By Loren K. Baynes, Director, Global Marketing Communications, The Open Group
On Monday, October 29, The Open Group kicked off the final event of 2018 in Singapore. Set in the magnificent InterContinental Singapore hotel, Steve Nunn, President and CEO of The Open Group, opened proceedings in front of an international audience with attendees from 24 countries including Belgium, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the Philippines.
The theme of the event is Managing Digital Enterprises and the first keynote speaker was UK-based David Wheable from Forrester Research. David gave an interesting talk using data from recent research about how organizations can become Digital Enterprises and how to embed the appropriate approaches and practices necessary for Digital Transformation while maintaining their existing technology investment.
Following David was Trevor Cheung, VP Strategy and Architecture Practice at Huawei Global Services, who suggested that Digital Transformation should be human-centered, focusing on the rational and emotional needs of both customers and employees. In an entertaining talk, where the audience was on its feet (at one point, Trevor asked the attendees to stand for 5 minutes), he went on to stress the importance of changing people’s mindsets to succeed in Digital Transformation. Culture is key as is doing things that have a real business impact.
After the coffee break, we heard from Judith Jones, CEO, ATE Enterprises, who went “Back to the Future”. Judith talked about the contribution Enterprise Architecture can make to the future digital world and its own future. She highlighted that one of the G20 Digital Government principles is to strengthen the digital skills of public servants, citizens, and businesses. She also considered how organizations need to structure themselves to capitalize on the automation opportunities and become the winners on the way to the Digital Age.
In the final session of the morning, Steve Nunn gave an update on the work being carried out in The Open Group Forums and Work Groups. He covered the Forum highlights of 2018 including the launch of the TOGAF® Standard, Version 9.2, the ArchiMate® Version 3.0.1 release, and the publication of the FACE™ Technical Standard, Edition 3.0, to name but a few. Steve also talked about the ongoing activities of the Forums including work on EA for Agile, IT4IT™ and BIAN Executable Standards in the ArchiMate® Modeling Language, Open Process Automation Preliminary Standard (O-PAS™), SOSA™ Technical Standard, and the Open Subsurface Data Universe™ Standards.
The afternoon sessions were split into tracks on Digital Enterprise and Enterprise Architecture:
- Design Thinking for the Digital Enterprise – Mayank Saxena, Enterprise Architect, ABN AMRO Bank
- Organizing for Digital Transformation with Enterprise Architecture – Madhu Dharmarajan, Enterprise Architect, HPE
- Strategic Enterprise Map Creation with TOGAF® and ArchiMate® – Aaron Tan Dani, Chairman of Enterprise Architecture SIG, Singapore Computer Society
- Creating an integrated EA Organization based on City Planning Metaphors – Rolf Knoll, Head of Competence Area EAM, NovaTec Consulting
The day concluded with an evening networking reception – where a good time was had by all!
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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 25 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.