The Open Group Panel Explores Ways to Help Smart Cities Initiatives Overcome Public Sector Obstacles

Transcript of a discussion on how The Open Group is ambitiously seeking to improve the impact of smart cities initiatives by easing the complexity and unique challenges inherent in public-sector digital transformation projects.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion on how The Open Group is spearheading ways to make smart cities initiatives more effective.

Gardner

Many of the latest technologies -- such as Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, big data analytics, and cloud computing -- are making data-driven and efficiency-focused digital transformation more powerful.

But exploiting these advances to improve municipal services for cities and urban government agencies face unique obstacles. Challenges range from a lack of common data sharing frameworks, to immature governance over multi-agency projects, to the need to find investment funding amid tight public sector budgets.

The good news is that architectural framework methods, extended enterprise knowledge sharing, and common specifying and purchasing approaches have solved many similar issues in other domains.

We will now explore how The Open Group is ambitiously seeking to improve the impact of smart cities initiatives by implementing what works organizationally among the most complex projects.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator as we now examine the future of smart cities programs. With that, please join me in welcoming our panel, Dr. Chris Harding, Chief Executive Officer at Lacibus. Welcome, Dr. Harding.

Dr. Chris Harding: Thank you, Dana. It’s a pleasure to be on the podcast, and I am looking forward to a great discussion.

Gardner: We’re also here with Dr. Pallab Saha, Chief Architect at The Open Group. Welcome.

Dr. Pallab Saha: Thank you, Dana. It’s great to be on this panel. I look forward to a very involved discussion.

Gardner: Don Brancato, Chief Strategy Architect at Boeing, joins us. Welcome, Don.

Don Brancato: Thanks very much, Dana. I appreciate joining the discussion.

Gardner: We are here, too, with Don Sunderland, Deputy Commissioner, Data Management and Integration, New York City Department of IT and Telecommunications. Welcome, Don.

Don Sunderland: Thank you. I am very much looking forward to the conversation.

Gardner: Filling out our panel is Dr. Anders Lisdorf, Enterprise Architect for Data Services for the City of New York. Welcome, Dr. Lisdorf.

Dr. Anders Lisdorf: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: Chris, why are urban and regional government projects different from other complex digital transformation initiatives?

Harding

Harding: Municipal projects have both differences and similarities compared with corporate enterprise projects. The most fundamental difference is in the motivation. If you are in a commercial enterprise, your bottom line motivation is money, to make a profit and a return on investment for the shareholders. If you are in a municipality, your chief driving force should be the good of the citizens -- and money is just a means to achieving that end.

This is bound to affect the ways one approaches problems and solves problems. A lot of the underlying issues are the same as corporate enterprises face.

Bottom-up blueprint approach

Brancato: Within big companies we expect that the chief executive officer (CEO) leads from the top of a hierarchy that looks like a triangle. This CEO can do a cause-and-effect analysis by looking at instrumentation, global markets, drivers, and so on to affect strategy. And what an organization will do is then top-down.

In a city, often it’s the voters, the masses of people, who empower the leaders. And the triangle goes upside down. The flat part of the triangle is now on the top. This is where the voters are. And so it’s not simply making the city a mirror of our big corporations. We have to deliver value differently.

There are three levels to that. One is instrumentation, so installing sensors and delivering data. Second is data crunching, the ability to turn the data into meaningful information. And lastly, urban informatics that tie back to the voters, who then keep the leaders in power. We have to observe these in order to understand the smart city.

Saha

Saha: Two things make smart city projects more complex. First, typically large countries have multilevel governments. One at the federal level, another at a provincial or state level, and then city-level government, too.

This creates complexity because cities have to align to the state they belong to, and also to the national level. Digital transformation initiatives and architecture-led initiatives need to help.

Secondly, in many countries around the world, cities are typically headed by mayors who have merely ceremonial positions. They have very little authority in how the city runs, because the city may belong to a state and the state might have a chief minister or a premier, for example. And at the national level, you could have a president or a prime minster. This overall governance hierarchy needs to be factored when smart city projects are undertaken.

These two factors bring in complexity and differentiation in how smart city projects are planned and implemented.

Sunderland: I agree with everything that’s been said so far. In the particular case of New York City -- and with a lot of cities in the US -- cities are fairly autonomous. They aren’t bound to the states. They have an opportunity to go in the direction they set.

The problem is, of course, the idea of long-term planning in a political context. Corporations can choose to create multiyear plans and depend on the scale of the products they procure. But within cities, there is a forced changeover of management every few years. Sometimes it’s difficult to implement a meaningful long-term approach. So, they have to be more reactive.

Create demand to drive demand

Driving greater continuity can nonetheless come by creating ongoing demand around the services that smart cities produce. Under [former New York City mayor] Michael Bloomberg, for example, when he launched 311 and nyc.gov, he had a basic philosophy which was, you should implement change that can’t be undone.

If you do something like offer people the ability to reduce 10,000 [city access] phone numbers to three digits, that’s going to be hard to reverse. And the same thing is true if you offer a simple URL, where citizens can go to begin the process of facilitating whatever city services they need.

In like-fashion, you have to come up with a killer app with which you habituate the residents. They then drive demand for further services on the basis of it. But trying to plan delivery of services in the abstract -- without somehow having demand developed by the user base -- is pretty difficult.

By definition, cities and governments have a captive audience. They don’t have to pander to learn their demands. But whereas the private sector goes out of business if they don’t respond to the demands of their client base, that’s not the case in the public sector.

The public sector has to focus on providing products and tools that generate demand, and keep it growing in order to create the political impetus to deliver yet more demand.

Gardner: Anders, it sounds like there is a chicken and an egg here. You want a killer app that draws attention and makes more people call for services. But you have to put in the infrastructure and data frameworks to create that killer app. How does one overcome that chicken-and-egg relationship between required technical resources and highly visible applications?

Lisdorf

Lisdorf: The biggest challenge, especially when working in governments, is you don’t have one place to go. You have several different agencies with different agendas and separate preferences for how they like their data and how they like to share it.

This is a challenge for any Enterprise Architecture (EA) because you can’t work from the top-down, you can’t specify your architecture roadmap. You have to pick the ways that it’s convenient to do a project that fit into your larger picture, and so on.

It’s very different working in an enterprise and putting all these data structures in place than in a city government, especially in New York City.

