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The Path to a Digital-First Enterprise
Is Paved with an Emergence Model
And Digital Transformation Playbook
Transcript of a discussion on how open standards help support a playbook approach for organizations to
improve and accelerate their digital transformation.
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. Our next digital business optimization discussion explores how open
standards help support a playbook approach for organizations to improve and accelerate their
digital transformation.
As companies chart a critical journey to become digital-first enterprises, they need new forms of
structure to make rapid adaptation a regular recurring core competency. Stay with us now as we
explore how standards, resources, and playbooks around digital best practices can guide
organizations through unprecedented challenges -- and allow them to emerge even stronger as
a result.
Here to explain how to architect for ongoing disruptive innovation
is our panel. Please join me in welcoming Jim Doss, Managing
Director at IT Management and Governance, LLC, and Vice
Chair of the Digital Practitioner Work Group (DPWG) at The
Open Group. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Doss: Good morning.
Gardner: We’re also here with Mike Fulton, Associate Vice
President of Technology Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide
and Academic Director of Digital Education at The Ohio State
University. Welcome back, Mike.
Mike Fulton: Great to be here, Dana.
Gardner: We’re also here with Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group.
Good to have you with us, Dave.
Dave Lounsbury: Good morning, Dana.
Gardner: Dave, the pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic response has focused a large, 40-
year gathering of knowledge into a new digitization need. What is that new digitization need,
and why are standards a crucial part of it?
Pandemic survival is digital
Doss

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Lounsbury: It’s not just digitization, but also the need to move to digital. That’s what we’re
seeing here. The sad fact of this terrible pandemic is that it has forced us all to live a more no-
contact, touch-free, and virtual life.
We’ve all experienced having to be on Zoom, or not going into work, or even when you’re out
doing take-out at a restaurant. You don’t sign a piece of paper anymore; you scan something on
your phone, and all of that is based on having the skills and the business processes to actually
deliver some part of your business’ value digitally.
This was always an evolution, and we’ve been working on it for years. But now, this pandemic
has forced us to face the reality that you have to adopt digital in order to survive. And there’s a
lot of evidence for that. I can cite McKinsey studies where the companies that realized this early
and pivoted to digital delivery are reaping the business benefits. And, of course, that means you
have to have both the technology, the digitization part, but also embrace the idea that you have
to conduct some part of your business, or deliver your value, digitally. This has now become
crystal clear in the focus of everyone’s mind.
Gardner: And what is the value in adopting standards? How do they help organizations from
going off the rails or succumbing to complexity and chaos?
Lounsbury: There’s classically been a split between
information technology (IT) in an organization and the people
who are in the business. And, something I picked up at one of
the Center for Information Research meetings was, the
minute an IT person talks about “the business” you’ve gone
off the rails.
If you’re going to deliver your business value digitally -- even if
it’s something simple like contactless payments or an
integrated take-out order system -- that knowledge might have
been previously in an IT shop or something that you
outsourced. Now it has to be in the line of business.
There has to be some awareness of these digital
fundamentals at almost all levels of the business. And, of course, to do that quickly, people
need a structure and a guidebook for what digital skills they need at different points of their
organizational evolution. And that is where standards, complemented by education and training,
play a big role.
Fulton: I want to hit on this idea of digitization versus digital. Dave made that point and I think
it’s a good one. But in the context of the pandemic, it’s incredibly critical that we understand the
value that digitization brings -- as well as the value that digital brings.
When we talk about digitization, typically what we’re talking about is the application of
technology inside of a company to drive productivity and improve the operating model of the
company. In the context of the pandemic, that value becomes much more important. Driving
internal productivity is absolutely critical.
Lounsbury

