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The Open Group Marks
25 Years of Working Together
To Make Successful Standards
Transcript of a discussion on the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the global
technology standards arena by The Open Group.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open
Group.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and
you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.
Way back in 1996, when web browsing was novel and central processing still ruled the
roost of enterprise IT, The Open Group was formed from the merger of the Open
Software Foundation and X/Open.
This October marks the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the technology
standards arena by The Open Group. Beginning with a focus as the publisher of the
single UNIX specification technical standard and steward of the UNIX trademark, the
organization has grown to more than 850 members in over 50 countries -- and it leads
the field and technology standard services, certifications, research, and training.
Stay with us now as we explore how standards like UNIX and TOGAF evolved to
transform business and society by impacting the world as a digital adoption wave swept
over human affairs during the past quarter century.
Here to commemorate The Open Group’s achievements and
reminisce about the game-changing, earth-shattering, and
culture-evolving advances of standards-enabled IT, please
welcome our guests. We’re here with Steve Nunn, Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) at The Open Group. Welcome,
Steve.
Steve Nunn: Thank you, Dana. I’m glad to be here.
Gardner: We’re also here with David Lounsbury, Chief
Digital Officer (CDO) at The Open Group. Welcome, David.
David Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to be here,
too.
Nunn
Page 2 of 14
Gardner: And we’re also here with Jim Hietala, Vice President Business Development
and Security at The Open Group. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Hietala: Hi, Dana. I’m glad to be here.
Gardner: Great to have you all. Steve, even after
25 years of clearly breathtaking changes across
the IT landscape, why is The Open Group’s original
mission as salient as ever?
Nunn: In a nutshell, it’s because the world needs
open standards. That has been our heritage --
open systems, open standards. We added
conformance to open standards, importantly, along
the way. And it’s never been more needed than it
is now.
When we began, there was a crying need for more
choice among customers and more interoperability among different software
applications. The main proprietary vendors just weren’t necessarily delivering that
choice. So, it’s really because customers need standards.
You know, they help suppliers, too. They help all of us in our day-to-day lives. That’s
why we’re still needed at 25 years on -- and we’re looking forward to a bright next 25
years.
Gardner: David, sometimes you have to pull people kicking and screaming into
standards. It’s like what your mom told you about eating spinach. It’s for your own good,
right?
Lounsbury: Right.
Gardner: But we couldn’t get to the current levels and breadth of technology use without
them.
Meeting the need for standards
Lounsbury: That’s right. And, you know, Steve mentioned the need for standards --
and the technology does drive the standards. At the time when we were founded, there
were relatively few CPU manufacturers, and now there has been an explosion in
compute power and a radical fall in the cost of networking, and that’s led to lots of new
ways of doing business. People are looking for guidance on how to do that, how to
restructure their organizations, and on which technology platforms they need to use.
That need is fueling a swing back to seeking new standards.
Hietala
Page 3 of 14
Gardner: Jim Hietala, with your focus on security, 25 years ago we couldn’t have
imagined the things we’re facing around security today. But without people pulling
together, we wouldn’t be able to buttress our supply chains. How has security in
particular been enabled by standards?
Hietala: It’s interesting to look back at the past because in the world of security today
you hear about two predominant themes. One is zero trust, and if you look back at some
of the work the Jericho Forum was doing inside of The Open Group 10 to 12 years ago,
those were the origins of what we’re calling zero trust in the security industry today.
The whole notion of perimeter security was failing. We needed to move security controls
closer to the data and to secure people’s access within what were previously considered
secure networks. The Jericho Forum seeded that discussion a number of years ago.
The other big issue out there today is supply chain security, with some of the supply
chain security attacks in the last 18 months. And here again an initiative inside of The
Open Group that was formed some 10 years ago, the Open Trusted Technology Forum
(OTTF), that was brought to us by the US government, was focused on addressing the
security of the hardware and software for the components that go into the IT systems
being procured.
And again, we’ve had some groundbreaking work inside of The Open Group on the topic
of security that’s highly relevant today, even though the environment has changed
tremendously in the last 25 years.
Gardner: Yes, as Steve mentioned, this is a long game. Sometimes it takes decades for
the value of these efforts to become fully evident to all the players.
I’m old enough to remember there used to be quite a few UNIX® standards or variants.
The process behind pulling them together for the benefit of everyone -- both the users
and ultimately the vendors as well -- became a cookie cutter model for creating
standards generally.
Steve, how did the evolution of UNIX standards in particular become opportunity to do
much more?
Nunn: We converted what it meant to be a UNIX system, from being derived from a
certain code base, to being based on a standard. The key is it wasn’t just one standard.
It was a lot of standards. There were 1170 different specs that changed what it meant to
be a UNIX system. It was then all about conformance with the standard and how the
system operates in connection with the standard -- rather than derived from a particular
code base.
It was gathering a set of standards together. Our history since then -- this idea of a
standard of standards -- has evolved and developed to make standards approachable
and useful for solving business problems.
Page 4 of 14
Fundamentally, at The Open Group, all of our work on standards starts with trying to
solve a business problem. A set of standards makes solutions more applicable, more
approachable, for implementation. And increasingly nowadays we add things like
developing some code alongside it. That’s the essence of it. We were transforming the
first kind of UNIX standard, the Spec-1170, set of standards.
Gardner: David, what a success UNIX has become since back when we thought this
was going to be just a way for workstations to interoperate better on a network. It
became the foundation for Linux, BSD, and for the MacOS. It went from workstations to
servers and then dominated servers. It seems that there’s no better validation for the
success and power of standards and what we’ve seen with UNIX over the past 25 years.
Lounsbury: Yes, no question about it. I come from the
minicomputer revolution, where I started in my career,
and basically that whole industry got run out of business
by UNIX systems. And now we have it, as you said, on
our laptops. I’m running it on my laptop right now. It’s on
all our smaller systems. Embedded processes all tend to
run a variant of things that look like the UNIX standard.
If you have to create something quickly, and you want to
create something that’s robust and will run predictably,
you pick something that follows the UNIX standard.
Gardner: And how did you get people to rally to such
standards? There’s more to this than technology. This is
also about a culture of cooperation. There is a human behavioral aspect to it.
How has The Open Group been able to pull so many different threads together and
repeat this? You’ve been doing this as well for TOGAF, with enterprise architecture, with
Open Agile, ArchiMate, FACE, and reference architectures like IT4IT, among many
others.