Gardner: Dr. Harding, how can we move past that chicken and egg tension? What needs to change for increasing the capability for technology to be used to its potential early in smart cities initiatives?

Framework for a common foundation 

Harding: As Anders brought up, there are lots of different parts of city government responsible for implementing IT systems. They are acting independently and autonomously -- and I suspect that this is actually a problem that cities share with corporate enterprises.

Very large corporate enterprises may have central functions, but often that is small in comparison with the large divisions that it has to coordinate with. Those divisions often act with autonomy. In both cases, the challenge is that you have a set of independent governance domains -- and they need to share data. What’s needed is some kind of framework to allow data sharing to happen.

This framework has to be at two levels. It has to be at a policy level -- and that is going to vary from city to city or from enterprise to enterprise. It also has to be at a technical level. There should be a supporting technical framework that helps the enterprises, or the cities, achieve data sharing between their independent governance domains.

Gardner: Dr. Saha, do you agree that a common data framework approach is a necessary step to improve things?

Saha: Yes, definitely. Having common data standards across different agencies and having a framework to support that interoperability between agencies is a first step. But as Dr. Anders mentioned, it’s not easy to get agencies to collaborate with one another or share data. This is not a technical problem. Obviously, as Chris was saying, we need policy-level integration both vertically and horizontally across different agencies.

Some cities set up urban labs as a proof of concept. You can make assessment on how the demand and supply are aligned.

One way I have seen that work in cities is they set up urban labs. If the city architect thinks they are important for citizens, those services are launched as a proof of concept (POC) in these urban labs. You can then make an assessment on whether the demand and supply are aligned.

Obviously, it is a chicken-and-egg problem. We need to go beyond frameworks and policies to get to where citizens can try out certain services. When I use the word “services” I am looking at integrated services across different agencies or service providers.

The fundamental principle here for the citizens of the city is that there is no wrong door, he or she can approach any department or any agency of the city and get a service. The citizen, in my view, is approaching the city as a singular authority -- not a specific agency or department of the city.

Gardner: Don Brancato, if citizens in their private lives can, at an e-commerce cloud, order almost anything and have it show up in two days, there might be higher expectations for better city services.

Is that a way for us to get to improvement in smart cities, that people start calling for city and municipal services to be on par with what they can do in the private sector?

Public- and private-sector parity

Brancato: You are exactly right, Dana. That’s what’s driven the do it yourself (DIY) movement. If you use a cell phone at home, for example, you expect that you should be able to integrate that same cell phone in a secure way at work. And so that transitivity is expected. If I can go to Amazon and get a service, why can’t I go to my office or to the city and get a service?

Brancato

This forms some of the tactical reasons for better using frameworks, to be able to deliver such value. A citizen is going to exercise their displeasure by their vote, or by moving to some other place, and is then no longer working or living there.

Traceability is also important. If I use some service, it’s then traceable to some city strategy, it’s traceable to some data that goes with it. So the traceability model, in its abstract form, is the idea that if I collect data it should trace back to some service. And it allows me to build a body of metrics that show continuously how services are getting better. Because data, after all, is the enablement of the city, and it proves that by demonstrating metrics that show that value.

So, in your e-commerce catalog idea, absolutely, citizens should be able to exercise the catalog. There should be data that shows its value, repeatability, and the reuse of that service for all the participants in the city.

Gardner: Don Sunderland, if citizens perceive a gap between what they can do in the private sector and public -- and if we know a common data framework is important -- why don’t we just legislate a common data framework? Why don’t we just put in place common approaches to IT?

Sunderland: There have been some fairly successful legislative actions vis-à-vis making data available and more common. The Open Data Law, which New York City passed back in 2012, is an excellent example. However, the ability to pass a law does not guarantee the ability to solve the problems to actually execute it.

Sunderland

In the case of the service levels you get on Amazon, that implies a uniformity not only of standards but oftentimes of [hyperscale] platform. And that just doesn’t exist [in the public sector]. In New York City, you have 100 different entities, 50 to 60 of them are agencies providing services. They have built vast legacy IT systems that don’t interoperate. It would take a massive investment to make them interoperate. You still have to have a strategy going forward.

The idea of adopting standards and frameworks is one approach. The idea is you will then grow from there. The idea of creating a law that tries to implement uniformity -- like an Amazon or Facebook can -- would be doomed to failure, because nobody could actually afford to implement it.

Since you can’t do top-down solutions -- even if you pass a law -- the other way is via bottom-up opportunities. Build standards and governance opportunistically around specific centers of interest that arise. You can identify city agencies that begin to understand that they need each other’s data to get their jobs done effectively in this new age. They can then build interconnectivity, governance, and standards from the bottom-up -- as opposed to the top-down.

Gardner: Dr. Harding, when other organizations are siloed, when we can’t force everyone into a common framework or platform, loosely coupled interoperability has come to the rescue. Usually that’s a standardized methodological approach to interoperability. So where are we in terms of gaining increased interoperability in any fashion? And is that part of what The Open Group hopes to accomplish?

Not something you can legislate

Harding: It’s certainly part of what The Open Group hopes to accomplish. But Don was absolutely right. It’s not something that you can legislate. Top-down standards have not been very successful, whereas encouraging organic growth and building on opportunities have been successful.

The prime example is the Internet that we all love. It grew organically at a time when governments around the world were trying to legislate for a different technical solution; the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model for those that remember it. And that is a fairly common experience. They attempted to say, “Well, we know what the standard has to be. We will legislate, and everyone will do it this way.”

That often falls on its face. But to pick up on something that is demonstrably working and say, “Okay, well, let’s all do it like that,” can become a huge success, as indeed the Internet obviously has. And I hope that we can build on that in the sphere of data management.

It’s interesting that Tim Berners-Lee, who is the inventor of the World Wide Web, is now turning his attention to Solid, a personal online datastore, which may represent a solution or standardization in the data area that we need if we are going to have frameworks to help governments and cities organize.

A prime example is the Internet. It grew organically when governments were trying to legislate a solution. That often falls on its face. Better to pick up on something that is working in practice.

Gardner: Dr. Lisdorf, do you agree that the organic approach is the way to go, a thousand roof gardens, and then let the best fruit win the day?

Lisdorf: I think that is the only way to go because, as I said earlier, any top-down sort of way of controlling data initiatives in the city are bound to fail.