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We’re seeing that here at Nationwide. We are taking steps to
apply digitization internally to increase the productivity of our
organization and help us drive the cost down of the insurance
that we provide to our customers very specifically. This is in
response to the adjustment in the value equation in the context
of the pandemic.
But then, the digital context is more about looking externally.
Digital in this context is applying those technologies to the
customer experience and to the business model. And that’s
where the contact list, as Dave was talking about, is so critically
important.
There are so many ways now to interact with
our customers, and in ways that don’t involve
human beings. How to get things done in this
pandemic, or to involve human beings in a
different way -- in a digital fashion -- that’s
where both digitization and digital are so
critically important in this current context.
Gardner: Jim Doss, as organizations face a survival-of-the-fittest environment, how do we keep
this a business transformation with technology pieces -- and not the other way around?
IT shifts from project management to product journey
Doss: The days of architecting IT and the business separately, or as a pure cascade or top-
down thing; those days are going. Instead of those “inside-out” approaches, “outside-in”
architectural thinking now keenly focuses on customer experiences and the value streams
aligned to those experiences. Agile Architecture promotes enterprise segmentation to facilitate
concurrent development and architecture refactoring, guided by architectural guardrails, a kind
of lightweight governance structure that facilitates interoperability and keeps people from
straying into dangerous territory.
If you read books like Team Topologies, The Open Group Digital Practitioner Body of
Knowledge™️ (DPBoK), and Open Agile Architecture™️ Standards, they are designed for team
cognitive load, whether they are IT teams or business teams. And doing things like the Inverse
Conway Maneuver segments the organization into teams that deliver a product, a product
feature, a journey, or a sub-journey.
Those are some really huge trends and the project-to-product shift is going on in business and
IT. These trends have been going on for a few years. But when it comes to undoing 30 or 40
years of project management mentality in IT -- we’re still at the beginning of the project-to-
product shift. It’s massive.
To summarize what David was saying, the business can no longer outsource digital
transformation. As matter of fact, by definition, you can’t outsource digital transformation to IT
anymore. This is a joint-effort going forward.
Fulton
How to get things done in this
pandemic, or to involve human beings
in a different way – in a digital fashion
– that’s where both digitization and
digital are so critically important.

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Gardner: Dave, as we’re further defining digital transformation, this goes beyond just improving
IT operations and systems optimization. Isn’t digital transformation also about redefining their
total value proposition?
Lounsbury: Yes, that’s a very good point. We
may have brushed over this point, but when we
say and use the word digital, at The Open
Group we really mean a change in the mindset
of how you deliver your business.
This is not something that the technology team does. It’s a reorientation of your business focus
and how you think about your interactions with the customer, as well as how you deliver value to
the customer. How do you give them more ways of interacting with you? How do you give them
more ways of personalizing their experience and doing what they want to do?
This goes very deep into the organization, to how you think about your value chains, in business
model leverage, and things like that.
One of the things we see a lot of is people thinking about is trying to do old processes faster.
We have been doing that incremental improvement and efficiency forever and applying
machines to do part of the value-delivery job. But the essential decision now is thinking about
the customers’ view as being primarily a digital interaction, and to give them customization, web
access, and let them do the whole value chain in digital. That goes right to the top of the
company and to how structure your business model or value delivery.
Balanced structure allows for flexibility
Gardner: Mike Fulton, more structure comes with great value in that you can manage
complexity and keep things from going off of the rails. But some people think that too much
structure slows you down. How do you reach the right balance? And does that balance vary
from company to company, or there are general rules about finding that Nirvana between
enough structure and too little?
Fulton: If we want to provide flexibility and speed, we have to move away from rules and start
thinking more about guardrails, guidelines, and about driving things from a principled
perspective.
That’s one of the biggest shifts we’re seeing in the digital space related to enterprise
architecture (EA). Whereas, historically, architecture played a directional, governance role, what
we’re seeing now is that architecture in a digital context provides guardrails for development
teams to work within. And that way, it provides more room for flexibility and for choice at the
lower levels of an organization as you’re building out your new digital products.
Those digital products still need to work in the context of a broader EA, and an architecture
that’s been developed leveraging potentially new techniques, like what’s coming out of The
Open Group with the Open Agile Architecture standard. That’s new, different, and critically
important for thinking about architecture in a different way. But, I think, that’s where we provide
flexibility -- through the creation of guardrails.
When we say and use the word
digital, at The Open Group we really
mean a change in the mindset of
how you deliver your business.