What is behind this ability to govern so many factions into a common goal?
Staying power of staying neutral
Lounsbury: There are a couple of dimensions to it, and Steve’s already mentioned one
of them. He talked about the end-customers. We recognized the value of neutrality -- not
only neutrality of technology, but also the other dimension of neutrality, which is the
balance between the buy-side and the supply-side.
There are many things called standards activities that are really altered to one side or
the other. We found the balanced viewpoint: balanced across the technologies, balanced
across the demand, which is the essential key to having stable buy-in. Now, of course,
Lounsbury
Page 5 of 14
that must be built on rock-solid processes that respect all the parties, all the way
through. And that’s how our formal governance comes in.
Nunn: That’s right, you’ve hit the
nail on the head. The magic
happens when the customers drive
this. They have things that need to
be achieved through standards.
The second point David made is key, too. The process has been essentially stable --
evolved slightly over the years -- but it’s a tried-and-tested process; a consensus
process of one company, one vote. It’s allowed us to create trust.
That’s the word I want to want to bring out here: trust in the process, trust in the equity of
the process; that all parties get to have their say. That has essentially stood us in good
stead. We’ve been able to apply that process, and that same approach in governance,
across many different industries and business programs.
Gardner: I suppose another key word here, Jim, is cooperation. Because while The
Open Group is a steward and has been involved with governance, there’s a tremendous
army of people who contribute the things that they have learned and know and then
bring to all this.
How important has it been to encourage that level of cooperation? It’s astonishing how
many people are involved with these standards.
Hietala: It’s critical to have that cooperation, and the work, frankly, from the members.
The Open Group brings the staff who help initiate standards initiatives and run them per
our processes and our governance in a fair, open, and transparent way.
But it’s the members who bring the subject matter expertise in whatever area we’re
talking about. In the case of The Open Group FACE Consortium, it’s the defense
contractors and government folks administering some of the programs who bring subject
matter expertise that helps us produce business guides, procurement guides, and the
standards themselves, as well as the reference software.
We have a saying that joining a standards effort such as The Open Group is like joining
a gym. You have to not just get the membership -- you have to show up and do the
work, too.
Lounsbury: Both of Steve and Jim mentioned confidence. I think that the confidence we
project in the process, both the formal governance and the ability to bring people
together, is the real differentiator of why The Open Group has stood the test of time.
We see many examples of groups that get together and say, “Well, why don’t we just get
together and solve this problem?” And what we often find is that they don’t because they
lack stability. They can’t project stability. They don’t have the endurance. The
The magic happens when the customers
drive this. They have things that need to
be achieved through standards.
Page 6 of 14
government is a good example of where they then come back to The Open Group and
say, “Hey, can you help us make this a sustainable activity that will have the impact over
time that we need?”
Gardner: Another key word here then is journey, because you never get to the
destination, which is actually a good thing. You have to be self-sustaining. It has to be
ongoing, the peeling back of the onion, the solving of one problem that perhaps creates
others: and then again and again.
Is it that never-ending part of the standards process also a strength, Steve?
Nunn: Yes, because around the world the various industries we work with don’t stand
still. There’s a new problem coming up every day, as you alluded to, Dana, that needs
solving.
When a group gets together to solve an initial problem through a standard, they realize
there’s much more there. I can think some recent examples, such as the Open
Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Forum, which is in the oil and gas industry. They
originally got together to focus on subsurface issues. And now they’re realizing that that
a standards approach can help them in many other areas of their business as well.
The problems don’t stand still, and technology
evolves the world. Disruptive events happen, and
we need to adjust and update the standards
accordingly.
Gardner: Is there a pattern to the standards you’ve chosen to foster? You obviously
have been very successful with enterprise architecture and TOGAF. You’ve gone to
modeling, security, and reference architectures for how IT organizations operate.
What’s the common denominator? Why these particular standards? Is there an order to
it? Is there a logic to it?
One business need leads to another, and another
Nunn: The common denominator is something mentioned earlier, which is a business
need. Is there a business problem to be solved, whatever industry that might be?
Over the years, The Open Group can trace one activity where a group of companies got
together to solve a business problem and then it led to several other forums. The
example we usually use is The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment
(FACE) Consortium in federal avionics. They recently celebrated their 10th anniversary.
That effort led directly to work in the sensor architecture space, and strangely led to our
Open Process Automation Forum. Members saw the great work that was being done in
the FACE Consortium, in terms of a modular method that creates an architected
The problems don’t stand
still, and technology
evolves the world.
Page 7 of 14
approach. The past saw a situation where one aircraft, for example, is funded completely
separately, with no reuse of technology or parts, and where everything was done from
scratch with one prime contractor and subs.
And we had some other members fortunately who saw from the oil industry how a set of
industry standards had emerged. They said, “We have the same issues in our industries.
We want a standardized approach, too.”
As a result, the Open Process Automation Forum is doing great work, transforming the
way that systems are procured.
These successes form a traceable
connection between an industry that has a
problem to solve and the established best
ways of doing it. They come together and
work on it as an industry, and through
tried-and-trusted processes, rather than
trying to beat each other in the
marketplace to the first magic solution.
Gardner: Jim, it sounds like the need for a standard almost presents itself to you. Is that
fair?
Hietala: As an outsider, you might say, “What in the world do control systems users
have in common with the military avionics industry?” But the takeaway is with each
iteration of this new standards initiative our staff learned better how to support the
formation and operation of a set of best practices around an operating standards
initiative. The members learn as well. So, you had folks from Exxon Mobil at a
conference speaking about how they transformed their industry, and the light bulb went
off. Others brought the idea back from the oil and gas industry.
Then we at The Open Group helped them identify similar uses in some other industries:
metals and mining, pulp and paper, utilities, water utilities, and pharmaceuticals – they
all use the same set of control system equipment. They all had similar problems until we
were able to bring it into a standards initiative. And once you have that sort of support
behind an initiative, the suppliers don’t have a choice but to pay attention, get involved,
and help drive the initiative themselves.
Gardner: David, it’s clear that just presenting a standard isn’t the only factor for success.
You must support it with certifications, additional research, events, and forums that
continuously bring people together in an atmosphere for collaboration and ongoing
training. You’ve not only broadened the scope of what The Open Group does in terms of
the standards, but also a wider set of functions that augment and support those
standards.
