By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Communications, The Open Group
The Open Group CEO & President Steve Nunn kicked off the second day of The Open Group San Francisco event, “Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow™”, with a warm greeting and quick update on activities in The Open Group Forums.
Of note were updates regarding progress on harmonizing ArchiMate® and TOGAF® within the ArchiMate and Architecture Forums, as well as joint work between the Architecture and Open Platform 3.0™ Forum on digitalization and customer experience. In addition, the FACE™ Forum will be launching a certification program later this year, the Healthcare Forum recently published a whitepaper on healthcare focus and the OTTF Standard is currently being translated into Chinese. And in the Security Forum, work is being done around Risk Management, as well as building a more robust approach to security planning into TOGAF. Steve also presented long-time Open Group member Kirk Hansen with an award for his work in the Architecture Forum.
Tuesday’s morning plenary session focused on IT4IT™ and managing the business of IT.
The first session of the morning was given jointly by Ryan Schmierer, Business & Enterprise Architect, and Kathleen Wilson, Enterprise Architect for Data Center & Cloud Services, from Microsoft presenting on “The Case for Change: How Lessons Learned by Microsoft Align with IT4IT.”
According to Wilson, today DevOps are driving the cadence of the Cloud. With the largest technology companies now deploying new capabilities anywhere from a few times a week to thousands of times a day, IT must focus more on delivering business value and brokering services. This new model will require a high level of automation and heavy emphasis on systems monitoring within IT to deliver services and manage failures. With the drastic changes in how IT works, Wilson believes the cloud will make the role of traditional IT pros obsolete within the next five years.
To avoid IT becoming irrelevant, Schmierer says IT will need to shift its role to focus more on being a service broker, business enabler and steward of enterprise data while ensuring security throughout the enterprise. However, this will require change. IT organizations will need to reexamine definitions of success to focus more on business outcomes rather than IT metrics, experimentation and learning and use a more outside-in orientation to solve problems. By fully integrating IT management systems, companies will be able to better manage the IT value stream and create end-to-end systems that can provide a true services model and provide better decision-making in organizations.
Microsoft’s presentation was followed by a brief update on progress within the IT4IT Forum by Chris Davis, IT4IT Forum Director and Professor of Information Systems, University of South Florida. Two years ago, a group of folks from various organizations first met to discuss the possibility of an IT4IT standards. In the short time since, not only has the group launched the IT4IT Forum within The Open Group, but it has recently published its first Reference Architecture, which already has more than 5,000 downloads worldwide and is being used by more than 3,000 individuals from approximately 800 organizations. The Forum has also published a management guide and hopes to launch its first IT4IT people certification in April of this year.
Following the morning coffee break, Rabobank Business Architect Toine Jenniskens presented a case study on “How IT4IT Helps Rabobank Navigate the DevOps Journey.” Like Microsoft, Rabobank is looking to automate and monitor as many IT processes as possible and create a modular IT model so the department can focus more on business priorities. To do this, the bank is taking a value-stream based approach based on the IT4IT Value Chain and Reference Architecture to manage its IT processes and breakdown silos across the organization. Thus far, the bank has begun to consolidate tools across functions, increase IT automation and fully automate incident management. Although their transformation is still underway, Rabobank has been able to automate delivery, increase time to market, lower costs and create greater continuity in services and delivery as a result.
The final morning session was a panel discussion on IT4IT in Practice led by Interarbor Solutions IT Analyst Dana Gardner. The vendor panel featured IT4IT Forum Chair Chris Davis; Lars Rossen, Distinguished Technologist, HP Enterprise; David Wright, Chief Strategy Officer, ServiceNow; and Ryan Schmierer, who presented earlier in the plenary.
