital capabilities and practices to build up across state employees.

The third I’ll point to is the work going on in India. There’s been a tremendous amount of really great work in India related to government, architecture, and getting to the digital transformation conversation at the government level. So, if folks are interested in more examples, more stories, I’d recommend you look into those three as places to start.

Lounsbury: The thing, I think, you’re referring to there, Mike, is the IndEA India Enterprise Architecture initiative and the pivot to digital that several of the Indian provinces are making. We can certainly talk about that more on a different podcast.

Transformation is almost always driven by a Darwinian force. Something has changed in your environment that causes you to evolve, and we've seen that in the federal and defense sectors in things like avionics where the cost of software is unaffordable. They then turned to modular, decomposable systems based on standards just to stay in business.

I will toss in one ray of light to what Jim said. Transformation is almost always driven by an almost Darwinian force. There’s something changed in your environment that causes you to evolve and we’ve seen that in the federal sector and the defense sector in particular where things like in avionics, the cost of software is becoming unaffordable. They turned to modular, decomposable systems based on standards in order to achieve the necessary cost savings to just stay in business.

Similarly, in India, the utter need to deliver to a very diverse, large rural population, and grow that needed digitization. And certainly, the U.S. federal sector and the defense sector are very aware of the disparity. And I think, things like, the defense budget changes or changes in mission will drive some of these changes that we’ve talked about that are driven by the pandemic urgently in the commercial sector.

So, it will happen, but it is, I’ll agree with Jim, probably the most challenging ultimate top-down environment that you could possibly imagine doing a transformation.

Gardner: In closing, what’s coming next from The Open Group, particularly around digital practitioner resources? How can organizations best exploit these resources?

Harmony on the horizon

Lounsbury: We’ve talked about the evolution The Open Group is going through, about the digital portfolio and the digital playbooks having all of our standards speak common language and working together.

A first step in that is to develop a set of principles by which we’re going to do that evolution and the documents is called, Principles for Open Digital Standards. You can get that from The Open Group bookstore and if you want to find it quickly, you go to The Open Group’s The Digital-First Enterprise page that links to all of these standards.

Looking forward, there are activities going on in all of the forums of The Open Group and the forums are voluntary organizations. But certainly, the IT4IT Forum, the Digital Practitioner Workgroup, in these large swaths of our architecture activity they are working on how we can harmonize the language and bring common knowledge to our standards.

And then, to look beyond that, I think we need to address the problems of discoverability and navigability that I mentioned earlier to give that coherent and an easy-to-access picture of where a person can find out what they need when they need it.

Fulton: Dave, I think probably one of the most important pieces of work that will be delivered soon by The Open Group is putting a stake in the ground around what it means to be a digital product. And that’s something that I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere else in the industry. I think it will really move the ball forward and be a unifying document for the entire open digital portfolio.

And so, we have some great work that’s already gone on in the DPBoK and the Open Agile Architecture standard, but I think that digital product will be a rallying cry that will make all of the standards even more cohesive going forward.

Doss: And I’ll just add my final two cents here. I think a lot of it, Dana, is just awareness. People need to just understand that there’s a DPBoK Standard out there for digital practitioners.

If you’re in IT, you’re not just an IT practitioner anymore, you’re using digital technology and digital practices to bring lean, user-centric value to your business or mission. So, digital is the new best practice. So, there’s a framework in a body of knowledge out there now that supports and helps people transform in their careers. The same thing with Agile Architecture. And so it’s just the awareness that these things are out there.

The most powerful thing to me is, both of these works that I just mentioned have more than 500 references from most of the last 10 years of leading digital thinkers. So, again, the way these are structured, the way these are built, bringing in just the scale-specific guidance and that sort of stuff is hugely powerful. There needs to be an increasing awareness that this stuff is out there.

Lounsbury: And if I can pick up on that awareness point, I do want to mention, as always, The Open Group publishes the standards as freely available to all. You can go to that digital enterprise page or The Open Group Library to find these. We also have an active training ecosystem that you can find these days. Everybody does that digital training. 

There are ways of learning the standards in depth and getting certified that you’re proficient in the knowledge of that. But I also should mention, we have at least two U.S. universities and more interest on the international sector for graduate work in executive-level education. And Mike has mentioned his executive teaching at Ohio State, and there are others as well.

Gardner: Right, and many of these resources are available at The Open Group website. There are also many events, many of them now virtual, as well as certification processes and resources. There’s always something new, it’s a very active place.

I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how open standards help organizations improve and accelerate their digital transformation. And we’ve learned how a playbook approach around digital best practices is guiding organizations through unprecedented challenges to emerge even stronger.

So, a big thank you to our panel, Jim Doss, Managing Director at IT Management and Governance, LLC, and Vice Chair of the Digital Practitioner Workgroup at The Open Group. Thank you so much, Jim.

Doss: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We’ve also been here with Michael Fulton, Associate Vice President of Technology Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide and Academic Director of Digital Education at The Ohio State University. Thank you so much, Mike.

Fulton: Thanks, Dana. It’s been a pleasure.

Gardner: And we’ve been also here with Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. Thank you, sir.

Lounsbury: You’re welcome, Dana, happy to be here.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect business enablement 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 with your business community, and do come back next time.

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

Transcript of a discussion on how open standards help support a playbook approach for organizations to improve and accelerate their digital transformation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The Open Group, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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