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

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The Open Group Digital Practitioner
Effort Provides Guidance to Ease
Digital Business Transformation
Transcript of a discussion on how The Open Group is closing the gap between IT
education, business methods, and what it takes as a culture to succeed over the next
decade.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: The Open Group.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership
panel discussion on the creation of new guidance on how digital business professionals
should approach their responsibilities.
Perhaps more than at any time in the history of IT, those tasked with planning,
implementation, and best use of digital business tools are being transformed into a new
breed of digital practitioner.
We will now explore how The Open Group is ambitiously seeking to close the gap
between IT education, business methods, and what it will take to truly succeed at work
over the next decade.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host and
moderator as we now examine digital business transformation -- and what it will take to
prepare the next generation of enterprise leadership.
Please join me now in welcoming our panel, Venkat
Nambiyur, Director of Business Transformation,
Enterprise, and Cloud Architecture at Oracle. Welcome,
Venkat.
Venkat Nambiyur: Thank you, Dana. It’s good to be
here.
Gardner: We are also here with Sriram Sabesan,
Consulting Partner and Digital Transformation Practice
Lead at Conexiam. Welcome, Sriram.
Sriram Sabesan: Good morning. It’s good to be here.Nambiyur

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Gardner: We are here with Michael Fulton,
Associate Vice President of IT Strategy and
Innovation at Nationwide and Co-Chair of The Open
Group IT4IT™ Forum. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Fulton: Thanks for having me.
Gardner: And we’re joined by David Lounsbury,
Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group.
Welcome back, David.
David Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to
be here.
Gardner: David, why is this the right time to be defining new guidance on how IT and
digital professionals should approach their responsibilities?
Body-of-knowledge building
Lounsbury: We had a presentation by a couple of Forrester
analysts about a year ago at a San Francisco meeting of The
Open Group. They identified a change in the market.
We were seeing a convergence of forces around the success
of Agile as a product management methodology at the edge,
the increased importance of customer experience, and the
fact that we have radically new and less expensive IT
infrastructure and IT management approaches, which make
this all happen more at the edge.
And they saw this change coming together into a new kind of
person who’s ready to use digital tools to actually deliver value
to their businesses. They saw this as a new part of
transformation. The Open Group looked at that challenge and stepped up to define this
activity, and we created the Digital Practitioners Work Group to bring together all of the
necessary factors.
Those include an emphasis on customer experience, to manage digital delivery, to
manage digital products, and the ability to manage digital delivery teams together. We
want to build one body of knowledge for how to actually be such a digital practitioner;
what it means for individuals to do that. So the people on this podcast have been
working in that group toward that objective since then.
Gardner: Is this digital practitioner position an expansion of an earlier category, such as
enterprise architect, chief information officer (CIO), or chief technology officer (CTO)? Or
is it something new? Are we transitioning, or are we starting fresh?
Lounsbury
Fulton

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Sabesan: We are in the middle of transitioning, as well
as creating something fresh. Through the last few
decades of computing change, we had been chasing
corporate-efficiency improvement, which brought in a
level of rigidity. Now, we are chasing individual
productivity.
Companies will have to rethink their products. That
means a change will have to happen in the thinking of
the CIO, the chief financial officer (CFO), the chief
marketing officer (CMO), and across the full suite of
chief executives. Many companies have dabbled with
the new role of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and Chief
Data Officer (CDO), but there has been a struggle of
monetization and of connecting with customers because loyalties are not as [strong as]
they used to be.
We are creating guidance to help people transition from old, typical CIO and CFO roles
into thinking about connecting more with the customer, of improving the revenue
potentials by associating closely with the productivity of the customers, and then
improving their productivity levels.
Lead with experience
Nambiyur: This is about leadership. I work with Oracle Digital, and we have worked
with a lot of companies focused on delivering products and services in what I call the
digital market.
They are all about experiences. That’s a fundamental shift from addressing specific
process or a specific capability requirement in organizations. Most of the small- to
medium-sized business (SMB) space is now focused on experiences, and that
essentially changes the nature of the dialogue from holistic to, “Here’s what I can do for
you.”
The nature of these roles has changed from a CIO, a developer, or a consumer to a
digital practitioner of different interactions. So, from my perspective at Oracle, this
practitioner work group becomes extremely important because now we are talking in a
completely different language as the market evolves. There are different expectations in
the market.
Fulton: There are a couple of key shifts going on here in the operating model that are
driving the changes we’re seeing.
Sabesan