Gardner: Let’s look at the cost issues that impact smart cities initiatives. In the private sector, you can rely on an operating expenditure budget (OPEX) and also gain capital expenditures (CAPEX). But what is it about the funding process for governments and smart cities initiatives that can be an added challenge?

How to pay for IT?

Brancato: To echo what Dr. Harding suggested, cost and legacy will drive a funnel to our digital world and force us -- and the vendors -- into a world of interoperability and a common data approach.

Cost and legacy are what compete with transformation within the cities that we work with. What improves that is more interoperability and adoption of data standards. But Don Sunderland has some interesting thoughts on this.

Sunderland: One of the great educations you receive when you work in the public sector, after having worked in the private sector, is that the terms CAPEX and OPEX have quite different meanings in the public sector.

Governments, especially local governments, raise money through the sale of bonds. And within the local government context, CAPEX implies anything that can be funded through the sale of bonds. Usually there is specific legislation around what you are allowed to do with that bond. This is one of those places where we interact strongly with the state, which stipulates specific requirements around what that kind of money can be used for. Traditionally it was for things like building bridges, schools, and fixing highways. Technology infrastructure had been reflected in that, too.

What’s happened is that the CAPEX model has become less usable as we’ve moved to the cloud approach because capital expenditures disappear when you buy services, instead of licenses, on the data center servers that you procure and own.

This creates tension between the new cloud architectures, where most modern data architectures are moving to, and the traditional data center, server-centric licenses, which are more easily funded as capital expenditures.

The rules around CAPEX in the public sector have to evolve to embrace data as an easily identifiable asset [regardless of where it resides]. You can’t say it has no value when there are whole business models being built around the valuation of the data that’s being collected.

There is great hope for us being able to evolve. But for the time being, there is tension between creating the newer beneficial architectures and figuring out how to pay for them. And that comes down to paying for [cloud-based operating models] with bonds, which is politically volatile. What you pay for through operating expenses comes out of the taxes to the people, and that tax is extremely hard to come by and contentious.

So traditionally it’s been a lot easier to build new IT infrastructure and create new projects using capital assets rather than via ongoing expenses directly through taxes.

Gardner: If you can outsource the infrastructure and find a way to pay for it, why won’t municipalities just simply go with the cloud entirely?

Cities in the cloud, but services grounded

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Saha: Across the world, many governments -- not just local governments but even state and central governments -- are moving to the cloud. But one thing we have to keep in mind is that at the city level, it is not necessary that all the services be provided by an agency of the city.

It could be a public/private partnership model where the city agency collaborates with a private party who provides part of the service or process. And therefore, the private party is funded, or allowed to raise money, in terms of only what part of service it provides.

Many cities are addressing the problem of funding by taking the ecosystem approach because many cities have realized it is not essential that all services be provided by a government entity. This is one way that cities are trying to address the constraint of limited funding.

Gardner: Dr. Lisdorf, in a city like New York, is a public cloud model a silver bullet, or is the devil in the details? Or is there a hybrid or private cloud model that should be considered?

Lisdorf: I don’t think it’s a silver bullet. It’s certainly convenient, but since this is new technology there are lot of things we need to clear up. This is a transition, and there are a lot of issues surrounding that.

One is the funding. The city still runs in a certain way, where you buy the IT infrastructure yourself. If it is to change, they must reprioritize the budgets to allow new types of funding for different initiatives. But you also have issues like the culture because it’s different working in a cloud environment. The way of thinking has to change. There is a cultural inertia in how you design and implement IT solutions that does not work in the cloud.

There is still the perception that the cloud is considered something dangerous or not safe. Another view is that the cloud is a lot safer in terms of having resilient solutions and the data is safe.

This is all a big thing to turn around. It’s not a simple silver bullet. For the foreseeable future, we will look at hybrid architectures, for sure. We will offload some use cases to the cloud, and we will gradually build on those successes to move more into the cloud.

Gardner: We’ve talked about the public sector digital transformation challenges, but let’s now look at what The Open Group brings to the table.

Dr. Saha, what can The Open Group do? Is it similar to past initiatives around TOGAF as an architectural framework? Or looking at DoDAF, in the defense sector, when they had similar problems, are there solutions there to learn from?

Smart city success strategies

Saha: At The Open Group, as part of the architecture forum, we recently set up a Government Enterprise Architecture Work Group. This working group may develop a reference architecture for smart cities. That would be essential to establish a standardization journey around smart cities.

One of the reasons smart city projects don’t succeed is because they are typically taken on as an IT initiative, which they are not. We all know that digital technology is an important element of smart cities, but it is also about bringing in policy-level intervention. It means having a framework, bringing cultural change, and enabling a change management across the whole ecosystem.

At The Open Group work group level, we would like to develop a reference architecture. At a more practical level, we would like to support that reference architecture with implementation use cases. We all agree that we are not going to look at a top-down approach; no city will have the resources or even the political will to do a top-down approach.

Given that we are looking at a bottom-up, or a middle-out, approach we need to identify use cases that are more relevant and successful for smart cities within the Government Enterprise Architecture Work Group. But this thinking will also evolve as the work group develops a reference architecture under a framework.

Gardner: Dr. Harding, how will work extend from other activities of The Open Group to smart cities initiatives?

Collective, crystal-clear standards

Harding: For many years, I was a staff member, but I left The Open Group staff at the end of last year. In terms of how The Open Group can contribute, it’s an excellent body for developing and understanding complex situations. It has participants from many vendors, as well as IT users, and from the academic side, too.

Such a mix of participants, backgrounds, and experience creates a great place to develop an understanding of what is needed and what is possible. As that understanding develops, it becomes possible to define standards. Personally, I see standardization as kind of a crystallization process in which something solid and structured appears from a liquid with no structure. I think that the key role The Open Group plays in this process is as a catalyst, and I think we can do that in this area, too.

Gardner: Don Brancato, same question; where do you see The Open Group initiatives benefitting a positive evolution for smart cities?

Brancato: Tactically, we have a data exchange model, the Open Data Element Framework that continues to grow within a number of IoT and industrial IoT patterns.  That all ties together with an open platform, and into Enterprise Architecture in general, and specifically with models like DODAF, MODAF, and TOGAF.

Data catalogs provide proof of the activities of human systems, machines, and sensors to the fulfillment of their capabilities and are traceable up to the strategy.

We have a really nice collection of patterns that recognize that the data is the mechanism that ties it together. I would have a look at the open platform and the work they are doing to tie-in the service catalog, which is a collection of activities that human systems or machines need in order to fulfill their roles and capabilities.