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Doss: The days are over for “Ivory Tower” EA – the top-down, highly centralized EA. Today, EA
is responding to left-to-right and outside-in versus inside-out pressures. It has to be more about
responding, as Mike said, to the customer-centric needs using market data, customer data, and
continuous feedback.
EA is really different now. It responds to product needs, market needs, and all of the domain-
driven design and other things that go along with that.
Lounsbury: Sometimes we use the term agile, and it’s almost like a religious term. But agile
essentially means you’re structured to respond to changes quickly and you learn from your
mistakes through repeatedly refining your concepts. That’s actually a key part of what’s in the
Open Agile Architecture Standard that Mike referred to.
The reason for this is fundamental to why people need to worry about digital right now. With
digital, your customer interface is no longer your fancy storefront. It’s that black mirror on your
phone, right? You have exactly the same six-by-two-and-a-half-inch screen that everybody else
has to get your message across.
And so, the side effect of that, is that the customer has much more power to select among
competitors than they did in the past. There’s been plenty of evidence that customers will pick
convenience or safety over brand loyalty in a heartbeat these days.
Internally that means as a business that you have to have your team structured so they can
quickly respond to the marketplace, and not have to go all the way up the management chain
for some big decision and then bring it all way back down again. You’ll be out-competed if you
do it that way. There is a hyper-acceleration to “survival of the fittest” in business and IT; this
has been called the Red Queen effect.
That’s why it’s essential to have agile not as a religion,
but as the organizational agility to respond to outside-in
customer pressures as a competitive factor in how you
run your business. And, of course, that then pulls along
the need to be agile in your business practices and in
how you empower your agile teams. How do you give
them the guardrails? How do you give them the
infrastructure they need to succeed at all of those things?
It’s almost as if the pyramid has been turned on its head. It’s not a pyramid that comes down
from the top of some high-level business decisions, but the pyramid grows backward from a
point of interaction with the customers.
Gardner: Before we drill down on how to attain that organizational agility, let’s dwell on the
challenges. What’s holding up organizations from attaining digital transformation now that they
face an existential need for it?
Digital delivers agile advantage
Doss: We see a lot of companies try to bring in digital technologies but really aren’t employing
the needed digital practices to bring the fuller intended value, so there’s a cultural lag.
It’s essential to have agile
not as a religion, but as
the organizational agility to
respond to outside-in
customer pressures as a
competitive factor in how
you run your business.

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The digital technologies are often used in combination and mashed up in amazing ways to bring
out new products and business models. But you need digital practices along with those digital
technologies. There’s a growing body of evidence that the difference between companies that
actually get that are not just outperforming their industry peers by percentages -- it’s almost
exponential.
The findings from the “State of DevOps” Reports for the last few years gives us clear evidence
on this. Product teams are really driving a lot of the work and functionality across the silos, and
increasingly into operations.
And this is why the standards and bodies knowledge are so important -- because you need
these ideas. With The Open Group DPBoK, we’ve woven all of this together in one Emergence
Model and kept these digital practices connected. That’s the “P” in DPBoK, the practitioner. It’s
those digital practices that bring in the value.
Fulton: Jim makes a great point here. But in my context with Digital Executive Education at
Ohio State, when we look at that journey to a digital enterprise we think of it in three parts: The
vision, the transformation, and the execution.
The piece that Jim was just talking about talks to execution. Once you’re in a digital enterprise,
how do you have the right capabilities and practices to create new digital products day to day?
And that’s absolutely critical.
But you also have to set the vision upfront. You have to be able to envision, as a leadership
team of an organization, what a digital enterprise looks like. What is your blueprint for that digital
enterprise? And so, you have to be able to figure that out. Then, once you have aligned that
blueprint with your leadership team, you have to lead that digital transformation journey.
And that transformation takes you from the vision to the execution. And that’s what I really love
about The Open Group and the new direction around an open digital portfolio, the portfolio
digital standards that work together in concert to take you across that entire journey.
These are the standards help you envision the future. Standards that help you drive that digital
transformation like the Open Agile Architecture Standard. Standards that help you with digital
delivery such as IT4IT. A critically important part of this journey is rethinking your digital delivery
because the vast majority of products that companies produce today are digital products.
But then, how do you actually deliver the capabilities
and practices, and uplift the organization with the new
skills to function in this digital enterprise once you get
there? And you can’t wait. You have to bring people
along that journey from the very start. The entire
organization needs to think differently, and it needs to
act differently, once you become a digital enterprise.
Lounsbury: Right. And that’s an important point, Mike, and one that’s come out of the digital
thinking going on at The Open Group. A part of the digital portfolio is understanding the
difference between “what a company is” and “what a company does” -- that vision that you
talked about – and then how we operate to deliver on that vision.
The entire organization
needs to think differently,
and it needs to act
differently, once you
become a digital enterprise.

