By Sonia Gonzalez, Digital Portfolio Manager, The Open Group, and Michelle Horrobin, Digital Portfolio Forum Director, The Open Group
The modern world runs on open standards. It does not matter if you are running a small firm or the most complex organization, Digital Transformation endeavors apply open standards to ensure that things that need to work together do work together.
In late July, The Open Group hosted an event bringing together speakers and practitioners from around the world to meet in Washington, DC at the historical Mayflower Hotel, and discuss some of today’s most vital topics in the area of security and resiliency.
With a focus on Zero Trust Architecture and Supply Chain Security, leaders from businesses including Microsoft, IBM, Micro Focus, and ServiceNow joined experts from public sector organizations like NIST and NASA, together with representatives from The Open Group itself, to explore how open standards are driving important developments and actionable insights in these important and developing topics.
By Kees van den Brink, Senior Manager Platform Architect, ServiceNow.
This blog title is derived from the famous quote by George E.P. Box from his paper “Science and Statistics”:
Box made this statement in relation to the use of statistical models by scientists, but I’ve found that it applies equally well to the use of open standards by enterprise architects and other digital practitioners.
Key take away from this blog:
o Standards can be useful when you:
o Learn and adopt from what makes sense
o Reject what does not fit
o Want to know more: Read “The Turning Point: A Novel about Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation”
Frankly, standards can be very helpful and are necessary, like the TCP/IP standard, or even old standards such as the Baudot Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code), which helped early instances of what would later be called telecommunications companies grow fast, or the ISO Standards, which help with interoperability.
However, there are a lot of lesser-known standards that are not getting such broad adoption. Examples that come to mind are the IT4IT™ Standard, TOGAF® Standard, BIZBOK®, etc.
y, Associate Director, Enterprise Architecture & Strategy
I consider open standards a huge time saver when getting started on any architecture engagement. I would like to start a conversation here about the use of architecture standards for agility in a digital transformation. In the comments, would you please answer the following question?:
Which standards have you tried using, to solve which problems, and what benefits did you receive?
To get this started, here are some of the standards we opted to include in a book I recently co-authored with Kees van Brink and Sylvain Marie called, “The Turning Point: A Novel about Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation.” The novel tells the story of Enterprise Architects and other characters in a company who recently went through a merger and who use several standards together to accelerate a Digital Transformation, including these standards from The Open Group
As organizations across all industries strive to become Digital First, open standards are more important than ever for providing the necessary frameworks and career development tools to drive transformation progress.
This week, our ‘Open Digital Standards’ Virtual Event April 26-28 brought together experts from across the globe to provide guidance for the creation and implementation of open digital standards. It was fantastic to see 1,300 attendees from more than 85 countries gather virtually to discuss various approaches and best practices for making sense of the evolving business landscape and delivering digital products and services.
In the ongoing transition to Digital-First, an increasing number of technology executives, managers, and practitioners are looking for new approaches that will help them to make sense of the evolving business landscape and deliver digital products and services.
As an organization that is known for solving business issues through global industry collaboration, The Open Group hosted its third virtual event October 26-29, 2020, which provided over 3,300 registrants with the opportunity to discover the critical digital standards that enable a smooth transition to a Digital-First enterprise.
