By The Open Group
On Monday, April 20, Allen Brown, President & CEO of The Open Group, welcomed 150 attendees to the Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow™ summit held at the Madrid Eurobuilding Hotel. Following are highlights from the plenary:
The Digital Transformation of the Public Administration of Spain – Domingo Javier Molina Moscoso
Domingo Molina, the first Spanish national CIO, said that governments must transform digitally to meet public expectations, stay nationally competitive, and control costs – the common theme in transformation of doing more with less. Their CORA commission studied what commercial businesses did, and saw the need for an ICT platform as part of the reform, along with coordination and centralization of ICT decision making across agencies.
Three Projects:
- Telecom consolidation – €125M savings, reduction in infrastructure and vendors
- Reduction in number of data centers
- Standardizing and strengething security platform for central administration – only possible because of consolidation of telecom.
The Future: Increasing use of mobile, social networks, online commercial services such as banking – these are the expectations of young people. The administration must therefore be in the forefront of providing digital services to citizens. They have set a transformation target of having citizens being able to interact digitally with all government services by 2020.
Q&A:
- Any use of formal methods for transformation such as EA? Looked at other countries – seen models such as outsourcing. They are taking a combined approach of reusing their experts and externalizing.
- How difficult has it been to achieve savings in Europe given labor laws? Model is to re-assign people to higher-value tasks.
- How do you measure progress: Each unit has own ERP for IT governance – no unified reporting. CIO requests and consolidates data. Working on common IT tool to do this.
An Enterprise Transformation Approach for Today’s Digital Business – Fernando García Velasco
Computing has moved from tabulating systems to the internet and moving into an era of “third platform” of Cloud, Analytics, Mobile and Social (CAMS) and cognitive computing. The creates a “perfect storm” for disruption of enterprise IT delivery.
- 58% say SMAC will reduce barriers to entry
- 69% say it will increase competition
- 41% expect this competition to come from outside traditional market players
These trends are being collected and consolidated in The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ standard.
He sees the transformation happening in three ways:
- Top-down – a transformation view
- Meet in the middle: Achieving innovation through EA
- Bottom-up: the normal drive for incremental improvement
Gartner: EA is the discipline for leading enterprise response to disruptive forces. IDC: EA is mandatory for managing transformation to third platform.
EA Challenges & Evolution – a Younger Perspective
Steve Nunn, COO of The Open Group and CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects (AEA), noted the AEA is leading the development of EA as a profession, and is holding the session to recognize the younger voices joining the EA profession. He introduced the panelists: Juan Abal, Itziar Leguinazabal, Mario Gómez Velasco, Daniel Aguado Pérez, Ignacio Macias Jareño.
The panelists talked about their journey as EAs, noting that their training focused on development with little exposure to EA or Computer Science concepts. Schools aren’t currently very interested in teaching EA, so it is hard to get a start. Steve Nunn noted the question of how to enter EA as a profession is a worldwide concern. The panelists said they started looking at EA as a way of gaining a wider perspective of the development or administrative projects they were working on. Mentoring is important, and there is a challenge in learning about the business side when coming from a technical world. Juan Abal said such guidance and mentoring by senior architects is one of the benefits the AEA chapter offers.
Q: What advice would you give to someone entering into the EA career? A: If you are starting from a CS or engineering perspective, you need to start learning about the business. Gain a deep knowledge of your industry. Expect a lot of hard work, but it will have the reward of having more impact on decisions. Q: EA is really about business and strategy. Does the AEA have a strategy for making the market aware of this? A: The Spanish AEA chapter focuses on communicating that EA is a mix, and that EAs need to develop business skills. It is a concern that young architects are focused on IT aspects of EA, and how they can be shown the path to understand the business side.
Q: Should EA be part of the IT program or the CS program in schools? A: We have seen around the world a history of architects coming from IT and that only a few universities have specific IT programs. Some offer it at the postgraduate level. The EA is trying globally to raise awareness of the need for EA education. continuing education as part of a career development path is a good way to manage the breadth of skills a good EA needs; organizations should also be aware of the levels of The Open Group Open CA certifications.
Q: If EA is connected to business, should EAs be specialized to the vertical sector, or should EA be business agnostic? A: Core EA skills are industry-agnostic, and these need to be supplemented by industry-specific reference models. Methodology, Industry knowledge and interpersonal skills are all critical, and these are developed over time.
Q: Do you use EA tools in your job? A: Not really – the experience to use complex tools comes over time.
Q: Are telecom companies adopting EA? A: Telecom companies are adopting standard reference architectures. This sector has not made much progress in EA, though it is critical for transformation in the current market. Time pressure in a changing market is also a barrier.
Q: Is EA being grown in-house or outsourced? A: We are seeing increased uptake among end-user companies in using EA to achieve transformation – this is happening across sectors and is a big opportunity in Spain right now.
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