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First and foremost is the rapid pace of change and what’s happening in organizations
and the marketplace with this shift to a customer focus. Businesses require a lot more
speed and agility.
Historically, businesses asked IT to provide efficiency and stability. But now we are
undergoing the shift to more outcomes around speed and agility. We are seeing
organizations fundamentally change their operating models, individual skills, and
processes to keep up with this significant shift.
The other extremely interesting thing we’re seeing are the emerging technologies that
are now coming to bear. We’re seeing brand-new what’s possible scenarios that affect
how we provide business benefits to our customers in new and interesting ways.
We are getting to a much higher bar in the
context of user experience (UX). We call
that the Apple- or Amazon-ification of UX.
Organizations have to keep up with that.
The technologies that have come up over the last few years, such as cloud computing,
as well as the near-term horizon technologies, things like quantum computing and 5G,
are shifting from a world of technology scarcity to a world of technology abundance.
Dave has talked quite a bit about this shift. Maybe he can add how he thinks about this
shift from scarcity to abundance when it comes to technology and how that impacts a
digital practitioner.
From scarcity to abundance
Lounsbury: We all see this, right? We all see the fact that you can get a cloud account,
either with a credit card or for free. There has been this explosion in the number of tools
and frameworks we have to produce new software.
The old model – of having to be very careful about aligning scarce, precious IT
resources with business strategies -- is less important these days. The bar to roll out IT
value has migrated very close to the edge of the organization. That in turn has enabled
this customer focus, with “software eating the world,” and an emphasis on digital-first
experiences.
The result is all of these new business skills emerging. And the people who were
previously in the business realm need to understand all of these digital skills in order to
live in this new world. That is a very important point.
Dana, you introduced this podcast as being on what IT people need to know. I would
broaden that out quite a bit. This is about what business people need to know about
digital delivery. They are going to have to get some IT on their hands to do that.
We are getting to a much higher
bar in the context of user
experience (UX). We call that the
Apple- or Amazon-ification of UX.

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Fortunately, it’s much, much easier now due to the technology abundance that Michael
noted.
Fulton: The shift we are undergoing -- from a world of physical to information-based --
has led to companies embedding technology into the products that they sell.
The importance of digital is, to Dave’s point,
moving from an IT functional world to a
world where digital practitioners are
embedded into every part of the business,
and into every part of the products that the
vast majority of companies take to market.
This includes companies that historically have been very physical, like aircraft engines
and GE, or oil refineries at Shell, or any number of areas where physical products are
becoming digital. They now provide much more information to consume and much more
technology rolls into the products that companies sell. It creates a new world that
highlights the importance of the digital practitioner.
Limitless digital possibilities
Nambiyur: The traditional sacred cows of the old are no longer sacred cows. Nobody is
willing to just take a technologist’s word that something is doable or not. Nobody is
willing to take a process expert’s word that something is doable or not.
In this new world, possibility is transparent, meaning everybody thinks that everything is
possible. Michael said that businesses need to have a digital practitioner in their line of
business or in many areas of work. My experience of the last four years of working here
is that, every participant in any organization is a digital practitioner. They are both a
service provider and a service consumer simultaneously, irrespective of where they
stand in an organization.
It becomes critical that everybody recognizes the impact of this digital market force, and
then recognize how their particular role has evolved or expanded to include a digital
component, both when they deliver value and how they receive value.
That is the core of what they are accomplishing as practitioners, to allow people to
define and expand their roles from the perspective of a digital practitioner. They need to
ask, “What does that really mean? How do I recognize the market? How do I recognize
my ecosystem? How do I evolve to deliver that?”
Sabesan: I will provide a couple of examples on how this impacts existing roles and new
roles.
For example, we have intelligent refrigerators and intelligent cooking ovens and ranges
that can provide insights to the manufacturer about the customers’ behaviors, which they
The importance of digital is …
moving from an IT functional
world to a world where digital
practitioners are embedded into
every part of the business.

