Last week , The Open Group kicked off their signature Enterprise Architecture Conference in London. Like others in the recent past the Open Group has taken on a industry focus for these quarterly conferences. The goal here is to provide a very tailored experience to EA’s in those specific industries. With this focus and where the conference was hosted I was surprised to see the very broad attendance and representation from many nations all over the world that include 28 nations: UK, US, Columbia, Philippines, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, Germany, South Africa and many others.
The theme of this conference was Business Transformation in Finance, Government and Healthcare. There were some very interesting sessions specifically from the keynote presenters based in the UK. If you were not there you can watch the live stream of the keynote presentations here:
- One World EA Framework for Governments - The Way Forward
- Using Enterprise Architecture to Inform Business Transformation Councils for UK’s Bath and Somerset Council
- Healthcare Transformation
You will find from all of these presentations that there is a shift in how EA is used and the results generated. As an example, Judith Jones from Architecting-The-Enterprise, shared her findings from the World Economic Forum, posing the question “what keeps 1000 global leaders awake at night”? There were stats were presented with over 50 global risks – economical, societal, environmental, geopolitical and technological. There wasn’t the typical drudging over IT oriented topics. Luckily this was a shared theme across many of the pure vertical tracks.
The Open Group has posted two summaries are well, I would suggest taking a look at them. I wasn’t going to duplicate much of what they covered since they did such a good job. See below:
Announcements
Even though there was a vertical focus the Open Group did cover additional areas around the profession of EA, forward looking views on the industry and architecture topics like big data and cloud.
Included in that were a series of announcements:
- Jericho Forum has decided the time has come to “declare success”. For security professionals this will be particularly interesting. The group communicated that their original goals from 10 years ago have been achieved.
- Philips now a Platinum Member of the Open Group and preparing to enter the Accredited Certification Program (ACP). This is the first end customer in a while to be a Platinum Member. This really shows value back to “real” customers and not big IT vendors.
- Open FAIR Certification for People Program. Certification the focuses on the risk analysis standard FAIR.
- TOGAF® 9 Certification Reaches 25,000 Milestone. The Open Group has now certified over 25,913 EA’s around the world in more than 90 countries.
- Apple OS X Version 10.9 Mavericks certified by the Open Group. The Open Group has a diverse set of standards under it’s belt. UNIX is one of those standards.
Mike Walker’s Participation at the Event
Unfortunately for myself I wasn’t able to attend many of the afternoon sessions at the conference. Would see more coverage and thoughts about the event. This was due largely to my leadership duties at the Open Group in developing the next version of TOGAF. Specifically I spent time in two areas, leading the Business Architecture work stream along with Enterprise Architecture Capabilities workshop (see more here). I will talk more about the Enterprise Architecture Capabilities in another post.
The time that I did spend in the conference center was spent presenting to the conference attendees. I had two sessions that centered around the profession itself:
- Enterprise Architecture Certifications Distilled
- Panel Session: Looking to the Future
Enterprise Architecture Certifications Distilled
In my presentation, I distilled a wide range of the certifications directly applicable to Enterprise Architecture. While this was a narrow view on the EA profession, it’s one of the most common questions I get from customers. Certifications are only one component of a career planning conversation. Most importantly for organizations, it is a component of a competency driven strategy to drive results for your organization.
With that said, and if you agree with the assertion, there are so many different EA certifications out there, without the proper framing it can get a bit confusing. I provide perspectives on certifications like TOGAF®, Open CA, and Open CITS to name a few. Then discuss why it is important to choose the right certification for your career. I examine why skills and experience-based certifications are becoming increasingly more important to both employers and employees as part of the professional development process.
You can see the Live Stream below for those that wasn’t able to attend:
Looking into the Future Panel
Thanks to David Daniel @AgileEngineer for snapping a shot of all of us.
In this panel session I participated we discussed some of the key issues facing the future development of the Enterprise Architecture discipline. You might of seen me talk on other panels about this very topic. A detailed post on my predictions can be found in the post entitled, “Predictions: Enterprise Architecture In 2020”. My thoughts on these topics haven’t changed much.
The questions asked were:
- How will the practice of architecture be materially different in 5 years?
- Will enterprise architecture ever achieve a professional status - similar to medicine or law?
- Are universities the right place to teach enterprise architecture?
- Are there any other disciplines that threaten to supersede EA? If so - what are they?
Thank You
I wanted to extend a big thank you to both The Open Group for asking me to come and speak again at their conference along with all the attendees that joined my sessions, asked some really great questions and tweeted some of my thoughts.
Thank you!