Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the role of enterprise architecture in helping enterprises exploit and manage technology transformation.

1. The Open Group Panel Explains How the ArchiMate
Modeling Language and The Open Group Architecture
Forum Impacts Such Trends as Big Data and Cloud
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the role of enterprise architecture in helping
enterprises exploit and manage technology transformation.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: The Open Group
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview
series coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference recently
held in Newport Beach, California.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host
and moderator throughout these business transformation discussions. The
conference itself is focusing on big data the transformation we need to embrace
today. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of this and other BriefingsDirect
podcasts.]
We're here now with a panel of experts to explore new trends and developments in enterprise
architecture (EA), as businesses grapple with such issues as big data, cloud computing, security,
and overall IT transformation.
We'll learn more on how EA is evolving and specifically how the TOGAF® framework and the
ArchiMate® modeling language are playing increased roles worldwide.
With that, please join me in welcoming our panel. We're here with
Chris Forde, the General Manager Asia-Pacific and Vice President of
Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Forde: Good morning, Dana, thank you.
Gardner: We're also here with Iver Band. He is Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate
Forum and Enterprise Architect at The Standard, a diversified financial services company.
Welcome.
Iver Band: Thank you very much for having me.
Gardner: Mike Walker, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell. Welcome Mike.
Mike Walker: Thank you, Dana.

2. Gardner: Henry Franken, the Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing
Director at BIZZdesign.
Henry Franken: Thanks Dana for having me here.
Gardner: And lastly, we're joined by Dave Hornford. He is Chair of the Architecture Forum at
The Open Group and Managing Partner at Conexiam. Welcome, Dave.
Dave Hornford: Good to be here.
Gardner: Chris, let's start with you. Here at the conference you're meeting with a lot of folks,
and there is a lot of activity in socializing and whatnot. Is there something about the role of the
enterprise architect that you sense is shifting, or are people, maybe even trying to project their
roles differently in their organizations?
Consistent theme
Forde: At these conferences, generally there is a fairly consistent theme. It goes from "We're
having difficulty defining our role in the context that makes it relevant and useful
to the business" to "We're having a great opportunity with our business partners to
drive business transformation." It really goes across the spectrum.
What I'm hearing in the conference, not just based on the themes, is a lot of
discussion about that transformation topic and the role of the enterprise architect
in moving the organization along. That's a very, very typical conversation to hear
in the hallways.
Gardner: When it's a dynamic environment, lots of change, lots of movement, the enterprise
architects' value can go up. If things were slow, constant and predictable, perhaps their value
wouldn't be as high. Any thoughts about that?
Franken: Well sure. What you see is that the challenge within large organizations on business
transformation is increasing and the number of good enterprise architects is small, so their value
increases. It's simple mathematics.
Gardner: Mike Walker at Dell, how do you see EA and the role of the architect changing, vis-à-
vis your experiences?
Walker: I’ll provide the perspective of the an EA leader and practitioner in the trenches of not
only my company but also talking with colleagues in other companies as well. I see a lot of what
was referred to from Henry and Chris. To add to that, there is more and more focus on
reinvigorating the EA practices. There is less of a focus on the traditional things we come to
think of EA such as standards, governance and policies, but rather into emerging areas such as
the soft skills, business architecture, and strategy.