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never had before. The designers used to operate on a business-to-business (B2B) sales
process, but now they have insights into the customer. They can directly get to the
customer’s behaviors and can fine-tune the product accordingly.
Yet enterprises never had to build the skill sets to be able to use that data and create
new innovative variations to the product set. So that’s one gap that we are seeing in the
market. That’s what this digital practitioner guide book is trying to address, number one.
Number two, IT personnel are now having to deal with a much wider canvas of things to
be brought together, of various data sets to be integrated.
Because of the sensors, what was thought of as an operational technology has become
part of the network of the IT as well. The access to accelerometers, temperature
sensors, pressure sensors, they are all now part of your same network.
A typical software developer now will have
to understand the hardware behaviors
happening in the field, so the mindset will
have to change. The canvas is wider. And
people will have to think about an integrated
execution model.
That is fundamental for any digital practitioner, to be thinking about putting [an integrated
execution model] into practice and having an architectural mindset to approach and
deliver improved experiences to the customer. At the end of the day, if you don’t deliver
experiences to the customer, there is no new revenue for the company. You’re thinking
has to pivot-change from operation efficiency or performance milestones to the delivery
of an experience and outcome for the customer.
Gardner: It certainly looks like the digital practitioner role is applicable to large
enterprises, as well as SMBs, and cuts across industries and geographies.
In putting together a set of guidelines, is there a standardization effort under way? How
important is it to make digital practitioners at all these different types of organizations
standardized? Or is that not the goal? Is this role instead individual, organization by
organization?
Setting the standards
Nambiyur: It’s a great question. In my view, before we begin creating standards, we
need the body of knowledge and to define what the practitioner is looking to do. We
have to collect all of the different experiences, different viewpoints, and define the things
that work. That source of experience, if you will, can eventually evolve into standards.
Do I personally think that standards are coming? I believe so. What defines that
standard? It depends on the amount of experiences we are able to collect. Are we able
A typical software developer now
will have to understand the
hardware behaviors happening in
the field, so the mindset will have
to change. The canvas is wider.

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to agree on some of the best practices, and some of the standards that we need to
follow so that any person functioning in the physical ecosystem can successfully deliver
in repeatable outcomes?
I think this can potentially evolve into a standard, but the starting point is to first collect
knowledge, collect experience from different folks, use cases, and points of use so that
we are reasonably able to determine what needs to evolve further.
Gardner: What would a standard approach to be a digital practitioner look like?
Sabesan: There are certain
things such as a basic analysis
approach, and a decomposition
and execution model that are
proven as a repeatable. Those
we can put as standards and
start documenting right now.
However, the way we play the analysis approach to a financial management problem
versus a manufacturing problem, it’s a little different. Those differences will have to be
highlighted. So when Venkat was talking about going to a body of knowledge, we are
trying to paint the canvas. How you apply these analysis methods differently under
different contexts is important.
If you think about Amazon, it is a banking company as well as a retail company as well
as an IT service provider company. So, people who are operating within or delivering
services within Amazon have to have multiple mindsets and multiple approaches to be
presented to them so that they can be efficient in their jobs.
Right now, we are looking at some form of standardization of the analysis,
decomposition, execution models, and yet providing guidance for the variances that are
there for each of the domains. Can each of domains by itself standardize? Definitely,
yes, and we are miles away from achieving that.
Lounsbury: This kind of digital delivery -- that customer-focused, outside-in mindset --
happens at organizations of all different scales. There are things that are necessary for a
successful digital delivery, that decomposition that Sriram mentioned, that might not
occur in a small organization but would occur in a large organization.
And as we think about standardization of skills, we want to focus on what’s relevant for
an organization at various stages of growth, engagement, and moving to a digital-first
view of their markets. We still want to provide that body of knowledge Venkat mentioned
that says, “As you evolve in your organization contextually, as you grow, as your
organization gets to be more complex in terms of the number of teams doing the
delivery, here’s what you need to know at each stage along the way.”
Certain things, such as a basic analysis
approach, and a decomposition and
execution model that are proven as
repeatable. Those we can put as standards
and start documenting right now.