The notion of data catalogs, which are the children of these service catalogs, provides the proof of the activities of human systems, machines, and sensors to the fulfillment of their capabilities and then are traceable up to the strategy.

I think we have a nice collection of standards and a global collection of folks who are delivering on that idea today.

Gardner: What would you like to see as a consumer, on the receiving end, if you will, of organizations like The Open Group when it comes to improving your ability to deliver smart city initiatives?

Use-case consumer value

Sunderland: I like the idea of reference architectures attached to use cases because -- for better or worse -- when folks engage around these issues -- even in large entities like New York City -- they are going to be engaging for specific needs.

Reference architectures are really great because they give you an intuitive view of how things fit. But the real meat is the use case, which is applied against the reference architecture. I like the idea of developing workgroups around a handful of reference architectures that address specific use cases. That then allows a catalog of use cases for those who facilitate solutions against those reference architectures. They can look for cases similar to ones that they are attempting to resolve. It’s a good, consumer-friendly way to provide value for the work you are doing.

Gardner: I’m sure there will be a lot more information available along those lines at www.opengroup.org.

When you improve frameworks, interoperability, and standardization of data frameworks, what success factors emerge that help propel the efforts forward? Let’s identify attractive drivers of future smart city initiatives. Let’s start with Dr. Lisdorf. What do you see as a potential use case, application, or service that could be a catalyst to drive even more smart cities activities?

Lisdorf: Right now, smart cities initiatives are out of control. They are usually done on an ad-hoc basis. One important way to get standardization enforced -- or at least considered for new implementations – is to integrate the effort as a necessary step in the established procurement and security governance processes.

Whenever new smart cities initiatives are implemented, you would run them through governance tied to the funding and the security clearance of a solution. That’s the only way we can gain some sort of control.

This approach would also push standardization toward vendors because today they don’t care about standards; they all have their own. If we included in our procurement and our security requirements that they need to comply with certain standards, they would have to build according to those standards. That would increase the overall interoperability of smart cities technologies. I think that is the only way we can begin to gain control.

Gardner: Dr. Harding, what do you see driving further improvement in smart cities undertakings?

Prioritize policy and people

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Harding: The focus should be on the policy around data sharing. As I mentioned, I see two layers of a framework: A policy layer and a technical layer. The understanding of the policy layer has to come first because the technical layer supports it.

The development of policy around data sharing -- or specifically on personal data sharing because this is a hot topic. Everyone is concerned with what happens to their personal data. It’s something that cities are particularly concerned with because they hold a lot of data about their citizens.

Gardner: Dr. Saha, same question to you.

Saha: I look at it in two ways. One is for cities to adopt smart city approaches. Identify very-high-demand use cases that pertain to environmental mobility, or the economy, or health -- or whatever the priority is for that city.

Identifying such high-demand use cases is important because the impact is directly seen by the people, which is very important because the benefits of having a smarter city are something that need to be visible to the people using those services, number one.

The other part, that we have not spoken about, is we are assuming that the city already exists, and we are retrofitting it to become a smart city. There are places where countries are building entirely new cities. And these brand-new cities are perfect examples of where these technologies can be tried out. They don’t yet have the complexities of existing cities.

It becomes a very good lab, if you will, a real-life lab. It’s not a controlled lab, it’s a real-life lab where the services can be rolled out as the new city is built and developed. These are the two things I think will improve the adoption of smart city technology across the globe.

Gardner: Don Brancato, any ideas on catalysts to gain standardization and improved smart city approaches?

City smarts and safety first

Brancato: I like Dr. Harding’s idea on focusing on personal data. That’s a good way to take a group of people and build a tactical pattern, and then grow and reuse that.

In terms of the broader city, I’ve seen a number of cities successfully introduce programs that use the notion of a safe city as a subset of other smart city initiatives. This plays out well with the public. There’s a lot of reuse involved. It enables the city to reuse a lot of their capabilities and demonstrate they can deliver value to average citizens.

In order to keep cities involved and energetic, we should not lose track of the fact that people move to cities because of all of the cultural things they can be involved with. That comes from education, safety, and the commoditization of price and value benefits. Being able to deliver safety is critical. And I suggest the idea of traceability of personal data patterns has a connection to a safe city.

Traceability in the Enterprise Architecture world should be a standard artifact for assuring that the programs we have trace to citizen value and to business value. Such traceability and a model link those initiatives and strategies through to the service -- all the way down to the data, so that eventually data can be tied back to the roles.

For example, if I am an individual, data can be assigned to me. If I am in some role within the city, data can be assigned to me. The beauty of that is we automate the role of the human. It is even compounded to the notion that the capabilities are done in the city by humans, systems, machines, and sensors that are getting increasingly smarter. So all of the data can be traceable to these sensors.

Gardner: Don Sunderland, what have you seen that works, and what should we doing more of?

Mobile-app appeal

Sunderland: I am still fixated on the idea of creating direct demand. We can’t generate it. It’s there on many levels, but a kind of guerrilla tactic would be to tap into that demand to create location-aware applications, mobile apps, that are freely available to citizens.

The apps can use existing data rather than trying to go out and solve all the data sharing problems for a municipality. Instead, create a value-added app that feeds people location-aware information about where they are -- whether it comes from within the city or without. They can then become habituated to the idea that they can avail themselves of information and services directly, from their pocket, when they need to. You then begin adding layers of additional information as it becomes available. But creating the demand is what’s key.

When 311 was created in New York, it became apparent that it was a brand. The idea of getting all those services by just dialing those three digits was not going to go away. Everybody wanted to add their services to 311. This kind of guerrilla approach to a location-aware app made available to the citizens is a way to drive more demand for even more people.

When 311 was created in New York, it became apparent that it was a brand. The idea of getting all of those services just by dialing those three digits is not going away.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve covered a lot of ground in discussing how The Open Group is spearheading ways to make smart cities initiatives more effective. We have learned how government transformation endeavors face unique challenges, but that such things as common data and standardized methods and frameworks help support more efficiency -- and ultimately far better city services.

For more information on this and other topics and events, please check out The Open Group website at www.opengroup.org.