3. To this end I see a lot in the realm of working directly with the executive chain to understand the
key value drivers for the company and rationalize where they want to go with their
business. So we're moving into a business-transformation role in this practice.
At the same time, we've got to be mindful of the disruptive external technology
forces coming in as well. EA can’t just divorce from the other aspects of
architecture as well. So the role that enterprise architects play becomes more and
more important and elevated in the organization.
Two examples of this disruptive technology that are being focused on at the conference are big
data and cloud computing. Both are providing impacts to our businesses not because of some
new business idea but because technology is available to enhance or provide new capabilities to
our business. The EA’s still do have to understand these new technology innovations and
determine how they will apply to the business.
To Henry's point around the need to get really good enterprise architects, it’s difficult to find
good ones. There is a shortage right now especially given that a lot of focus is being put on the
EA department to really deliver sound architectures.
Not standalone
Gardner: We've been talking a lot here about big data, but usually that's not just a standalone
topic. It's big data and cloud, cloud and mobile, and also cloud, big data, mobile, and security.
So with these overlapping and complex relationships among multiple trends, why is EA and
things like the TOGAF framework and the ArchiMate modeling language especially useful. Let's
try with you, Iver.
Band: One of the things that has been clear for a while now is that people outside of IT don't
necessarily have to go through the technology function to avail themselves of
these technologies any more. Whether they ever had to is really a question as
well.
One of things that EA is doing, and especially in the practice that I work in, is
using approaches like the ArchiMate modeling language to effect clear
communication between the business, IT, partners and other stakeholders. That's
what I do in my daily work, overseeing our major systems modernization efforts.
I work with major partners, some of which are offshore.
I'm increasingly called upon to make sure that we have clear processes for making decisions and
clear ways of visualizing the different choices in front of us. We can't always unilaterally dictate
the choice, but we can make the conversation clearer by using frameworks like the TOGAF
standard and the ArchiMate modeling language, which I use virtually every day in my work.

4. Gardner: And so the more moving parts and the more complexity, the less likely that you can
wing this or use traditional linear tools. You need something that's a bit more up to the task.
Dave, help us understand how these tools can grapple better with these multiple levels of
complexity and then also bridge some of these communication gaps among different
constituencies in these large organizations?
Hornford: The fundamental benefit of the tools is the organization realizing its capability and
strategy. I just came from a session where a fellow quoted a Harvard study,
which said that around a third of executives thought their company was good at
executing on its strategy. He highlighted that this means that two-thirds are not
good at executing on their strategy.
If you're not good at executing on your strategy and you've got big data,
mobile, consumerization of IT and cloud, where are you going? What's the
correct approach? How does this fit into what you were trying to accomplish as
an enterprise?
An enterprise architect that is doing their job is bringing together the strategy, goals and
objectives of the organization. Also, its capabilities with the techniques that are available,
whether it's offshoring, onshoring, cloud, or big data, so that the organization is able to move
forward to where it needs to be, as opposed to where it's going to randomly walk to.
Gardner: Chris, anything to add?
Forde: One of the things that has come out in several of the presentations is this kind of
capability-based planning, a technique in EA to get their arms around this thing from a business-
driver perspective. Just to polish what Dave said a little bit, it's connecting all of those things. We
see enterprises talking about a capability-based view of things on that basis.
Gardner: Because we're here with a couple of the chairpeople from these forums, where a lot of
the development and direction for these tools comes about, let's get a quick update. The TOGAF
framework, where are we and what have been the highlights from this particular event. Dave?
Minor upgrade
Hornford: In the last year, we've published a minor upgrade for TOGAF version 9.1 which
was based upon cleaning up consistency in the language in the TOGAF documentation. What
we're working on right now is a significant new release, the next release of the TOGAF standard,
which is dividing the TOGAF documentation to make it more consumable, more consistent and
more useful for someone.