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The focus initially is on “what” and not “how.” Knowing what principles you have to have
in order for your customer experiences to work, that you have to manage teams, that
you have to treat your digital assets in certain ways, and those things are the leading
practices. But the tools you will use to do them, the actual bits and the bytes, are going
to evolve very quickly. We want to make sure we are at that right level of guidance to the
practitioner, and not so much into the hard-core tools and techniques that you use to do
that delivery.
Organizational practices that evolve
Fulton: One of the interesting things that Dave mentions is the way that the Digital
Practitioner Body of Knowledge™ (DPBoK) is constructed. There are a couple of key
things worth noting there.
One, right now we are viewing it as a perspective on the leading practices, not
necessarily of standards yet when it comes to how to be a digital practitioner. But
number two, and this is a fairly unique one, is that the Digital Practitioner Body of
Knowledge does not take a standard structure to the content. It’s a fairly unique
approach that’s based on organizational evolution. I have been in the IT industry for
longer than I would care to admit, and I have never seen a standard or a body of
knowledge that has taken this kind of an approach.
Typically, bodies of knowledge and standards are targeted at large enterprise, and they
put in place what you need to do -- all the things that you need to do when you do
everything perfect at full scale. What the Digital Practitioner’s Body of Knowledge does is
walk you through the organizational evolution, from starting at an individual or a founder
of a startup -- like two people in a garage -- through when you have built that startup into
a team, and you have to start to put some more capabilities around that team, up to
when the team becomes a team of teams.
You are starting to get bigger and bigger, until you evolve into a full enterprise
perspective, where you are a larger company that needs more of the full capabilities.
By taking this organizational maturity,
organizational evolution, and emergence
approach to thinking about a leading
practice, it allows an individual to learn and
grow as they step through in a standard
way. It helps us fit the content to you, where
you are as an individual, and where your
organization is in its level of maturity.
It’s a unique approach, walking people through the content. The content is still full and
comprehensive, but it’s an interesting way to help people understand how things are put
together in that bigger picture. It helps people understand when you need to care about
something and when you don’t.
It allows an individual to learn and
grow as they step through in a
standard way. It helps us fit the
content to you, where you are as an
individual, and where your
organization is in its level of maturity.