Lounsbury: That’s right. Both Jim and Steve mentioned the process of discovery by the
members, or by potential members, and the value of standards. That’s a critical
[Businesses] come together and work
on it as an industry, and through tried-
and-trusted processes, rather than
trying to beat each other in the
marketplace to the first magic solution.
Page 8 of 14
component because the natural instinct is for people to go off and try to solve things on
their own, or to get a magic bullet competitively.
But part of the art of what we do is help
members understand that only through
collective action, only through a wide
agreement, is there going to be a
sufficient response to solve the business
problem and provide a center of gravity for
the vendors to invest in building the systems that embrace and employ the standards.
And so, a part of building that continuing confidence is knowing that there will be trained
people who know how to use the standard effectively. There will be systems that
conform to the standard, and you can get together with peers in your industry to find out
about what’s going on at the cutting edge of technology.
And, frankly, even the social networking, just meeting people face to face builds
confidence that everybody is working toward the common objective. All of these things
are critical supporting pieces that give people confidence to invest in solutions and the
confidence to specify that when they purchase.
Gardner: It seems like a big part of the secret sauce here is mutual assured success for
as many of the people in the ecosystem -- on all sides of the equation -- as possible. It
sounds simple, but it’s really hard to do.
Nunn: It is, Dana. And you need champions, the people who are passionate about it in
their own organizations.
For me, the single biggest differentiator and reason for The Open Group’s success so far
is that we have a very respected set of certification programs and processes. The
importance of certification is that it gives standards some teeth. It gives them meaning.
We’re not just publishing standards for the sake of it, and nobody uses them. They’re
being used by trained people. There might also be certified products out there, too.
Certification helps turn it into an ecosystem, and that in turn gets people more engaged
and seeking to evolve it and be part of the movement. Certification is key because of the
teeth that it gives the standards.
Gardner: Well, the custom is when we have an anniversary to do toasts. Usually, toasts
are anecdotal or remembrances. Are there any such moments in hindsight that ended up
being formative and important over the past 25 years?
Cheers to 25th
anniversary highlights
Nunn: For years, we had heard that UNIX was going away, that it’s not relevant
anymore. I think the work we’ve done has proven that’s not the case.
Only through collective action, only
through a wide agreement, is there
going to be a sufficient response to
solve the business problem.
Page 9 of 14
Another highlight or breakthrough moment was when we got our TOGAF practitioner
certification program up and running. That spread around the world to a large number of
individuals who are certified and who are promoting the value of the standard itself.
We’ve created a community over the years, even though that community is harder to
bring together right now in the pandemic days. But certainly, for the vast majority of our
history, we have brought people together; these people are familiar with each other, and
new people come in.
The face-to-face element is special.
Somebody recently made a great
point about the effect of the
pandemic. And the point was that you
need the personal interactions in
developing standards. Standards are
about contributing intellectual
property, but also about compromise. It’s about discussing what’s best for the relevant
industry. And that’s hard to achieve in a virtual world.
You need the dinners, the beers, whatever it might be to build the social networking and
up the trust for the individuals in these situations who are often from competing
companies. The way that we have encouraged the community and built up what we’ve
often called “The Open Group family” over the years is a key factor for us.
Gardner: David, what are some anecdotes that come to mind that highlight the first 25
years?
Lounsbury: I’m going to pick up on Steve’s theme of face-to-face meetings. One that
stands out in my mind was the first face-to-face FACE Consortium meeting, which was
at a vendor building on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
And, I’ll be honest, there was a ton of skepticism, both from the government agencies
and from some of the larger vendors, that this could ever possibly come together. And
because we got the people together and we had a few enthusiastic champions -- not
necessarily the people who started things out -- but the people who saw the value of
cooperative industry engagement -- we got it together. And 60 companies walked out of
that room saying, “Yeah, this might actually work.” And from then on -- that was over 10
years ago -- it changed the way avionics are produced. And now it has inspired changes
in other industry verticals as well.
So, what we sometimes call The Open Group way differentiates how we create
standards from what had gone on in other standards activities that they had been
engaged in.
Gardner: Jim, what’s your toast to the past quarter-century?
You need the personal interactions in
developing standards. Standards are
about intellectual property, but also
about compromise. It’s about discussing
what’s best for the relevant industry.
Page 10 of 14
Hietala: At little bit higher level, I point to the fact that The Open Group has grown to
more than 850 member organizations from dozens of countries. The specific things that
resonate with me and made an impact over the years are engaging with all those
members from the many different countries and nationalities at events we’ve held.
That and to getting to over 120,000 TOGAF-certified people, which is a huge milestone
and was definitely not an overnight success. TOGAF was tens of years in the making, so
those to me are indicative of where we’ve come in 25 years.
Gardner: It seems that the Tower of Babel isn’t particularly high when it comes to
information technology (IT). The technology is a common denominator that cuts across
cultures and boundaries. There really is a common world stage for IT.
IT – The universal language
Hietala: I think that’s true. There’s probably work that goes on inside of standards
organizations like The Open Group, that isn’t necessarily seen, that enables that.
There’s a fair amount of work translating the products of The Open Group into various
native languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, French, or Spanish, or Chinese. Those
often happen at the ground level by volunteers, typically from the countries that want to
enable adoption of what they see as a highly valuable standard.
Lounsbury: The profusion of technology you mentioned has driven a fundamental
change in the way people run their businesses. And The Open Group is very much at
the forefront of thinking about how that’s best going to happen.
What does it mean to architect your business going forward when you have all of these
new management techniques, all of this new technology that’s available at very low cost
causing these fundamental shifts in how you interact with your customers and in your
ecosystem? That’s currently on the forefront of the minds of many of the groups working
inside The Open Group.
We all know there’s a new management book a
day nowadays. That’s why there’s a growing
demand for stability of guidance in this world.
How to do these new digital ways of working?
We look to standards bodies to come out with
that guidance. Our members are working on it.
Gardner: I suppose the past is prologue. And back when I first got involved with
enterprise IT in the late 1980s, this type of technology transformation was still fringe in
business. But it’s become more than mainstream, it’s become dominant.
We talk about digital transformation. We could probably just drop digital, now it’s
transformation, period. Given the depth, breadth, and importance of IT to business and
society -- where do we go from here?
How to do these new digital
ways of working? We look to
standards bodies to come out
with that guidance.
Page 11 of 14
How do you take the success you’ve had for the past 25 years and extend that to an
even grander stage?