Please join me in thanking our panel: Dr. Chris Harding, Chief Executive Officer at Lacibus; Dr. Pallab Saha, Chief Architect of The Open Group; Don Brancato, Chief Strategy Architect at Boeing; Don Sunderland, Deputy Commissioner Data Management and Integration, New York City Department of IT and Telecommunications, and Dr. Anders Lisdorf, Enterprise Architect for Data Services for the City of New York. Thanks to you all.

And a big thank you as well to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion. Lastly, thank you to our audience for joining. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a discussion on how The Open Group is ambitiously seeking to improve the impact of smart cities initiatives by easing the complexity and unique challenges inherent in public-sector digital transformation projects. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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The Open Group Digital Practitioner Effort Provides Guidance to Ease the People Path to Digital Business Transformation

Transcript of a discussion on how The Open Group is closing the gap between IT education, business methods, and what it takes as a culture to succeed over the next decade.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion on the creation of new guidance on how digital business professionals should approach their responsibilities.

Gardner

Perhaps more than at any time in the history of IT, those tasked with planning, implementation, and best use of digital business tools are being transformed into a new breed of digital practitioner.

We will now explore how The Open Group is ambitiously seeking to close the gap between IT education, business methods, and what it will take to truly succeed at work over the next decade.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host and moderator as we now examine digital business transformation -- and what it will take to prepare the next generation of enterprise leadership.

Please join me now in welcoming our panel, Venkat Nambiyur, Director of Business Transformation, Enterprise, and Cloud Architecture at Oracle. Welcome, Venkat.

Venkat Nambiyur: Thank you, Dana. It’s good to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with Sriram Sabesan, Consulting Partner and Digital Transformation Practice Lead at Conexiam. Welcome, Sriram.

Sriram Sabesan: Good morning. It’s good to be here.

The panel examines digital transformation -- and what it will take to prepare the next generation of enterprise leadership.

Gardner: We are here with Michael Fulton, Associate Vice President of IT Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide and Co-Chair of The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Fulton: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And we’re joined by David Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. Welcome back, David.

David Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to be here.

Gardner: David, why is this the right time to be defining new guidance on how IT and digital professionals should approach their responsibilities?

Body-of-knowledge building

Lounsbury: We had a presentation by a couple of Forrester analysts about a year ago at a San Francisco meeting of The Open Group. They identified a change in the market.

Lounsbury

We were seeing a convergence of forces around the success of Agile as a product management methodology at the edge, the increased importance of customer experience, and the fact that we have radically new and less expensive IT infrastructure and IT management approaches, which make this all happen more at the edge.

And they saw this change coming together into a new kind of person who’s ready to use digital tools to actually deliver value to their businesses. They saw this as a new part of transformation. The Open Group looked at that challenge and stepped up to define this activity, and we created the Digital Practitioners Work Group to bring together all of the necessary factors.

Those include an emphasis on customer experience, to manage digital delivery, to manage digital products, and the ability to manage digital delivery teams together. We want to build one body of knowledge for how to actually be such a digital practitioner; what it means for individuals to do that. So the people on this podcast have been working in that group toward that objective since then.

Gardner: Is this digital practitioner position an expansion of an earlier category, such as enterprise architect, chief information officer (CIO), or chief technology officer (CTO)? Or is it something new? Are we transitioning, or are we starting fresh?

Sabesan

Sabesan: We are in the middle of transitioning, as well as creating something fresh.  Through the last few decades of computing change, we had been chasing corporate-efficiency improvement, which brought in a level of rigidity. Now, we are chasing individual productivity.

Companies will have to rethink their products. That means a change will have to happen in the thinking of the CIO, the chief financial officer (CFO), the chief marketing officer (CMO), and across the full suite of chief executives. Many companies have dabbled with the new role of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and Chief Data Officer (CDO), but there has been a struggle of monetization and of connecting with customers because loyalties are not as [strong as] they used to be.

We are creating guidance to help people transition from old, typical CIO and CFO roles into thinking about connecting more with the customer, of improving the revenue potentials by associating closely with the productivity of the customers, and then improving their productivity levels.

Lead with experience

Nambiyur: This is about leadership. I work with Oracle Digital, and we have worked with a lot of companies focused on delivering products and services in what I call the digital market.

Nambiyur

They are all about experiences. That’s a fundamental shift from addressing specific process or a specific capability requirement in organizations. Most of the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) space is now focused on experiences, and that essentially changes the nature of the dialogue from holistic to, “Here’s what I can do for you.”

The nature of these roles has changed from a CIO, a developer, or a consumer to a digital practitioner of different interactions. So, from my perspective at Oracle, this practitioner work group becomes extremely important because now we are talking in a completely different language as the market evolves. There are different expectations in the market.

Fulton: There are a couple of key shifts going on here in the operating model that are driving the changes we’re seeing.

First and foremost is the rapid pace of change and what’s happening in organizations and the marketplace with this shift to a customer focus. Businesses require a lot more speed and agility.

Historically, businesses asked IT to provide efficiency and stability. But now we are undergoing the shift to more outcomes around speed and agility. We are seeing organizations fundamentally change their operating models, individual skills, and processes to keep up with this significant shift.

The other extremely interesting thing we’re seeing are the emerging technologies that are now coming to bear. We’re seeing brand-new what’s possible scenarios that affect how we provide business benefits to our customers in new and interesting ways.

We are getting to a much higher bar in the context of user experience (UX). We call that the Apple- or Amazon-ification of UX. Organizations have to keep up with that.

The technologies that have come up over the last few years, such as cloud computing, as well as the near-term horizon technologies, things like quantum computing and 5G, are shifting from a world of technology scarcity to a world of technology abundance.

Dave has talked quite a bit about this shift. Maybe he can add how he thinks about this shift from scarcity to abundance when it comes to technology and how that impacts a digital practitioner.

From scarcity to abundance 

Lounsbury: We all see this, right? We all see the fact that you can get a cloud account, either with a credit card or for free. There has been this explosion in the number of tools and frameworks we have to produce new software.

The old model – of having to be very careful about aligning scarce, precious IT resources with business strategies -- is less important these days. The bar to roll out IT value has migrated very close to the edge of the organization. That in turn has enabled this customer focus, with “software eating the world,” and an emphasis on digital-first experiences.

The result is all of these new business skills emerging. And the people who were previously in the business realm need to understand all of these digital skills in order to live in this new world. That is a very important point.

Dana, you introduced this podcast as being on what IT people need to know. I would broaden that out quite a bit. This is about what business people need to know about digital delivery. They are going to have to get some IT on their hands to do that. Fortunately, it’s much, much easier now due to the technology abundance that Michael noted.