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If you are two people in a garage, you don’t need to care about enterprise architecture;
you can do the enterprise architecture for your entire company in your head. You don’t
need to write it down. You don’t need to do models. You don’t need to do all those
things.
If you are a 500,000-person Amazon, you probably need to have some thought around
the enterprise architecture for your company, because there’s no way anybody can keep
that in their mind and keep that straight. You absolutely have to, as your company grows
and matures, layer in additional capabilities. And this Body of Knowledge is a really good
map on what to layer in and when.
Gardner: It sounds as if those taking advantage of the Body of Knowledge as digital
practitioners are going to be essential at accelerating the maturity of organizations into
fully digital businesses.
Given the importance of that undertaking, where do these people come from? What are
some typical backgrounds and skill sets? Where do you find these folks?
Who runs the digital future?
Sabesan: You find them everywhere. Today’s Millennials, for example, let’s go with
different categories of people. Kids who are out of school right now or still in school, they
are dabbling with products and hardware. They are making things and connecting to the
Internet and trying to give different experiences for people.
Those ideas should not be stifled; we need to expand them and help them try to convert
these ideas and solutions into an operable, executable, sustainable business models.
That’s one side.
On the other far end, we have very mature
people who are running businesses right now,
but who have been presented with a
challenge of a newcomer into the market
trying to threaten them, to question their
fundamental business models. So, we need to
be talking to both ends -- and providing
different perspectives.
As Mike was talking about, what this particular Body of Knowledge provides us is what
can we do for the new kids, how do we help them think about the big picture, not just
one product version out. In the industry right now, between V1 and V2, you could
potentially see three different competitors for your own functionality and the product that
you are bringing to market. These newcomers need to think of getting ahead of
competition in a structured way.
[One side is Millenials]. On the
other far end, we have very
mature people who are running
businesses right now. We need to
be talking to both ends – and
providing different perspectives.

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And on the other hand, enterprises are sitting on loads of cash, but are not sure where to
invest, and how to exploit, or how to thwart a disruption. So that’s the other spectrum we
need to talk about. And the tone and the messaging are completely different. We find the
practitioners everywhere, but the messaging is different.
Gardner: How is this then different from a cross-functional team; it sounds quite similar?
Beyond cross-functionality
Sabesan: Even if you have a cross-functional team, the execution model is where most
of them fail. When they talk about a simple challenge that Square is trying to become,
they are no longer a payment tech company, they are a hardware company, and they
are also a website development company trying to solve the problem for a small
business.
So, unless you create a structure that is able to
bring people from multiple business units
together -- multiple verticals together to focus
on a single customer vertical problem – the
current cross-functional teams will not be able
to deliver. You need risk mitigation mindset.
You need to remove a single team ownership
mindset. Normally corporations have one
person as accountable to be able to manage
the spend; now we need to put one person accountable to manage experiences and
outcomes. Unless you bring that shift together, the traditional cross-functional teams are
not going to work in this new world.
Nambiyur: I agree with Sriram, and I have a perspective from where we are building our
organization at Oracle, so that’s a good example.
Now, obviously, we have a huge program where we hire folks right out of college. They
come in with a great understanding of -- and they represent -- this digital world. They
represent the market forces. They are the folks who live it every single day. They have a
very good understanding of what the different technologies bring to the table.
But one key thing that they do -- and I find more often – is they appreciate the context in
which they are operating. Meaning, if I join Oracle, I need to understand what Oracle as
a company is trying to accomplish at the end of the day, right? Adding that perspective
cannot just be done by having a cross-functional team, because everybody comes and
tries to stay in their comfort zone. If they bring in an experienced enterprise architect, the
tendency is to stay in the comfort zone of models and structures, and how they have
been doing things.
The way that we find the digital practitioners is to allow them to have a structure in place
that tells them to add a particular perspective. Like just with the Millennials, you need to
Normally corporations have one
person as accountable to be
able to manage the spend; now
we need to put one person
accountable to manage
experiences and outcomes.