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Dana, you began this with a question about the barriers and what’s slowing progress down.
Those things used to be vertically aligned. What the business is and does used to be
decomposed through some top-down, reductionist, refactor or delegate, decompose and
delegate of all of the responsibilities. And if everybody does their job at the edge, then the vision
will be realized. That’s not true anymore because of the outside-in digital reality.
A big part of the challenge for most organizations is the old idea that, “Well, if we do that all
faster, we’ll somehow be able to compete.” That is gone, right? That fundamental change and
challenge for top- and middle-management is, “How do we make the transition to the structure
that matches the new competitive environment of outside-in?”
“What does it mean to empower our team? What is the culture we need in our company to
actually have a productive team at the edge?” Things like, “Are you escalating every decision up
to a higher level of management?” You just don’t have time for that anymore.
Are people free to choose the tools and interfaces with the customers that they believe will
maximize the customer experience? And if it doesn’t work out, how do you move on to the next
step without being punished for the failure of your experiment? If it reflects negatively on you,
that’s going to inhibit your ability to respond, too.
All of these techniques, all of these digital ways of working, to use Jim’s term, have to be
brought into the organization. And, as Mike said, that’s where the power of standards comes in.
That’s where the playbooks that The Open Group has created in the DPBoK Standard, the
Open Agile Architecture Standard, and the IT4IT Reference Architecture actually give you the
guidance on how to do that.
Part of the Emergence Model is knowing when to do what, at the right stage in your
organization’s growth or transformation.
Gardner: And leading up to the Emergence Model, we’ve been talking about standards and
playbooks. But what is a “playbook” when it comes to standards? And why is The Open Group
ahead of the curve to extend the value when you have multiple open standards and playbooks?
Teams need a playbook to win
Lounsbury: I’ll be honest, Dana, The Open Group is at a very exciting time. We’re in a bit of a
transition. When there was a clear division between IT and business, there were different
standards and different bodies of knowledge for how you adapt to each of those. A big part of
the role of the enterprise architect was in bridging those two worlds.
The world has changed, and The Open Group
is in the process of adapting to that. We’re
looking to build on the robust and proven
standards and build those into a much more
coherent and unified digital playbook, where
there is easy discoverability and navigability
between the different standards.
We’re looking to build on the robust
and proven standards and build those
into a much more coherent and unified
digital playbook, where there is easy
discoverability and navigability
between the different standards.

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People today want to have quick access. They want to say, “Oh, what does it mean to have an
agile team? What does it mean to have an outside-in mindset?” They want to quickly discover
that and then drill in deeper. And that’s what we pioneered with the DPBoK, with the
architecture of the document called the Emergence Model, and that’s been picked up by other
standards of The Open Group. It’s clearly the direction we need to do more in.
Gardner: Mike, why are multiple standards acting in concert good?
Fulton: For me, when I think about why you need multiple standards, it’s because if you were to
try to create a single standard that covered everything, that standard would become
incomprehensible.
If you want an industry standard, you need to bring the right subject matter experts together, the
best of the best, the right thought leaders -- and that’s what The Open Group does. It brings
thought leaders from across the world together to talk about specific topics to develop the best
information that we have as an industry and to put that into our standards.
But it’s a rare bird, indeed, that can do that across
multiple parts of an organization, or multiple
capabilities, or multiple practices. And so by building
these standards up individually, it allows us to tap into
the right subject matter experts, the right passions,
and the right areas of expertise.
But then, what The Open Group is now doing with the digital portfolio is intentionally bringing
those standards together to make sure that the standards align. It brings the standards together
to make sure that they have the same messaging, that we’re all working on the same
definitions, and that we’re all thinking about big, broad concepts together in the same way and
then allow us to dig down into the details with the right subject matter experts at the level of
granularity needed to provide the appropriate levels of benefits for industry.
Gardner: And how does the Emergence Model help harmonize multiple standards, particularly
around the Digital Practitioner’s Workgroup?
Emergence Model scales for success using standards
Lounsbury: We talked about outside-in, and there are a couple of ways you can approach
how you organize such a topic. As Mike just said, there’s a lot of detail that you need to
understand to fully grasp it.
But you don’t always have to fully grasp everything at the start. And there are different ways you
can look at organizations. You can look at the typical stack, decomposition, and the top-down
view. You can look at lifecycles, that when you start at the left and you go to the right, what are
all the steps in-between?
And the third dimension, which we’re picking up on inside The Open Group, is the concept of
scale through the Emergence Model. And that’s what we’ve tried to do, particularly in the
DPBoK Standard. It’s the best example we have right now. And that approach is coming into
By building these standards up
individually, it allows us to tap
into the right subject matter
experts, the right passions, and
the right areas of expertise.