Standards provide frame for future transformation
Nunn: As Dave said, organizations have to transform. They’re looking for structure.
They’re looking for tools that help go through this transformation. It can’t happen soon
enough. The pandemic has been an accelerator.
But they need a framework, and standards provide that framework. That doesn’t mean
exactly the same approach for all standards. But I don’t think we need to fundamentally
change the way standards are built.
We’ve talked about our legacy of trust and the
tried-and-tested. We need to evolve how
things are done as we go forward, to fit with
the speed with which transformation needs to
occur and the demands that individual
organizations in their industries have.
But we definitely now have a very solid bedrock for evolving, and the transformation
aspect of it is key because people see standards as helping them transform. Standards
give them something to work with when so much all around is changing.
Gardner: Jim, how do you take the success you’ve had with digital standards and
expand the use of the methodologies?
Hietala: We’ve seen that the practices, business model, and the approach to taking a
big industry problem and solving it through the development of standards has been
proven to work. Companies in need of those standards efforts are comfortable looking at
The Open Group and saying, “You’re an honest broker to be in the middle of this and
make something happen.”
For example, a member from our OSDU Forum looked at what was happening there and
saw a similar need inside of his company. It happened to be in the energy industry, but
he saw a problem around how to measure and manage their carbon footprint. They
examined the approach used in the OSDU and said, “That’s what we need over here to
determine what our carbon footprint is.”
And what they found quickly in looking at that customer need was that that’s a universal
need. It’s certainly not just an energy industry issue. Cement companies, large auto
manufacturers, and many others all have that same need. They would all be well served
by having a standard effort that produces not just standards but a reference software
platform that they could build from that helps them measure and manage any carbon
footprint. The approach has evolved a bit. We’re able to support now open-source
We need to evolve how things
are done as we go forward, to
fit with the speed with which
transformation needs to occur.
Page 12 of 14
initiatives alongside of standards initiatives. But fundamentally our consensus-oriented
standard process has not changed.
And that’s the way we build these initiatives, rally industry support, and take them from
looking at the customer business problem to producing standards and business guides.
The way we address the issues hasn’t changed.
Gardner: David, if you can apply the lessons learned at The Open Group to even more
challenging and impactful problems, that sounds worth doing. Is that part of your next 25
years?
Lounsbury: Yes, it certainly is. There’s a couple of dimensions to it. There’s the scale in
number of people who are engaged. And we’ve given plenty of examples of how we
went from a core standard like UNIX or IT4IT or TOGAF and applied those same proven
techniques to things such as how you do avionics, which led to how to do process
control systems, which led to how to do subsurface data. That has all led to a
tremendous expansion in the number of organizations and people who are engaged with
The Open Group.
The other dimension of scale is speed. And that is something where we need to keep
our standards up to date, and that has evolved. For example, we’ve restructured our
architecture portfolio to have more modular content. That’s something we’re going to be
looking at across all of our core standards, including how we link them together and how
we make them more cohesive.
We’re looking at reducing the friction in
keeping standards up to date and improving
the pace so they’re competitive with those one-
off, two-people-writing-a-book kinds of
guidance that characterizes our industry right
now.
Gardner: For those who have been listening and are now interested in taking an active
role in open standards, where can they go? Also, what’s coming next, Steve?
Nunn: Yes, we’ll have some anniversary celebrations. We have a great event in
October. We’re doing a moving global event over a 24-hour period. So, a few hours
hosted in each of several locations around the world where we have offices and staff
and significant membership.
We also have an ever-growing number of active meetings in our groups. Most of them,
because of the pandemic, have been virtual recently. But we’re starting to see, as I
mentioned earlier, the eagerness for people to get together face-to-face again when, of
course, it’s safe to do so and people feel comfortable to do so.
And we’ll be looking at not just what we’ve achieved but also looking at how we make
the next steps. A big part of that relates to the work we’ve done with governments
We’re looking at reducing the
friction in keeping standards up to
date and improving the pace so
they’re competitive.
Page 13 of 14
around the world. A good example is the government of India, which recently published
a standard called IndEA, based on our TOGAF Enterprise Architecture standard.
It’s being used to fundamentally transform government services, not just in the national
government of India, but in various states there. And then other countries are looking at
that work. We also have work going on with the International Telecommunication Union
(ITU) in healthcare and digital services for citizens.
We’re doing a lot of work with governments to make a real difference to people’s lives as
citizens, in countries that may need to catch up with some of the more developed
countries. They’re using our standards and the work groups we’ve put together to get up
to speed.
For me, that’s an exciting part of our future: The
difference we can make in people’s daily lives.
Gardner: And, of course, a lot of this information
is on your website, www.opengroup.org. Any other resources that people should be
aware of?
Lounsbury: Yes, all of our standards are free to download from our library on our
website. You can obviously find how to register for events on the website, too. At the
Forum level, there’s good information about each Forum that we’ve been working on.
There’s always a contact form associated with each of the Forum webpages so you can
leave your details and someone from our team will get in touch and tell you how to get
involved.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on 25 years of remarkable achievements in the technology
standards arena by The Open Group.
And we’ve learned how standards like UNIX and TOGAF evolved to transform business
and society, impacting us all over the world as a digital adoption wave swept across
human affairs. So a big thank you to our panel. We’ve been here with Steve Nunn, Chief
Executive officer at The Open Group. Thank you so much, Steve.
Nunn: Thank you very much, Dana. It’s been a great discussion.
Gardner: And we’ve been joined by David Lounsbury, Chief Digital Officer at the Open
Group. Thank you, sir.
Lounsbury: You’re welcome, Dana.
Gardner: And lastly, Jim Hietala has been with us. He’s vice President Business
Development and Security at The Open Group. Thank you, Jim.
Hietala: Thank you, Dana.
That’s an exciting part of our
future: The difference we can
make in people’s daily lives.
Page 14 of 14
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect
commemoration of technology standards successes discussion.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Your host throughout the
series of BriefingsDirect discussions sponsored by The Open Group.