5. Today, the TOGAF standard has guidance on how to do something mixed into the framework of
what you should be doing. We're peeling those apart. So with that peeled apart, we won't have
guidance that is tied to classic application architecture in a world of cloud.
What we find when we have done work with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN)
for banking architecture, Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) for
security architecture, and the TeleManagement Forum, is that the concepts in the TOGAF
framework work across industries and across trends. We need to move the guidance into a place
so that we can be far nimbler on how to tie cloud with my current strategy, how to tie
consumerization of IT with on-shoring?
Franken: The ArchiMate modeling language turned two last year, and the ArchiMate 1.0
standard is the language to model out the core of your EA. The ArchiMate 2.0 standard added
two specifics to it to make it better aligned also to the process of EA. According
to the TOGAF standard, this is being able to model out the motivation, why
you're doing EA, stakeholders and the goals that drive us. The second extension
to the ArchiMate standard is being able to model out its planning and migration.
So with the core EA and these two extensions, together with the TOGAF standard
process working, you have a good basis on getting EA to work in your
organization.
Gardner: Let’s also go back to the big data concepts that are driving this conference. I've been
interested in this notion of the information architecture, data architecture and how that relates to
the TOGAF framework. Mike, you've been doing some interesting writing on this subject. Fill us
in on some of your thoughts about the role of information architecture vis-à-vis the larger
business architect and enterprise architect roles.
Walker: Information architecture is an interesting topic in that it hasn’t been getting a whole lot
of attention until recently.
Information architecture is an aspect of enterprise architecture that enables an information
strategy or business solution through the definition of the company's business information assets,
their sources, structure, classification and associations that will prescribe the required application
architecture and technical capabilities.
Information architecture is the bridge between the business architecture world and the
application and technology architecture activities.
The reason I say that is because information architecture is a business-driven discipline that
details the information strategy of the company. As we know, and from what we’ve heard at the
conference keynotes like in the case of NASA, big data, and security presentations, the
preservation and classification of that information is vital to understanding what your
architecture should be.

6. Least matured
From an industry perspective, this is one of the least matured, as far as being incorporated into
a formal discipline. The TOGAF standard actually has a phase dedicated to it in data
architecture. Again, there are still lots of opportunities to grow and incorporate additional
methods, models and tools by the enterprise information management discipline.
Enterprise information management not only it captures traditional topic areas like master data
management (MDM), metadata and unstructured types of information architecture but also
focusing on the information governance, and the architecture patterns and styles implemented in
MDM, big data, etc. There is a great deal of opportunity there.
From the role of information architects, I’m seeing more and more traction in the industry as a
whole. I've dealt with an entire group that’s focused on information architecture and building up
an enterprise information management practice, so that we can take our top line business
strategies and understand what architectures we need to put there.
This is a critical enabler for global companies, because oftentimes they're restricted by
regulation, typically handled at a government or regional area. This means we have to understand
that we build our architecture. So it's not about the application, but rather the data that it
processes, moves, or transforms.
Gardner: Up until not too long ago, the conventional thinking was that applications generate
data. Then you treat the data in some way so that it can be used, perhaps by other applications,
but that the data was secondary to the application.
But there's some shift in that thinking now more toward the idea that the data is the application
and that new applications are designed to actually expand on the data’s value and deliver it out to
mobile tiers perhaps. Does that follow in your thinking that the data is actually more prominent
as a resource perhaps on par with applications?
Walker: You're spot on, Dana. Before the commoditization of these technologies that resided on
premises, we could get away with starting at the application layer and work our way back
because we had access to the source code or hardware behind our firewalls. We could throw
servers out, and we used to put the firewalls in front of the data to solve the problem with
infrastructure. So we didn’t have to treat information as a first-class citizen. Times have changed,
though.
Information access and processing is now democratized and it’s being pushed as the first point of
presentment. A lot of times this is on a mobile device and even then it’s not the corporate’s
mobile device, but your personal device. So how do you handle that data?
It's the same way with cloud, and I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working as an
adviser for a company, and they were looking at their cloud strategy. They had made a big bet on

