By Chris Frost, Principal Enterprise Architect, Application Technology Consulting Division, Fujitsu.
The Open Group has a great set of Standards for digital business. These have evolved over time as members have collaborated to create the standards we need for our businesses. You can see them all on the website today, The TOGAF® Standards, (TOGAF®) The Open Group IT4IT™ Standards, (IT4IT™) The ArchiMate® Specification, (ArchiMate®) Open Agile Architecture™ Standard, (O-AA™) The Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge™ Standard, (DPBoK™), Open FAIR™, and many others.
There are years of hard work from members poured into these standards, and they each address some aspect of developing and running digital businesses. But if you look at the website, and visit these links, then you’ll see that each standard is presented largely stand-alone, with few obvious relationships between them. That’s great if you already know, for example, that you need the TOGAF Standard for your Enterprise Architecture capability. However, if you want to understand where these standards fit within a digital business, or how they relate to one another, then that is more difficult to see. What we need is a view of the whole portfolio of standards.
By “portfolio” I mean something that is more organised than a simple list of standards, showing the relationships and connections between them, and presented in a simple picture or map. So for example, IT4IT™ and TOGAF® have a strong connection in that TOGAF® provides the Enterprise Architecture framework that is needed in the IT4IT Strategy Function. You could imagine on the website seeing that graphically, and being able to click through from one to the other. I’ve show below some of my thoughts on how the portfolio might fit together:
I hope this gives an idea of how the Portfolio will give a greater ability to navigate from one standard to the next, and understand what standards are applicable to a particular situation. The Portfolio as a whole will be more powerful than an unrelated set of standards; each one will be supporting the others. For people participating in working groups and making new standards, it will mean easier cross-refencing between standards and avoiding duplication. Ultimately, I believe this will strengthen position of The Open Group as provider of Digital Open Standards and show a stronger value proposition for existing and prospective members. It could even be a way finder for future standards development by highlighting gaps and overlaps.
If all this sounds interesting to you and you would like to get involved in making it a reality, then please join us in the Digital Practitioners Working Group. If you are not a member of The Open Group Information related on how to become a member can be found in here or through this contact memberservices@opengroup.org
Also, you can visit our Digital Enterprise page and our Digital Portfolio library where you will find more information
Chris has worked for Fujitsu since 2005, in variety of technical leadership roles. At present he is a Principal Enterprise Architect within the Application Technology Consulting Division, which provides guidelines, standards, and expert technical support for the global Fujitsu 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.
Before Fujitsu, Chris worked for EDS (now part of HP) on several large contracts for the MoD, and in earlier years worked for Ford, Shell, and a small startup software house called Shamrock Marketing.