The panel discussed a number of critical issues around how IT management is changing and how IT4IT can ease that transition IT including how and why IT4IT was developed by and for IT managers, the possibility of using an IT framework to model services across other parts of the business and how to get traction for and start using IT4IT within IT departments. According to Wright, industry traction for a more holistic view of IT seems to be coming first from financial services and pharmaceutical sectors. Schmierer says that he believes there will be early adoption for IT4IT among companies that have large legacy IT systems, typical technology early adopters and those under the most pressure for cost performance. One way to know early on whether IT4IT is working within organizations, Rossen says, is that they’ll see a difference in areas for multi-services. Davis added that although the changes IT4IT will bring will likely be difficult to measure, but it will be sensed within organizations. However, Wright suggests organizations put together ways to measure success prior to beginning projects so departments can benchmark against them after projects are completed.
Tuesday’s afternoon tracks followed three different threads—a continuation of the morning’s discussions around IT4IT; EA topics around business transformation and value; and Open Platform topics including mobile computing and data analytics. In the IT4IT track, attendees were treated to a number of deep dives into the IT4IT Value Chain, providing a peek under the covers of each stream within the chain. The EA track featured practical examples of EA transformation in practice including an energy industry case study, a look at how SOA is maturing and advice on getting practical value from architectures.
In the Open Platform 3.0 Mobile Computing track, Russ Gibfried, Enterprise Architect for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, gave an interesting talk on the use of mobile platforms in the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) entitled “Probation Officers Online and On the Streets in San Diego.” The SDPD has implemented a system using smartphones and smart watches as technology hubs for the county’s probation officers. Using a mobile app, officers are now able to managing their caseloads and contact notes in the field, as well as use location services and search capabilities to keep tabs on clients.
Afterward, Modi Ronen an IT/Business Enterprise Architect from Salesforce, spoke on enterprise mobile strategies for cloud architectures. We now live in a primarily mobile world. However, most mobile apps are still abandoned, forgotten or deleted. As such, those designing for mobile must begin to prepare for Mobile 3.0 user experiences—usability, value, adoptability and desirability, as well as personalization—that better marry form and function for users, particularly as the Internet of Things and wearables become more ubiquitous.
In the late afternoon tracks, Don Brancato, Chief Enterprise Architect for HPE First, and Myles Suer, Chief Platform Evangelist, Informatica, hosted a talk on “Removing Science from Big Data Programs.” Brancato and Suer posit that science and looking for nebulous information is holding up the progress of Big Data to the detriment of gaining business value. What companies are finding is that Big Data is not a cure-all for the problems associated with traditional Business Intelligence. Rather than getting stuck with scientists digging around through masses of data, Brancato and Suer advocate for automated Big Data services that will allow for more easily repeatable analyses that deliver the actionable information businesses really need and get users involved in the process as early as possible.
Also in the late afternoon, Michael Fulton, Principal Architect, CC&C Solutions held a discussion providing details on the upcoming IT4IT Certification and Training Program followed by another panel discussion on IT4IT, again moderated by Dana Gardner.
The afternoon panelists included Fulton; Philippe Geneste, Partner at Accenture; Sue Desiderio, IT Enablement Process Leader, for PWC; Dwight David, Enterprise Architect for HPE; and Rob Akershoek, Solution Architect for Shell. To wrap up the day, the panel discussed the state of the IT4IT Reference Architecture today, where it needs to continue to evolve and the value of automation for IT organizations. The panel strongly encouraged attendees to try out the standard so they can see what’s working well and where tweaks may need to be made.
The day ended with a dinner and wine tasting event at San Francisco’s famous Presidio, a park and former military base, with beautiful views overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
On Wednesday and Thursday, work sessions and member meetings were held.
A special ‘thank you’ goes to our sponsors and exhibitors: Association of Enterprise Architects (AEA), BiZZdesign, Good e-Learning, HPE, Orbus Software, Signavio, SNA Technologies, Van Haren Publishing.
Other content, photos and highlights can be found via #ogSFO on Twitter. Select videos are on The Open Group YouTube channel. For full agenda and speakers, please visit The Open Group San Francisco 2016.
Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, joined The Open Group in 2013 and spearheads corporate marketing initiatives, primarily the website, blog, media relations and social media. Loren has over 20 years experience in brand marketing and public relations and, prior to The Open Group, was with The Walt Disney Company for over 10 years. Loren holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas A&M University. She is based in the US.