Fulton

Fulton: The shift we are undergoing -- from a world of physical to information-based -- has led to companies embedding technology into the products that they sell.

The importance of digital is, to Dave’s point, moving from an IT functional world to a world where digital practitioners are embedded into every part of the business, and into every part of the products that the vast majority of companies take to market.

This includes companies that historically have been very physical, like aircraft engines and GE, or oil refineries at Shell, or any number of areas where physical products are becoming digital. They now provide much more information to consume and much more technology rolls into the products that companies sell. It creates a new world that highlights the importance of the digital practitioner.

Limitless digital possibilities 

Nambiyur: The traditional sacred cows of the old are no longer sacred cows. Nobody is willing to just take a technologist’s word that something is doable or not. Nobody is willing to take a process expert’s word that something is doable or not.

In this new world, possibility is transparent, meaning everybody thinks that everything is possible. Michael said that businesses need to have a digital practitioner in their line of business or in many areas of work. My experience of the last four years of working here is that, every participant in any organization is a digital practitioner. They are both a service provider and a service consumer simultaneously, irrespective of where they stand in an organization.

It becomes critical that everybody recognizes the impact of this digital market force, and then recognize how their particular role has evolved or expanded to include a digital component, both when they deliver value and how they receive value.

In this new world, possibility is transparent, meaning everybody thinks that everything is possible. ... The traditional sacred cows are no longer sacred.

That is the core of what they are accomplishing as practitioners, to allow people to define and expand their roles from the perspective of a digital practitioner. They need to ask, “What does that really mean? How do I recognize the market? How do I recognize my ecosystem? How do I evolve to deliver that?”

Sabesan: I will provide a couple of examples on how this impacts existing roles and new roles.

For example, we have intelligent refrigerators and intelligent cooking ovens and ranges that can provide insights to the manufacturer about the customers’ behaviors, which they never had before. The designers used to operate on a business-to-business (B2B) sales process, but now they have insights into the customer. They can directly get to the customer’s behaviors and can fine-tune the product accordingly.

Yet enterprises never had to build the skill sets to be able to use that data and create new innovative variations to the product set. So that’s one gap that we are seeing in the market. That’s what this digital practitioner guide book is trying to address, number one.

Number two, IT personnel are now having to deal with a much wider canvas of things to be brought together, of various data sets to be integrated.

Because of the sensors, what was thought of as an operational technology has become part of the network of the IT as well. The access to accelerometers, temperature sensors, pressure sensors, they are all now part of your same network.

A typical software developer now will have to understand the hardware behaviors happening in the field, so the mindset will have to change. The canvas is wider. And people will have to think about an integrated execution model.

That is fundamental for any digital practitioner, to be thinking about putting [an integrated execution model] into practice and having an architectural mindset to approach and deliver improved experiences to the customer. At the end of the day, if you don’t deliver experiences to the customer, there is no new revenue for the company. You’re thinking has to pivot-change from operation efficiency or performance milestones to the delivery of an experience and outcome for the customer.

Gardner: It certainly looks like the digital practitioner role is applicable to large enterprises, as well as SMBs, and cuts across industries and geographies.

In putting together a set of guidelines, is there a standardization effort under way? How important is it to make digital practitioners at all these different types of organizations standardized? Or is that not the goal? Is this role instead individual, organization by organization?

Setting the standards 

Nambiyur: It’s a great question. In my view, before we begin creating standards, we need the body of knowledge and to define what the practitioner is looking to do. We have to collect all of the different experiences, different viewpoints, and define the things that work. That source of experience, if you will, can eventually evolve into standards.

Do I personally think that standards are coming? I believe so. What defines that standard? It depends on the amount of experiences we are able to collect. Are we able to agree on some of the best practices, and some of the standards that we need to follow so that any person functioning in the physical ecosystem can successfully deliver in repeatable outcomes?

I think this can potentially evolve into a standard, but the starting point is to first collect knowledge, collect experience from different folks, use cases, and points of use so that we are reasonably able to determine what needs to evolve further.

Gardner: What would a standard approach to be a digital practitioner look like?

Sabesan: There are certain things such as a basic analysis approach, and a decomposition and execution model that are proven as a repeatable. Those we can put as standards and start documenting right now.

We are looking for some sort of standardization of the analysis, decomposition, and execution models, yet providing guidance.

However, the way we play the analysis approach to a financial management problem versus a manufacturing problem, it’s a little different. Those differences will have to be highlighted. So when Venkat was talking about going to a body of knowledge, we are trying to paint the canvas. How you apply these analysis methods differently under different contexts is important.

If you think about Amazon, it is a banking company as well as a retail company as well as an IT service provider company. So, people who are operating within or delivering services within Amazon have to have multiple mindsets and multiple approaches to be presented to them so that they can be efficient in their jobs.

Right now, we are looking at some form of standardization of the analysis, decomposition, execution models, and yet providing guidance for the variances that are there for each of the domains. Can each of domains by itself standardize? Definitely, yes, and we are miles away from achieving that.

Lounsbury: This kind of digital delivery -- that customer-focused, outside-in mindset -- happens at organizations of all different scales. There are things that are necessary for a successful digital delivery, that decomposition that Sriram mentioned, that might not occur in a small organization but would occur in a large organization.

And as we think about standardization of skills, we want to focus on what’s relevant for an organization at various stages of growth, engagement, and moving to a digital-first view of their markets. We still want to provide that body of knowledge Venkat mentioned that says, “As you evolve in your organization contextually, as you grow, as your organization gets to be more complex in terms of the number of teams doing the delivery, here’s what you need to know at each stage along the way.”

The focus initially is on “what” and not “how.” Knowing what principles you have to have in order for your customer experiences to work, that you have to manage teams, that you have to treat your digital assets in certain ways, and those things are the leading practices. But the tools you will use to do them, the actual bits and the bytes, are going to evolve very quickly. We want to make sure we are at that right level of guidance to the practitioner, and not so much into the hard-core tools and techniques that you use to do that delivery.

Organizational practices that evolve 

Fulton: One of the interesting things that Dave mentions is the way that the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge™ (DPBoK) is constructed. There are a couple of key things worth noting there.