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other parts of our standards. The idea comes out of lean startup thinking, which comes out of
lean manufacturing.
When you’re a startup, or starting a new initiative, there are a few critical things you have to
know. What is your concept of digital value? What do you need to deliver that value? Things like
that.
Then you ideally succeed and grow and then, “Wow, I need more people.” So now you have a
team. Well, that brings in the idea of, “What does team management mean? What do I have to
do to make a team productive? What infrastructure does it need?”
And then, with that, the success goes on because of the steps you’ve taken from the beginning.
As you get into more complexity, you get into multiple teams, which brings in budgeting. You
soon have large-scale enterprises, which means you have all sorts of compliance, accounting,
and auditing. These things go on and on.
But you don’t know those things at the start. You do have to know them at the end. What you
need to know at the start is that you have a map as to how to get there. And that’s the
architecture, and the process to that is what we call the Emergence Model.
It is how you map to scale. And I should say, people think of this quite often in terms of, “Oh it’s
just for a startup. I’m not a startup, I’m in a big company.” But many big companies -- Mike, I
think you’ve had some experience with this – have many internal innovation centers. You do
entrepreneurial funding for a small group of people and, depending on their success, feed them
more resources.
So you have the need for an Emergence
Model even inside of big companies. And, by
the way, there are many use cases for using a
pattern for success in how to do digital
transformation. Don’t start from the top-down;
start with some experiments and grow from the
inside-out.
Doss: I refer to that as downscale digital piloting. You may be a massive enterprise, but if you’re
going to adapt and adopt new business models, like your competitors and smaller innovators
who are in your space, you need to think more like them.
Though I’m in a huge enterprise, I’m going to start some smaller initiatives and fence them off
from governance and other things that slow those teams down. I’m going to bring in only lean
aspects for those initiatives.
And then, you amplify what works and scale that to the enterprise. As David said, you have the
smaller organizations that have a great guidebook now for what’s right around the corner.
They’re growing now, they don’t have just one product anymore, they have two or three
products and so the original product owner can’t be in every product meeting.
So, all of those things are happening as a company grows and the DPBoK and Emergence
Model is great for, “Hey, this is what’s around the corner.”
You have the need for an Emergence
Model even inside of big companies.
And, … there are many use cases for
using a pattern for success in how to
do digital transformation.

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With a lot of other frameworks, you’d have to spend a lot of time extracting for scale-specific
guidance on digital practices. So, you’d have to extract all that scale-specific stuff and it’s a lot
of work, to be honest, and it’s hard to get right. So, in the DPBoK, we built the guidance so it’s
much easier to move in either direction -- going up- and down-scale digital piloting as well.
Gardner: Mike, you’re on the pointy end of this, I think, in one of your jobs.
Intentional innovation
Fulton: Yes, at Nationwide, in our technology innovation team, we are doing exactly what
Dave and Jim have described. We create new digital products for the organization and we
leverage a combination of lean startup methodologies, agile methodologies, and the Emergence
Model from The Open Group DPBoK to help us think about what we need at different points in
time in that lifecycle of a digital product.
And that’s been really effective for us as we have brought new products to market. I shared the
full story at The Open Group presentation about six months ago. But it is something that I
believe is a really valuable tool for big enterprises trying to innovate. It helps you think about
being very intentional about what are you using. What capabilities and components are you
using that are lean versus more robust? What capabilities are you using that are implicit versus
explicit, and what point in time do you actually need to start writing things down?
At what point in time do you absolutely need to
start leveraging those slightly bigger, more
robust enterprise processes to be able to
effectively bring a digital product to market
versus using processes that might be more
appropriate in a startup world? And I found the
DPBoK to be incredibly helpful and instructive
as we went through that process at Nationwide.
Gardner: Are there any other examples of what’s working, perhaps even in the public sector?
This is not just for private sector corporations. A lot of organizations of all stripes are trying to
align, become more agile, more digital, and be more responsive to their end-users through
digital channels. Any examples of what is working when it comes to the Emergence Model,
rapid digitalization, and leveraging of multiple standards appropriately?
Good governance, digitally
Doss: We’re really still in the early days with digital in the US federal government. I do a lot of
work in the federal space, and I’ve done a lot of commercial work as well.
They’re still struggling in the federal space with the project-to-product shift.
There is still a huge focus on the legacy project management mentality. When you think about
the legacy definition of a deliverable, the project is done at the deliverable. So, that supports
“throw it over the wall and run the other way.”
At what point in time do you absolutely
need to start leveraging those slightly
bigger, more robust enterprise
processes to be able to effectively
bring a digital product to market
versus using processes that might be
more appropriate in a startup world?