Thanks again for listening, please pass this along with your business community, 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 the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the global
technology standards arena by The Open Group. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The
Open Group, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• The path to a digital-first enterprise is paved with an Emergence Model and Digital
Transformation Playbook
• How The Open Group enterprise architecture portfolio enables an agile digital enterprise
• How agile Enterprise Architecture builds agile business advantage
• How the ArchiMate modeling standard helps Enterprise Architects deliver successful
digital transformation
• Where the rubber meets the road: How users see the IT4IT standard building competitive
business advantage
• How an agile focus for Enterprise Architects builds competitive advantage for digital
transformation
• How the data science profession is growing in value and impact across the business
world
• The Open Group panel explores ways to help smart cities initiatives overcome public
sector obstacles
• The Open Group digital practitioner effort eases the people path to digital business
transformation

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The Open Group Marks 25 Years of Working Together To Make Successful Standards

  • 1. Page 1 of 14 The Open Group Marks 25 Years of Working Together To Make Successful Standards Transcript of a discussion on the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the global technology standards arena by The Open Group. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group. Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Way back in 1996, when web browsing was novel and central processing still ruled the roost of enterprise IT, The Open Group was formed from the merger of the Open Software Foundation and X/Open. This October marks the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the technology standards arena by The Open Group. Beginning with a focus as the publisher of the single UNIX specification technical standard and steward of the UNIX trademark, the organization has grown to more than 850 members in over 50 countries -- and it leads the field and technology standard services, certifications, research, and training. Stay with us now as we explore how standards like UNIX and TOGAF evolved to transform business and society by impacting the world as a digital adoption wave swept over human affairs during the past quarter century. Here to commemorate The Open Group’s achievements and reminisce about the game-changing, earth-shattering, and culture-evolving advances of standards-enabled IT, please welcome our guests. We’re here with Steve Nunn, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at The Open Group. Welcome, Steve. Steve Nunn: Thank you, Dana. I’m glad to be here. Gardner: We’re also here with David Lounsbury, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at The Open Group. Welcome, David. David Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to be here, too. Nunn
  • 2. Page 2 of 14 Gardner: And we’re also here with Jim Hietala, Vice President Business Development and Security at The Open Group. Welcome, Jim. Jim Hietala: Hi, Dana. I’m glad to be here. Gardner: Great to have you all. Steve, even after 25 years of clearly breathtaking changes across the IT landscape, why is The Open Group’s original mission as salient as ever? Nunn: In a nutshell, it’s because the world needs open standards. That has been our heritage -- open systems, open standards. We added conformance to open standards, importantly, along the way. And it’s never been more needed than it is now. When we began, there was a crying need for more choice among customers and more interoperability among different software applications. The main proprietary vendors just weren’t necessarily delivering that choice. So, it’s really because customers need standards. You know, they help suppliers, too. They help all of us in our day-to-day lives. That’s why we’re still needed at 25 years on -- and we’re looking forward to a bright next 25 years. Gardner: David, sometimes you have to pull people kicking and screaming into standards. It’s like what your mom told you about eating spinach. It’s for your own good, right? Lounsbury: Right. Gardner: But we couldn’t get to the current levels and breadth of technology use without them. Meeting the need for standards Lounsbury: That’s right. And, you know, Steve mentioned the need for standards -- and the technology does drive the standards. At the time when we were founded, there were relatively few CPU manufacturers, and now there has been an explosion in compute power and a radical fall in the cost of networking, and that’s led to lots of new ways of doing business. People are looking for guidance on how to do that, how to restructure their organizations, and on which technology platforms they need to use. That need is fueling a swing back to seeking new standards. Hietala
  • 3. Page 3 of 14 Gardner: Jim Hietala, with your focus on security, 25 years ago we couldn’t have imagined the things we’re facing around security today. But without people pulling together, we wouldn’t be able to buttress our supply chains. How has security in particular been enabled by standards? Hietala: It’s interesting to look back at the past because in the world of security today you hear about two predominant themes. One is zero trust, and if you look back at some of the work the Jericho Forum was doing inside of The Open Group 10 to 12 years ago, those were the origins of what we’re calling zero trust in the security industry today. The whole notion of perimeter security was failing. We needed to move security controls closer to the data and to secure people’s access within what were previously considered secure networks. The Jericho Forum seeded that discussion a number of years ago. The other big issue out there today is supply chain security, with some of the supply chain security attacks in the last 18 months. And here again an initiative inside of The Open Group that was formed some 10 years ago, the Open Trusted Technology Forum (OTTF), that was brought to us by the US government, was focused on addressing the security of the hardware and software for the components that go into the IT systems being procured. And again, we’ve had some groundbreaking work inside of The Open Group on the topic of security that’s highly relevant today, even though the environment has changed tremendously in the last 25 years. Gardner: Yes, as Steve mentioned, this is a long game. Sometimes it takes decades for the value of these efforts to become fully evident to all the players. I’m old enough to remember there used to be quite a few UNIX® standards or variants. The process behind pulling them together for the benefit of everyone -- both the users and ultimately the vendors as well -- became a cookie cutter model for creating standards generally. Steve, how did the evolution of UNIX standards in particular become opportunity to do much more? Nunn: We converted what it meant to be a UNIX system, from being derived from a certain code base, to being based on a standard. The key is it wasn’t just one standard. It was a lot of standards. There were 1170 different specs that changed what it meant to be a UNIX system. It was then all about conformance with the standard and how the system operates in connection with the standard -- rather than derived from a particular code base. It was gathering a set of standards together. Our history since then -- this idea of a standard of standards -- has evolved and developed to make standards approachable and useful for solving business problems.