7. one of the big infrastructures and cloud-service providers. They looked first at what the features
and functions that that cloud provider could provide, and not necessarily the information
requirements. There were two major issues that they ran into, and that was essentially a
showstopper. They had to pull off that infrastructure.
The first one was that in that specific cloud provider’s terms of service around intellectual
property (IP) ownership. Essentially, that company was forced to cut off their IP rights.
Big business
As you know, IP is a big business these days, and so that was a showstopper. It actually broke
the core regulatory laws around being able to discover information.
So focusing on the applications to make sure it meets your functional needs is important.
However, we should take a step back and look at the information first and make sure that for the
people in your organization who can’t say no, their requirements are satisfied.
Gardner: Data architecture is it different from EA and business architecture, or is it a subset?
What’s the relationship, Dave?
Hornford: Data architecture is part of an EA. I won’t use the word subset, because a subset
starts to imply that it is a distinct thing that you can look at on its own. You cannot look at your
business architecture without understanding your information architecture. When you think about
big data, cool. We've got this pile of data in the corner. Where did it come from? Can we use it?
Do we actually have legitimate rights, as Mike highlighted, to use this information? Are we
allowed to mix it and who mixes it?
When we look at how our business is optimized, they normally optimize around work product,
what the organization is delivering. That’s very easy. You can see who consumes your work
product. With information, you often have no idea who consumes your information. So now we
have provenance, we have source and as we move for global companies, we have the trends
around consumerization, cloud and simply tightening cycle time.
There was a very interesting thing that came out of a PricewaterhouseCoopers CEO summary,
which said there has historically been cycles where the CEOs were focusing on innovation or
cost. What they have observed over the last few surveys is much tightening of those cycles. We
used to be a bit worried about cost for a few years. Then, we would worry about innovation for a
few years. Now, it’s worrying about it for a year. What came out in the last survey? Both are
rated number one.
How do we in global, tightly connected, information-rich environment manage? Do we have
access to the information? Our competitors may, our customers do and our suppliers probably do.
How do we fit into that? If we look at data in isolation, I have to understand how the system
works and how the enterprise’s architecture fits together.

8. Gardner: Of course, the end game for a lot of the practitioners here is to create that feedback
loop of a lifecycle approach, rapid information injection and rapid analysis that could be applied.
So what are some of the ways that these disciplines and tools can help foster that complete
lifecycle? Let’s go to Iver.
Band: The disciplines and tools can facilitate the right conversations among different
stakeholders. One of the things that we're doing at The Standard is building cadres equally
balanced between people in business and IT.
We're training them in information management, going through a particular curriculum, and
having them study for an information management certification that introduces a lot of these
different frameworks and standard concepts.
Creating cadres
We want to create these cadres to be able to solve tough and persistent information
management problems that affect all companies in financial services, because information is a
shared asset. The purpose of the frameworks is to ensure proper stewardship of that asset across
disciplines and across organizations within an enterprise.
Gardner: If they add to the fostering of that nirvana of a full lifecycle that it cuts across different
disciplines in the organization.
Hornford: The core is from the two standards that we have, The ArchiMate standard and the
TOGAF standard. The TOGAF standard has, from its early roots, focused on the components of
EA and how to build a consistent method of understanding of what I'm trying to accomplish,
understanding where I am, and where I need to be to reach my goal.
When we bring in the ArchiMate standard, I have a language, a descriptor, a visual descriptor
that allows me to cross all of those domains in a consistent description, so that I can do that
traceability. When I pull in this lever or I have this regulatory impact, what does it hit me with, or
if I have this constraint, what does it hit me with?
If I don’t do this, if I don’t use the framework of the TOGAF standard, or I don’t use the
discipline of formal modeling in the ArchiMate standard, we're going to do it anecdotally. We're
going to trip. We're going to fall. We're going to have a non-ending series of surprises, as Mike
highlighted.
"Oh, terms of service. I am violating the regulations. Beautiful. Let’s take that to our executive
and tell him right as we are about to go live that we have to stop, because we can't get where we
want to go, because we didn't think about what it took to get there." And that’s the core of EA in
the frameworks.