11. Page 11 of 14
Various forms of the plan-build-operate (PBO) IT organization structure still dominate in the
federal space. Orgs that are PBO-aligned tend to push work from left to right across the P, B &
O silos, and the space between these siloes are heavily stage-gated. So, this inside-out thinking
and the stage-gating also supports “throw it over the wall and run the other way.” In the federal
space, waterfall is baked into nearly everything.
These are two huge digital anti-patterns that the federal space is really struggling with.
Product management, for example, employs a single persistent team that remains with the work
across the lifecycle and ties together those dysfunctional silos. Such “full product lifecycle
teams” eliminate a lot of the communication and handoff problems associated with such legacy
structures.
The other problem in the federal space with the PBO IT org structure is that the real power
resides in these silos and these silos’ management focus is downward into their silo….not as
much across the silos; so there are a lot of cross functional initiatives such as EA, service
ownership, product ownership or digital initiative that might get some traction for a while but
such initiatives of functions have no real buying power or “go/no-go” decision authority so they
get squashed eventually by the silo heads, where the real power resides in such organizations.
In the US, I look over time for Congressional, via new laws or Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) via policy, to bring in some needed changes and governance about how IT orgs get
structured and governed.
Ironically, these two digital anti-patterns also lead to the creation of lots of overbaked
governance over decades to try to assure that the intended value was still captured, which is
like chasing more bad money after that other bad money.
This is not just true in federal this is also true in the commercial world. Such overbaked
governance just happens to be really, really bad in the federal space.
For federal IT, you have laws like Clinger-Cohen, Federal Information Technology Acquisition
Reform Act (FITARA), policies and required checks by the OMB, Capital Planning and
Investment control, Acquisition Regulations, DoD Architecture Framework, and I could go on --
all which require tons of artifacts and evidence of sound decision making.
The problem is nobody is rationalizing these
together… like figuring out what supersedes
what when something new comes out. So, the
governance just gets more and more un-lean,
over-bloated and what you have at the end is
agencies are either misguided by out-of-date
guidance or overburdened by over-bloated
governance.
Fulton: I don’t have nearly the level of depth in the government space that Jim does, but I do
have a couple examples I want to point people to if they are trying to look for more government-
related examples. I point you to a couple here in Ohio, both Doug McCollough and his work with
the City of Dublin in Ohio. He’s done a lot of work with digital technologies; digital transformation
at the city level.
The governance just gets more and
more un-lean, over-bloated and what
you have at the end is agencies are
either misguided by out-of-date
guidance or overburdened by over-
bloated governance.

12. Page 12 of 14
And then again here in Ohio – and I’m just using Ohio references because I live in Ohio and I
know a little bit more intimately what some of these folks are doing -- Ervan Rodgers, CEO of
the State of Ohio, has done a really nice job of focusing on digital capabilities and practices to
build up across state employees.
The third I’ll point to is the work going on in India. There’s been a tremendous amount of really
great work in India related to government, architecture, and getting to the digital transformation
conversation at the government level. So, if folks are interested in more examples, more stories,
I’d recommend you look into those three as places to start.
Lounsbury: The thing, I think, you’re referring to there, Mike, is the IndEA India Enterprise
Architecture initiative and the pivot to digital that several of the Indian provinces are making. We
can certainly talk about that more on a different podcast.
I will toss in one ray of light to what Jim said. Transformation is almost always driven by an
almost Darwinian force. There’s something changed in your environment that causes you to
evolve and we’ve seen that in the federal sector and the defense sector in particular where
things like in avionics, the cost of software is becoming unaffordable. They turned to modular,
decomposable systems based on standards in order to achieve the necessary cost savings to
just stay in business.
Similarly, in India, the utter need to deliver to a very diverse, large rural population, and grow
that needed digitization. And certainly, the U.S. federal sector and the defense sector are very
aware of the disparity. And I think, things like, the defense budget changes or changes in
mission will drive some of these changes that we’ve talked about that are driven by the
pandemic urgently in the commercial sector.
So, it will happen, but it is, I’ll agree with Jim,
probably the most challenging ultimate top-down
environment that you could possibly imagine
doing a transformation.
Gardner: In closing, what’s coming next from The Open Group, particularly around digital
practitioner resources? How can organizations best exploit these resources?
Harmony on the horizon
Lounsbury: We’ve talked about the evolution The Open Group is going through, about the
digital portfolio and the digital playbooks having all of our standards speak common language
and working together.
A first step in that is to develop a set of principles by which we’re going to do that evolution and
the documents is called, Principles for Open Digital Standards. You can get that from The Open
Group bookstore and if you want to find it quickly, you go to The Open Group’s The Digital-First
Enterprise page that links to all of these standards.
Looking forward, there are activities going on in all of the forums of The Open Group and the
forums are voluntary organizations. But certainly, the IT4IT Forum, the Digital Practitioner
Workgroup, in these large swaths of our architecture activity they are working on how we can
harmonize the language and bring common knowledge to our standards.
[Digital transformation] will happen,
but [government] is probably the
most challenging environment that
you could possibly imagine.