  • 4. Page 4 of 14 Fundamentally, at The Open Group, all of our work on standards starts with trying to solve a business problem. A set of standards makes solutions more applicable, more approachable, for implementation. And increasingly nowadays we add things like developing some code alongside it. That’s the essence of it. We were transforming the first kind of UNIX standard, the Spec-1170, set of standards. Gardner: David, what a success UNIX has become since back when we thought this was going to be just a way for workstations to interoperate better on a network. It became the foundation for Linux, BSD, and for the MacOS. It went from workstations to servers and then dominated servers. It seems that there’s no better validation for the success and power of standards and what we’ve seen with UNIX over the past 25 years. Lounsbury: Yes, no question about it. I come from the minicomputer revolution, where I started in my career, and basically that whole industry got run out of business by UNIX systems. And now we have it, as you said, on our laptops. I’m running it on my laptop right now. It’s on all our smaller systems. Embedded processes all tend to run a variant of things that look like the UNIX standard. If you have to create something quickly, and you want to create something that’s robust and will run predictably, you pick something that follows the UNIX standard. Gardner: And how did you get people to rally to such standards? There’s more to this than technology. This is also about a culture of cooperation. There is a human behavioral aspect to it. How has The Open Group been able to pull so many different threads together and repeat this? You’ve been doing this as well for TOGAF, with enterprise architecture, with Open Agile, ArchiMate, FACE, and reference architectures like IT4IT, among many others. What is behind this ability to govern so many factions into a common goal? Staying power of staying neutral Lounsbury: There are a couple of dimensions to it, and Steve’s already mentioned one of them. He talked about the end-customers. We recognized the value of neutrality -- not only neutrality of technology, but also the other dimension of neutrality, which is the balance between the buy-side and the supply-side. There are many things called standards activities that are really altered to one side or the other. We found the balanced viewpoint: balanced across the technologies, balanced across the demand, which is the essential key to having stable buy-in. Now, of course, Lounsbury
  • 5. Page 5 of 14 that must be built on rock-solid processes that respect all the parties, all the way through. And that’s how our formal governance comes in. Nunn: That’s right, you’ve hit the nail on the head. The magic happens when the customers drive this. They have things that need to be achieved through standards. The second point David made is key, too. The process has been essentially stable -- evolved slightly over the years -- but it’s a tried-and-tested process; a consensus process of one company, one vote. It’s allowed us to create trust. That’s the word I want to want to bring out here: trust in the process, trust in the equity of the process; that all parties get to have their say. That has essentially stood us in good stead. We’ve been able to apply that process, and that same approach in governance, across many different industries and business programs. Gardner: I suppose another key word here, Jim, is cooperation. Because while The Open Group is a steward and has been involved with governance, there’s a tremendous army of people who contribute the things that they have learned and know and then bring to all this. How important has it been to encourage that level of cooperation? It’s astonishing how many people are involved with these standards. Hietala: It’s critical to have that cooperation, and the work, frankly, from the members. The Open Group brings the staff who help initiate standards initiatives and run them per our processes and our governance in a fair, open, and transparent way. But it’s the members who bring the subject matter expertise in whatever area we’re talking about. In the case of The Open Group FACE Consortium, it’s the defense contractors and government folks administering some of the programs who bring subject matter expertise that helps us produce business guides, procurement guides, and the standards themselves, as well as the reference software. We have a saying that joining a standards effort such as The Open Group is like joining a gym. You have to not just get the membership -- you have to show up and do the work, too. Lounsbury: Both of Steve and Jim mentioned confidence. I think that the confidence we project in the process, both the formal governance and the ability to bring people together, is the real differentiator of why The Open Group has stood the test of time. We see many examples of groups that get together and say, “Well, why don’t we just get together and solve this problem?” And what we often find is that they don’t because they lack stability. They can’t project stability. They don’t have the endurance. The The magic happens when the customers drive this. They have things that need to be achieved through standards.
  • 6. Page 6 of 14 government is a good example of where they then come back to The Open Group and say, “Hey, can you help us make this a sustainable activity that will have the impact over time that we need?” Gardner: Another key word here then is journey, because you never get to the destination, which is actually a good thing. You have to be self-sustaining. It has to be ongoing, the peeling back of the onion, the solving of one problem that perhaps creates others: and then again and again. Is it that never-ending part of the standards process also a strength, Steve? Nunn: Yes, because around the world the various industries we work with don’t stand still. There’s a new problem coming up every day, as you alluded to, Dana, that needs solving. When a group gets together to solve an initial problem through a standard, they realize there’s much more there. I can think some recent examples, such as the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Forum, which is in the oil and gas industry. They originally got together to focus on subsurface issues. And now they’re realizing that that a standards approach can help them in many other areas of their business as well. The problems don’t stand still, and technology evolves the world. Disruptive events happen, and we need to adjust and update the standards accordingly. Gardner: Is there a pattern to the standards you’ve chosen to foster? You obviously have been very successful with enterprise architecture and TOGAF. You’ve gone to modeling, security, and reference architectures for how IT organizations operate. What’s the common denominator? Why these particular standards? Is there an order to it? Is there a logic to it? One business need leads to another, and another Nunn: The common denominator is something mentioned earlier, which is a business need. Is there a business problem to be solved, whatever industry that might be? Over the years, The Open Group can trace one activity where a group of companies got together to solve a business problem and then it led to several other forums. The example we usually use is The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium in federal avionics. They recently celebrated their 10th anniversary. That effort led directly to work in the sensor architecture space, and strangely led to our Open Process Automation Forum. Members saw the great work that was being done in the FACE Consortium, in terms of a modular method that creates an architected The problems don’t stand still, and technology evolves the world.
  • 7. Page 7 of 14 approach. The past saw a situation where one aircraft, for example, is funded completely separately, with no reuse of technology or parts, and where everything was done from scratch with one prime contractor and subs. And we had some other members fortunately who saw from the oil industry how a set of industry standards had emerged. They said, “We have the same issues in our industries. We want a standardized approach, too.” As a result, the Open Process Automation Forum is doing great work, transforming the way that systems are procured. These successes form a traceable connection between an industry that has a problem to solve and the established best ways of doing it. They come together and work on it as an industry, and through tried-and-trusted processes, rather than trying to beat each other in the marketplace to the first magic solution. Gardner: Jim, it sounds like the need for a standard almost presents itself to you. Is that fair? Hietala: As an outsider, you might say, “What in the world do control systems users have in common with the military avionics industry?” But the takeaway is with each iteration of this new standards initiative our staff learned better how to support the formation and operation of a set of best practices around an operating standards initiative. The members learn as well. So, you had folks from Exxon Mobil at a conference speaking about how they transformed their industry, and the light bulb went off. Others brought the idea back from the oil and gas industry. Then we at The Open Group helped them identify similar uses in some other industries: metals and mining, pulp and paper, utilities, water utilities, and pharmaceuticals – they all use the same set of control system equipment. They all had similar problems until we were able to bring it into a standards initiative. And once you have that sort of support behind an initiative, the suppliers don’t have a choice but to pay attention, get involved, and help drive the initiative themselves. Gardner: David, it’s clear that just presenting a standard isn’t the only factor for success. You must support it with certifications, additional research, events, and forums that continuously bring people together in an atmosphere for collaboration and ongoing training. You’ve not only broadened the scope of what The Open Group does in terms of the standards, but also a wider set of functions that augment and support those standards. Lounsbury: That’s right. Both Jim and Steve mentioned the process of discovery by the members, or by potential members, and the value of standards. That’s a critical [Businesses] come together and work on it as an industry, and through tried- and-trusted processes, rather than trying to beat each other in the marketplace to the first magic solution.