9. Walker: To build on what Dave has just talked about and going back to your first question Dana,
the value statement on TOGAF from a business perspective. I think businesses value of TOGAF
is that they get a repeatable and a predictable process for building out our architectures that
properly manage risks and reliably produces value.
The TOGAF framework provides a methodology to ask what problems you're trying to solve and
where you are trying to go with your business opportunities or challenges. That leads to business
architecture, which is really a rationalization in technical or architectural terms the distillation of
the corporate strategy.
From there, what you want to understand is information -- how does that translate, what
information architecture do we need to put in place? You get into all sorts of things around risk
management, etc., and then it goes on from there, until what we were talking about earlier about
information architecture.
If the TOGAF standard is applied properly you can achieve the same result every time, That is
what interests business stakeholders in my opinion. And the ArchiMate modeling language is
great because, as we talked about, it provides very rich visualizations so that people cannot only
show a picture, but tie information together. Different from other aspects of architecture,
information architecture is less about the boxes and more about the lines.
Gardner: All right, thank you Mike. Chris, anything to add?
Quality of the individuals
Forde: Building on what Dave was saying earlier and also what Iver was saying is that while
the process and the methodology and the tools are of interest, it’s the discipline and the quality of
the individuals doing the work.
Iver talked about how the conversation is shifting and the practice is improving to build
communications groups that have a discipline to operate around. What I am hearing is implied,
but actually I know what specifically occurs, is that we end up with assets that are well described
and reusable.
And there is a point at which you reach a critical mass that these assets become an accelerator for
decision making. So the ability of the enterprise and the decision makers in the enterprise at the
right level to respond is improved, because they have a well disciplined foundation beneath
them.
A set of assets that are reasonably well-known at the right level of granularity for them to absorb
the information and the conversation is being structured so that the technical people and the
business people are in the right room together to talk about the problems.

10. This is actually a fairly sophisticated set of operations that I am discussing and doesn't happen
overnight, but is definitely one of the things that we see occurring with our members in certain
cases.
Hornford: I want to build on that what Chris said. It’s actually the word "asset." While he was
talking, I was thinking about how people have talked about information as an asset. Most of us
don’t know what information we have, how it’s collected, where it is, but we know we have got a
valuable asset.
I'll use an analogy. I have a factory some place in the world that makes stuff. Is that an asset? If I
know that my factory is able to produce a particular set of goods and it’s hooked into my supply
chain here, I've got an asset. Before that, I just owned a thing.
I was very encouraged listening to what Iver talked about. We're building cadres. We're building
out this approach and I have seen this. I'm not using that word, but now I'm stealing that word.
It's how people build effective teams, which is not to take a couple of specialists and put them in
an ivory tower, but it’s to provide the method and the discipline of how we converse about it, so
that we can have a consistent conversation.
When I tie it with some of the tools from the Architecture Forum and the ArchiMate Forum, I'm
able to consistently describe it, so that I now have an asset I can identify, consume and produce
value from.
Business context
Forde: And this is very different from data modeling. We are not talking about entity
relationship, junk at the technical detail, or third normal form and that kind of stuff. We're talking
about a conversation that’s occurring around the business context of what needs to go on
supported by the right level of technical detail when you need to go there in order to clarify.
Gardner: Thank you Chris. I believe we'll have to leave it there. We're about out of time. We've
been talking about the enterprise architect’s role, how it's evolving, and how TOGAF and
ArchiMate are playing increased roles worldwide.
We've seen how EA is being creatively employed as businesses grapple with such issues as cloud
computing, security, big data, and overall IT transformation.
This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group
Conference in Newport Beach, California.
I want to extend a big thank you to our panel. We've been joined by Chris Forde, the General
Manager Asia-Pacific and Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver
Band, Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Enterprise Architect at The
Standard; Mike Walker, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell.

11. And Henry Franken, Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing Director at
BIZZdesign. Also lastly Dave Hornford, Chair of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and
a Managing Partner at Conexiam. Thanks to you all.
This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator through
these thought leadership interviews. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: The Open Group
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the role of enterprise architecture in helping
enterprises exploit and manage technology transformation. Copyright The Open Group and
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.
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