By Ash Patel, Marketing Specialist, The Open Group
During the recent Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Summit (Hybrid Event) involving the Presidents Awards, Steve Nunn, President, and CEO for The Open Group, proudly announced the winners.
This included Fujitsu (accepted by Chris Frost) for ‘Most Valuable Contribution as an Organization’ and also Rob Akershoek for ‘Most Valuable Contributor Award for an Individual’, in relation to being an active contributor of the Forum, making IT4IT flow.
Chris Frost, CTO Global Technology, Fujitsu. Chris has worked for Fujitsu since 2005, in variety of technical leadership roles. At present he is Deputy Head IT Systems Technology Div, and CTO Global Technology Group. Previous to this he has been the CTO for various business units in Fujitsu UK & Ireland, on large outsourcing contracts for several Fujitsu customers.

Rob Akershoek, IT management architect and consultant at Logicalis SMC. For over 20 years, he has been involved in improving IT organizations by designing and implementing integrated processes and tools. He has been working on dozens of projects to implement best practices (such as ITIL and COBIT) and the roll-out of numerous integrated IT management solutions. Currently Rob is working as an IT4IT™ architect at Shell responsible for the solution architecture and design of IT management solutions. In this role, Rob has been involved in The Open Group IT4IT Forum from the start and is currently Chair of the Forum. Rob is also lead author of the management guide, IT4IT™ for Managing the Business of IT.

After receiving the awards, I caught up with Chris Frost and Rob Akershoek, as they shared with me how they felt about the award and what it meant to them.
Most Valuable Contribution as an Organization…..Winner: Fujitsu (accepted by Chris Frost)
“I was delighted to receive the “Most Valuable Contributor” award on behalf of Fujitsu from Steve Nunn. We’ve been members of The Open Group since it’s start in 1996, and have contributed to many of the standards and participated in other activities with The Open Group. Our COO, Hidenori Furuta, made a special video for the 25th anniversary celebrations, underlying the importance of The Open Group to Fujitsu. I’ve also made some contributions myself, in particular the leadership of the work to produce the new TOGAF Series Guide “Enabling Enterprise Agility”, so this award meant a lot to me personally too. I look forward to many more years of fruitful contribution!”- Chris Frost, CTO Global Technology, Fujitsu
Most Valuable Contributor Award for an Individual… Winner: Rob Akershoek
“It is great to be part of The Open Group community, providing the ability to contribute to new digital standards, and improve the way we manage this new digital ecosystem. Co-creating with many different companies and participants is very motivating. It is honor to have received this Presidents Award for my personal contribution. This award gives a lot of motivation to continue this journey of collaborating and bridging the various practices and standards in the market, so we can mature the digital management practices in the market. I also got an overwhelming response on winning this award on LinkedIn (over 20.000 views and 460 likes, and many great comments).”
Finally, congratulations to all the nominees for their participation in The Open Group initiatives over the years. We would not be able to accomplish the work that we do or create the standards that are helping to drive the technology industry, without working together to achieve our vision of open standards.

Ash Patel, Marketing Specialist, joined The Open Group in 2020, initially working in the Certification Team as a Certification Services Agent, before moving into the Marketing Team where he now works on email mailers, content for the staff intranet (O-Zone), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), to monitoring stats for email communications. Ash holds a First-Class Bachelor’s Degree in Media Production (BA hons) from Coventry University and has a background in content writing, copy writing, script writing, photo editing and video editing. He is based in the UK.
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