  • 8. Page 8 of 14 component because the natural instinct is for people to go off and try to solve things on their own, or to get a magic bullet competitively. But part of the art of what we do is help members understand that only through collective action, only through a wide agreement, is there going to be a sufficient response to solve the business problem and provide a center of gravity for the vendors to invest in building the systems that embrace and employ the standards. And so, a part of building that continuing confidence is knowing that there will be trained people who know how to use the standard effectively. There will be systems that conform to the standard, and you can get together with peers in your industry to find out about what’s going on at the cutting edge of technology. And, frankly, even the social networking, just meeting people face to face builds confidence that everybody is working toward the common objective. All of these things are critical supporting pieces that give people confidence to invest in solutions and the confidence to specify that when they purchase. Gardner: It seems like a big part of the secret sauce here is mutual assured success for as many of the people in the ecosystem -- on all sides of the equation -- as possible. It sounds simple, but it’s really hard to do. Nunn: It is, Dana. And you need champions, the people who are passionate about it in their own organizations. For me, the single biggest differentiator and reason for The Open Group’s success so far is that we have a very respected set of certification programs and processes. The importance of certification is that it gives standards some teeth. It gives them meaning. We’re not just publishing standards for the sake of it, and nobody uses them. They’re being used by trained people. There might also be certified products out there, too. Certification helps turn it into an ecosystem, and that in turn gets people more engaged and seeking to evolve it and be part of the movement. Certification is key because of the teeth that it gives the standards. Gardner: Well, the custom is when we have an anniversary to do toasts. Usually, toasts are anecdotal or remembrances. Are there any such moments in hindsight that ended up being formative and important over the past 25 years? Cheers to 25th anniversary highlights Nunn: For years, we had heard that UNIX was going away, that it’s not relevant anymore. I think the work we’ve done has proven that’s not the case. Only through collective action, only through a wide agreement, is there going to be a sufficient response to solve the business problem.
  • 9. Page 9 of 14 Another highlight or breakthrough moment was when we got our TOGAF practitioner certification program up and running. That spread around the world to a large number of individuals who are certified and who are promoting the value of the standard itself. We’ve created a community over the years, even though that community is harder to bring together right now in the pandemic days. But certainly, for the vast majority of our history, we have brought people together; these people are familiar with each other, and new people come in. The face-to-face element is special. Somebody recently made a great point about the effect of the pandemic. And the point was that you need the personal interactions in developing standards. Standards are about contributing intellectual property, but also about compromise. It’s about discussing what’s best for the relevant industry. And that’s hard to achieve in a virtual world. You need the dinners, the beers, whatever it might be to build the social networking and up the trust for the individuals in these situations who are often from competing companies. The way that we have encouraged the community and built up what we’ve often called “The Open Group family” over the years is a key factor for us. Gardner: David, what are some anecdotes that come to mind that highlight the first 25 years? Lounsbury: I’m going to pick up on Steve’s theme of face-to-face meetings. One that stands out in my mind was the first face-to-face FACE Consortium meeting, which was at a vendor building on the National Mall in Washington, DC. And, I’ll be honest, there was a ton of skepticism, both from the government agencies and from some of the larger vendors, that this could ever possibly come together. And because we got the people together and we had a few enthusiastic champions -- not necessarily the people who started things out -- but the people who saw the value of cooperative industry engagement -- we got it together. And 60 companies walked out of that room saying, “Yeah, this might actually work.” And from then on -- that was over 10 years ago -- it changed the way avionics are produced. And now it has inspired changes in other industry verticals as well. So, what we sometimes call The Open Group way differentiates how we create standards from what had gone on in other standards activities that they had been engaged in. Gardner: Jim, what’s your toast to the past quarter-century? You need the personal interactions in developing standards. Standards are about intellectual property, but also about compromise. It’s about discussing what’s best for the relevant industry.
  • 10. Page 10 of 14 Hietala: At little bit higher level, I point to the fact that The Open Group has grown to more than 850 member organizations from dozens of countries. The specific things that resonate with me and made an impact over the years are engaging with all those members from the many different countries and nationalities at events we’ve held. That and to getting to over 120,000 TOGAF-certified people, which is a huge milestone and was definitely not an overnight success. TOGAF was tens of years in the making, so those to me are indicative of where we’ve come in 25 years. Gardner: It seems that the Tower of Babel isn’t particularly high when it comes to information technology (IT). The technology is a common denominator that cuts across cultures and boundaries. There really is a common world stage for IT. IT – The universal language Hietala: I think that’s true. There’s probably work that goes on inside of standards organizations like The Open Group, that isn’t necessarily seen, that enables that. There’s a fair amount of work translating the products of The Open Group into various native languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, French, or Spanish, or Chinese. Those often happen at the ground level by volunteers, typically from the countries that want to enable adoption of what they see as a highly valuable standard. Lounsbury: The profusion of technology you mentioned has driven a fundamental change in the way people run their businesses. And The Open Group is very much at the forefront of thinking about how that’s best going to happen. What does it mean to architect your business going forward when you have all of these new management techniques, all of this new technology that’s available at very low cost causing these fundamental shifts in how you interact with your customers and in your ecosystem? That’s currently on the forefront of the minds of many of the groups working inside The Open Group. We all know there’s a new management book a day nowadays. That’s why there’s a growing demand for stability of guidance in this world. How to do these new digital ways of working? We look to standards bodies to come out with that guidance. Our members are working on it. Gardner: I suppose the past is prologue. And back when I first got involved with enterprise IT in the late 1980s, this type of technology transformation was still fringe in business. But it’s become more than mainstream, it’s become dominant. We talk about digital transformation. We could probably just drop digital, now it’s transformation, period. Given the depth, breadth, and importance of IT to business and society -- where do we go from here? How to do these new digital ways of working? We look to standards bodies to come out with that guidance.