One, right now we are viewing it as a perspective on the leading practices, not necessarily of standards yet when it comes to how to be a digital practitioner. But number two, and this is a fairly unique one, is that the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge does not take a standard structure to the content. It’s a fairly unique approach that’s based on organizational evolution. I have been in the IT industry for longer than I would care to admit, and I have never seen a standard or a body of knowledge that has taken this kind of an approach.

Typically, bodies of knowledge and standards are targeted at large enterprise, and they put in place what you need to do -- all the things that you need to do when you do everything perfect at full scale. What the Digital Practitioner’s Body of Knowledge does is walk you through the organizational evolution, from starting at an individual or a founder of a startup -- like two people in a garage -- through when you have built that startup into a team, and you have to start to put some more capabilities around that team, up to when the team becomes a team of teams.

You are starting to get bigger and bigger, until you evolve into a full enterprise perspective, where you are a larger company that needs more of the full capabilities.

By taking this organizational maturity, evolution, and emergence approach to thinking about a leading practice, it allows an individual to learn and grow as they step through in a standard way. It helps us fit the content to you, where you are as an individual, and where your organization is in its level of maturity.

Taking this organizational maturity, evolution, and emergence approach to thinking about leading a practice allows an individual to learn and grow in a standard way.

It’s a unique approach, walking people through the content. The content is still full and comprehensive, but it’s an interesting way to help people understand how things are put together in that bigger picture. It helps people understand when you need to care about something and when you don’t.

If you are two people in a garage, you don’t need to care about enterprise architecture; you can do the enterprise architecture for your entire company in your head. You don’t need to write it down. You don’t need to do models. You don’t need to do all those things.

If you are a 500,000-person Amazon, you probably need to have some thought around the enterprise architecture for your company, because there’s no way anybody can keep that in their mind and keep that straight. You absolutely have to, as your company grows and matures, layer in additional capabilities. And this Body of Knowledge is a really good map on what to layer in and when.

Gardner: It sounds as if those taking advantage of the Body of Knowledge as digital practitioners are going to be essential at accelerating the maturity of organizations into fully digital businesses.

Given the importance of that undertaking, where do these people come from? What are some typical backgrounds and skill sets? Where do you find these folks?

Who runs the digital future? 

Sabesan: You find them everywhere. Today’s Millennials, for example, let’s go with different categories of people. Kids who are out of school right now or still in school, they are dabbling with products and hardware. They are making things and connecting to the Internet and trying to give different experiences for people.

Those ideas should not be stifled; we need to expand them and help them try to convert these ideas and solutions into an operable, executable, sustainable business models. That’s one side.

On the other far end, we have very mature people who are running businesses right now, but who have been presented with a challenge of a newcomer into the market trying to threaten them, to question their fundamental business models. So, we need to be talking to both ends -- and providing different perspectives.

As Mike was talking about, what this particular Body of Knowledge provides us is what can we do for the new kids, how do we help them think about the big picture, not just one product version out. In the industry right now, between V1 and V2, you could potentially see three different competitors for your own functionality and the product that you are bringing to market. These newcomers need to think of getting ahead of competition in a structured way.

And on the other hand, enterprises are sitting on loads of cash, but are not sure where to invest, and how to exploit, or how to thwart a disruption. So that’s the other spectrum we need to talk about. And the tone and the messaging are completely different. We find the practitioners everywhere, but the messaging is different.

Gardner: How is this then different from a cross-functional team; it sounds quite similar?

Beyond cross-functionality 

Sabesan: Even if you have a cross-functional team, the execution model is where most of them fail. When they talk about a simple challenge that Square is trying to become, they are no longer a payment tech company, they are a hardware company, and they are also a website development company trying to solve the problem for a small business.

So, unless you create a structure that is able to bring people from multiple business units together -- multiple verticals together to focus on a single customer vertical problem – the current cross-functional teams will not be able to deliver. You need risk mitigation mindset. You need to remove a single team ownership mindset. Normally corporations have one person as accountable to be able to manage the spend; now we need to put one person accountable to manage experiences and outcomes. Unless you bring that shift together, the traditional cross-functional teams are not going to work in this new world.

Nambiyur: I agree with Sriram, and I have a perspective from where we are building our organization at Oracle, so that’s a good example.

Now, obviously, we have a huge program where we hire folks right out of college. They come in with a great understanding of -- and they represent -- this digital world. They represent the market forces. They are the folks who live it every single day. They have a very good understanding of what the different technologies bring to the table.

We have a huge program where we hire right out of college. They represent the digital world, the market forces, and they are living it every day.

But one key thing that they do -- and I find more often – is they appreciate the context in which they are operating. Meaning, if I join Oracle, I need to understand what Oracle as a company is trying to accomplish at the end of the day, right? Adding that perspective cannot just be done by having a cross-functional team, because everybody comes and tries to stay in their comfort zone. If they bring in an experienced enterprise architect, the tendency is to stay in the comfort zone of models and structures, and how they have been doing things.

The way that we find the digital practitioners is to allow them to have a structure in place that tells them to add a particular perspective. Like just with the Millennials, you need to understand what the company is trying to accomplish so that you just can’t let your imagination run all over the place. Eventually and likewise, for a mature enterprise architect, “Hey, you know what? You need to incorporate these changes so that your experience becomes continuously relevant.”

I even look at some of the folks who are non-technologists, folks who are trying to understand why they should work with IT and why they need an enterprise architect. So to help them answer these questions, we give them the perspective of what value they can bring from the perspective of the market forces they face.

That’s the key way. Cross-functional teams work in certain conditions, but we have to set the change, as in organizational change and organizational mindset change, at every level. That allows folks to change from a developer to a digital practitioner, from an enterprise architect to a digital practitioner, from a CFO to a digital practitioner.

That’s really the huge value that the Body of Knowledge is going to bring to the table.

Fulton: It’s important to understand that today it’s not acceptable for business leaders or business members in an organization to simply write off technology and say that it’s for the IT people to take care of.

Technology is now embedded throughout everything that we do in our work lives. We all need to understand technology. We all need to be able to understand the new ways of working that that technology brings. We all need to understand these new opportunities for us to move more quickly and to react to customer wants and needs in new and exciting ways; ways that are going to add distinct value.

To me the exciting piece about this is it's not just IT folks that have to change into digital practitioners. It’s business folks across every single organization that also have to change and bringing both sides closer together.

IT everywhere, all the time, for everyone

Lounsbury: Yes, that’s a really important point, because this word “digital” gets stuck to everything these days. You might call it digital washing, right?