13. Page 13 of 14
And then, to look beyond that, I think we need to address the problems of discoverability and
navigability that I mentioned earlier to give that coherent and an easy-to-access picture of where
a person can find out what they need when they need it.
Fulton: Dave, I think probably one of the most important pieces of work that will be delivered
soon by The Open Group is putting a stake in the ground around what it means to be a digital
product. And that’s something that I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere else in the industry. I think
it will really move the ball forward and be a unifying document for the entire open digital
portfolio.
And so, we have some great work that’s already gone on in the DPBoK and the Open Agile
Architecture standard, but I think that digital product will be a rallying cry that will make all of the
standards even more cohesive going forward.
Doss: And I’ll just add my final two cents here. I think a lot of it, Dana, is just awareness. People
need to just understand that there’s a DPBoK Standard out there for digital practitioners.
If you’re in IT, you’re not just an IT practitioner
anymore, you’re using digital technology and
digital practices to bring lean, user-centric
value to your business or mission. So, digital is
the new best practice. So, there’s a framework
in a body of knowledge out there now that
supports and helps people transform in their
careers. The same thing with Agile Architecture. And so it’s just the awareness that these things
are out there.
The most powerful thing to me is, both of these works that I just mentioned have more than 500
references from most of the last 10 years of leading digital thinkers. So, again, the way these
are structured, the way these are built, bringing in just the scale-specific guidance and that sort
of stuff is hugely powerful. There needs to be an increasing awareness that this stuff is out
there.
Lounsbury: And if I can pick up on that awareness point, I do want to mention, as always, The
Open Group publishes the standards as freely available to all. You can go to that digital
enterprise page or The Open Group Library to find these. We also have an active training
ecosystem that you can find these days. Everybody does that digital training.
There are ways of learning the standards in depth and getting certified that you’re proficient in
the knowledge of that. But I also should mention, we have at least two U.S. universities and
more interest on the international sector for graduate work in executive-level education. And
Mike has mentioned his executive teaching at Ohio State, and there are others as well.
Gardner: Right, and many of these resources are available at The Open Group website. There
are also many events, many of them now virtual, as well as certification processes and
resources. There’s always something new, it’s a very active place.
I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussion on how open standards help organizations improve and accelerate their digital
If you’re in IT, you’re not just an IT
practitioner anymore, you’re using
digital technology and digital
practices to bring lean, user-centric
value to your business or mission.

14. Page 14 of 14
transformation. And we’ve learned how a playbook approach around digital best practices is
guiding organizations through unprecedented challenges to emerge even stronger.
So, a big thank you to our panel, Jim Doss, Managing Director at IT Management and
Governance, LLC, and Vice Chair of the Digital Practitioner Workgroup at The Open Group.
Thank you so much, Jim.
Doss: Thanks for having me.
Gardner: We’ve also been here with Michael Fulton, Associate Vice President of Technology
Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide and Academic Director of Digital Education at The Ohio
State University. Thank you so much, Mike.
Fulton: Thanks, Dana. It’s been a pleasure.
Gardner: And we’ve been also here with Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open
Group. Thank you, sir.
Lounsbury: You’re welcome, Dana, happy to be here.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect business
enablement discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
throughout this 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 how open standards help support a playbook approach for organizations to
improve and accelerate their digital transformation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC and The Open
Group, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.
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