  • 11. Page 11 of 14 How do you take the success you’ve had for the past 25 years and extend that to an even grander stage? Standards provide frame for future transformation Nunn: As Dave said, organizations have to transform. They’re looking for structure. They’re looking for tools that help go through this transformation. It can’t happen soon enough. The pandemic has been an accelerator. But they need a framework, and standards provide that framework. That doesn’t mean exactly the same approach for all standards. But I don’t think we need to fundamentally change the way standards are built. We’ve talked about our legacy of trust and the tried-and-tested. We need to evolve how things are done as we go forward, to fit with the speed with which transformation needs to occur and the demands that individual organizations in their industries have. But we definitely now have a very solid bedrock for evolving, and the transformation aspect of it is key because people see standards as helping them transform. Standards give them something to work with when so much all around is changing. Gardner: Jim, how do you take the success you’ve had with digital standards and expand the use of the methodologies? Hietala: We’ve seen that the practices, business model, and the approach to taking a big industry problem and solving it through the development of standards has been proven to work. Companies in need of those standards efforts are comfortable looking at The Open Group and saying, “You’re an honest broker to be in the middle of this and make something happen.” For example, a member from our OSDU Forum looked at what was happening there and saw a similar need inside of his company. It happened to be in the energy industry, but he saw a problem around how to measure and manage their carbon footprint. They examined the approach used in the OSDU and said, “That’s what we need over here to determine what our carbon footprint is.” And what they found quickly in looking at that customer need was that that’s a universal need. It’s certainly not just an energy industry issue. Cement companies, large auto manufacturers, and many others all have that same need. They would all be well served by having a standard effort that produces not just standards but a reference software platform that they could build from that helps them measure and manage any carbon footprint. The approach has evolved a bit. We’re able to support now open-source We need to evolve how things are done as we go forward, to fit with the speed with which transformation needs to occur.
  • 12. Page 12 of 14 initiatives alongside of standards initiatives. But fundamentally our consensus-oriented standard process has not changed. And that’s the way we build these initiatives, rally industry support, and take them from looking at the customer business problem to producing standards and business guides. The way we address the issues hasn’t changed. Gardner: David, if you can apply the lessons learned at The Open Group to even more challenging and impactful problems, that sounds worth doing. Is that part of your next 25 years? Lounsbury: Yes, it certainly is. There’s a couple of dimensions to it. There’s the scale in number of people who are engaged. And we’ve given plenty of examples of how we went from a core standard like UNIX or IT4IT or TOGAF and applied those same proven techniques to things such as how you do avionics, which led to how to do process control systems, which led to how to do subsurface data. That has all led to a tremendous expansion in the number of organizations and people who are engaged with The Open Group. The other dimension of scale is speed. And that is something where we need to keep our standards up to date, and that has evolved. For example, we’ve restructured our architecture portfolio to have more modular content. That’s something we’re going to be looking at across all of our core standards, including how we link them together and how we make them more cohesive. We’re looking at reducing the friction in keeping standards up to date and improving the pace so they’re competitive with those one- off, two-people-writing-a-book kinds of guidance that characterizes our industry right now. Gardner: For those who have been listening and are now interested in taking an active role in open standards, where can they go? Also, what’s coming next, Steve? Nunn: Yes, we’ll have some anniversary celebrations. We have a great event in October. We’re doing a moving global event over a 24-hour period. So, a few hours hosted in each of several locations around the world where we have offices and staff and significant membership. We also have an ever-growing number of active meetings in our groups. Most of them, because of the pandemic, have been virtual recently. But we’re starting to see, as I mentioned earlier, the eagerness for people to get together face-to-face again when, of course, it’s safe to do so and people feel comfortable to do so. And we’ll be looking at not just what we’ve achieved but also looking at how we make the next steps. A big part of that relates to the work we’ve done with governments We’re looking at reducing the friction in keeping standards up to date and improving the pace so they’re competitive.
  • 13. Page 13 of 14 around the world. A good example is the government of India, which recently published a standard called IndEA, based on our TOGAF Enterprise Architecture standard. It’s being used to fundamentally transform government services, not just in the national government of India, but in various states there. And then other countries are looking at that work. We also have work going on with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in healthcare and digital services for citizens. We’re doing a lot of work with governments to make a real difference to people’s lives as citizens, in countries that may need to catch up with some of the more developed countries. They’re using our standards and the work groups we’ve put together to get up to speed. For me, that’s an exciting part of our future: The difference we can make in people’s daily lives. Gardner: And, of course, a lot of this information is on your website, www.opengroup.org. Any other resources that people should be aware of? Lounsbury: Yes, all of our standards are free to download from our library on our website. You can obviously find how to register for events on the website, too. At the Forum level, there’s good information about each Forum that we’ve been working on. There’s always a contact form associated with each of the Forum webpages so you can leave your details and someone from our team will get in touch and tell you how to get involved. Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on 25 years of remarkable achievements in the technology standards arena by The Open Group. And we’ve learned how standards like UNIX and TOGAF evolved to transform business and society, impacting us all over the world as a digital adoption wave swept across human affairs. So a big thank you to our panel. We’ve been here with Steve Nunn, Chief Executive officer at The Open Group. Thank you so much, Steve. Nunn: Thank you very much, Dana. It’s been a great discussion. Gardner: And we’ve been joined by David Lounsbury, Chief Digital Officer at the Open Group. Thank you, sir. Lounsbury: You’re welcome, Dana. Gardner: And lastly, Jim Hietala has been with us. He’s vice President Business Development and Security at The Open Group. Thank you, Jim. Hietala: Thank you, Dana. That’s an exciting part of our future: The difference we can make in people’s daily lives.
  • 14. Page 14 of 14 Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect commemoration of technology standards successes discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Your host throughout the series of BriefingsDirect discussions sponsored by The Open Group. Thanks again for listening, please pass this along with your business community, 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 the 25th anniversary of remarkable achievements in the global technology standards arena by The Open Group. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The Open Group, 2005-2021. All rights reserved. You may also be interested in: • The path to a digital-first enterprise is paved with an Emergence Model and Digital Transformation Playbook • How The Open Group enterprise architecture portfolio enables an agile digital enterprise • How agile Enterprise Architecture builds agile business advantage • How the ArchiMate modeling standard helps Enterprise Architects deliver successful digital transformation • Where the rubber meets the road: How users see the IT4IT standard building competitive business advantage • How an agile focus for Enterprise Architects builds competitive advantage for digital transformation • How the data science profession is growing in value and impact across the business world • The Open Group panel explores ways to help smart cities initiatives overcome public sector obstacles • The Open Group digital practitioner effort eases the people path to digital business transformation