In fact, you put your finger on the fundamental transformation. When an organization realizes that it's going to interact with its customers through either of the digital twins -- digital access to physical products and services or truly digital delivery -- then you have pieces of information, or data, that they can present to the customer.

That customer’s interactions through that -- the customer’s experience of that – which also then brings value to the business. A first focus, then is to shift from the old model of, “Well, we will figure out what our business is, and then we will throw some requirements down the IT channel, and sooner or later it will emerge.” As we have said, that's not going to cut it anymore.

You need to have that ability to deliver through digital means right at the edge with your product decisions.

Gardner: David, you mentioned earlier the concept of an abundance of technology. And, Michael, you mentioned the gorilla in the room, which is the new tools around artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and more data-driven analysis.

To become savvier about how to take advantage of the abundance of technology and analytics requires a cultural and organizational shift that permeates the entire organization.

To what degree does a digital practitioner have to be responsible for changing the culture and character of their organization?

Lounsbury: I want to quote something I heard at the most recent Center for Information Systems Research Conference at the MIT Sloan School. The article is published by Jeanne Ross, who said, the time for digitization, for getting your digital processes in place, getting your data digitalized, that’s passed. What's important now is that the people who understand the ability to use digital to deliver value actually begin acting as the agents of change in an organization.

To me, all of what Sriram said about strategy -- of helping your organization realize what can happen, giving them through leading practices and a Body of Knowledge as a framework to make decisions and lower the barrier between the historical technologist and business people, and seeing them as an integrated team – that is the fundamental transition that we need to be leading people to in their organizations.

Sabesan: Earlier we said that the mindset has been, “This is some other team’s responsibility. We will wait for them to do their thing, and we will start from where they left off.”

Now, with the latest technology, we are able to permeate across organizational boundaries. The person to bring out that cultural change should simply ask the question, “Why should I wait for you? If you are not looking out for me, then I will take over, complete the job, and then let you manage and run with it.”

We want people to be able to question the status quo and show a sample of what could be a better way. Those will drive the cultural shifts.

There are two sides of the equation. We also have the DevOps model where, “I build, and I own.” The other one is, “I build it for you, you own, and keep pace with me.” So basically we want people to be able to question the status quo and show a sample of what could be a better way. Those will drive the cultural shifts and push leaders beyond their comfort zone, that Venkat was talking about, to be able to accept different ways of working: Show and then lead.

Talent, all ages, needed for cultural change 

Nambiyur: I can give a great example. There is nothing more effective than watching your own company go through that, and just building off on bringing Millennials into the organization. There is an organization we call a Solutions Hub at Oracle that is entirely staffed by college-plus-two folks. Ans they are working day-in and day-out on realizing the art of what’s possible with the technology. In a huge way, this complements the work of senior resources -- both in the pre-sales and the product side. This has had a cumulative, multiplier effect on how Oracle is able to present what it can do for its customers.

We are able to see the native digital-generation folks understanding their role as a digital practitioner, bringing that strength into play. And that not only seamlessly complements the existing work, it elevates the nature of how the rest of the senior folks who have been in the business for 10 or 20 years are able to function. As an organization, we are now able to deliver more effectively a credible solution to the market, especially as Oracle is moving to cloud.

That’s a great example of how culturally each player – it doesn’t matter if they are a college-plus-two or a 20-year person -- can be a huge part of changing the organizational culture. The digital practitioner is fundamental, and this is a great example of how an organization has accomplished that.

Fulton: This is hard work, right? Changing the culture of any organization is hard work. That’s why the guidance like what we are putting together with the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge is invaluable. It gives us as individuals a starting point to work from to lead the change. And it gives us a place to go back to and continue to learn and grow ourselves. We can point our peers to it as we try to change the culture of an organization.

It’s one of the reasons I like what’s being put together with the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge and its use in enterprises like Nationwide Insurance. It’s a really good tool to help us spend our time focused on what’s most important. In Nationwide’s case, being on our site for the members that we serve, but also being focused on how we transform the culture to better deliver against those business objectives more quickly and with agility.

Lounsbury: Culture change takes time. One thing everybody should do when you think about your digital practitioners is to go look at any app store. See the number of programming tutorials targeted at grade-school kids. Think about how you are going to be able to effectively manage that incoming generation of digitally savvy people. The organizations that can do that, that can manage that workforce effectively, are going to be the ones that succeed going forward.

Gardner: What stage within the Body of Knowledge process are we at? What and how should people be thinking about contributing? Is there a timeline and milestones for what comes next as you move toward your definitions and guidelines for bring a digital practitioner?

Contributions welcome

Lounsbury: This group has been tremendously productive. That Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge is, in fact, out and available for anyone to download at The Open Group Bookstore. If you look for the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge, publication S185, you will find it. We are very open about getting public comments on that snapshot as we then finish the Body of Knowledge.

Of course, the best way to contribute to any activity at The Open Group is come down and join us. If you go to www.opengroup.org, you will see ways to do that.

Gardner: What comes next, David, in the maturation of this digital practitioner effort, Body of Knowledge and then what?

Lounsbury: Long-term, we already began discussing both how we work with academia to bring this into curricula to train people who are entering the workforce. We are also thinking in these early days about how we identify Digital Practitioners with some sort of certification, badging, or something similar. Those will be things we discuss in 2019.

We will work with academia to bring this into curricula and to train people who are entering the workforce.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been discussing the creation of new guidance and a Body of Knowledge around how digital professionals should approach their responsibilities. And we have learned how The Open Group is ambitiously seeking to close the gap between issues around IT education, business methods, and what it will take to really succeed in the new generation of digital business.

For more information on this architectural approach, cultural change, and topics related to Digital Practitioners, do please check out The Open Group website at www.opengroup.org.

Please join me in thanking our panel, Venkat Nambiyur, Director of Business Transformation Enterprise, and Cloud Architecture at Oracle; Sriram Sabesan, Consulting Partner and Digital Transformation Practice Lead at Conexiam; Michael Fulton, Associate Vice President of IT Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide Insurance and Co-Chair of The Open Group IT4IT Forum, and David Lounsbury, Chief Technology Officer at The Open Group.

And a big thank you as well to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion. Lastly, thank you to our audience for joining. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a discussion on how The Open Group is closing the gap between IT education, business methods, and what it takes as a culture to succeed over the next decade. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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