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understand what the company is trying to accomplish so that you just can’t let your
imagination run all over the place. Eventually and likewise, for a mature enterprise
architect, “Hey, you know what? You need to incorporate these changes so that your
experience becomes continuously relevant.”
I even look at some of the folks who are non-technologists, folks who are trying to
understand why they should work with IT and why they need an enterprise architect. So
to help them answer these questions, we give them the perspective of what value they
can bring from the perspective of the market forces they face.
That’s the key way. Cross-functional teams
work in certain conditions, but we have to set
the change, as in organizational change and
organizational mindset change, at every
level. That allows folks to change from a
developer to a digital practitioner, from an
enterprise architect to a digital practitioner,
from a CFO to a digital practitioner.
That’s really the huge value that the Body of Knowledge is going to bring to the table.
Fulton: It’s important to understand that today it’s not acceptable for business leaders or
business members in an organization to simply write off technology and say that it’s for
the IT people to take care of.
Technology is now embedded throughout everything that we do in our work lives. We all
need to understand technology. We all need to be able to understand the new ways of
working that that technology brings. We all need to understand these new opportunities
for us to move more quickly and to react to customer wants and needs in new and
exciting ways; ways that are going to add distinct value.
To me the exciting piece about this is it's not just IT folks that have to change into digital
practitioners. It’s business folks across every single organization that also have to
change and bringing both sides closer together.
IT everywhere, all the time, for everyone
Lounsbury: Yes, that’s a really important point, because this word “digital” gets stuck
to everything these days. You might call it digital washing, right?
In fact, you put your finger on the fundamental transformation. When an organization
realizes that it's going to interact with its customers through either of the digital twins --
digital access to physical products and services or truly digital delivery -- then you have
pieces of information, or data, that they can present to the customer.
Cross-functional teams work in
certain conditions, but we have
to set the change, as in
organizational change and
organizational mindset change,
at every level.

12. Page 12 of 15
That customer’s interactions through that -- the customer’s experience of that – which
also then brings value to the business. A first focus, then is to shift from the old model of,
“Well, we will figure out what our business is, and then we will throw some requirements
down the IT channel, and sooner or later it will emerge.” As we have said, that's not
going to cut it anymore.
You need to have that ability to deliver through digital means right at the edge with your
product decisions.
Gardner: David, you mentioned earlier the concept of an abundance of technology. And,
Michael, you mentioned the gorilla in the room, which is the new tools around artificial
intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and more data-driven analysis.
To become savvier about how to take advantage
of the abundance of technology and analytics
requires a cultural and organizational shift that
permeates the entire organization.
To what degree does a digital practitioner have to
be responsible for changing the culture and
character of their organization?
Lounsbury: I want to quote something I heard at the most recent Center for Information
Systems Research Conference at the MIT Sloan School. The article is published by
Jeanne Ross, who said, the time for digitization, for getting your digital processes in
place, getting your data digitalized, that’s passed. What's important now is that the
people who understand the ability to use digital to deliver value actually begin acting as
the agents of change in an organization.
To me, all of what Sriram said about strategy -- of helping your organization realize what
can happen, giving them through leading practices and a Body of Knowledge as a
framework to make decisions and lower the barrier between the historical technologist
and business people, and seeing them as an integrated team – that is the fundamental
transition that we need to be leading people to in their organizations.
Sabesan: Earlier we said that the mindset has been, “This is some other team’s
responsibility. We will wait for them to do their thing, and we will start from where they
left off.”
Now, with the latest technology, we are able to permeate across organizational
boundaries. The person to bring out that cultural change should simply ask the question,
“Why should I wait for you? If you are not looking out for me, then I will take over,
complete the job, and then let you manage and run with it.”
There are two sides of the equation. We also have the DevOps model where, “I build,
and I own.” The other one is, “I build it for you, you own, and keep pace with me.” So
basically we want people to be able to question the status quo and show a sample of
To become savvier about
how to take advantage of the
abundance of technology
and analytics requires a
cultural and organizational
shift that permeates the
entire organization.

13. Page 13 of 15
what could be a better way. Those will drive the cultural shifts and push leaders beyond
their comfort zone, that Venkat was talking about, to be able to accept different ways of
working: Show and then lead.
Talent, all ages, needed for cultural change
Nambiyur: I can give a great example. There is nothing more effective than watching
your own company go through that, and just building off on bringing Millennials into the
organization. There is an organization we call a Solutions Hub at Oracle that is entirely
staffed by college-plus-two folks. Ans they are working day-in and day-out on realizing
the art of what’s possible with the technology. In a huge way, this complements the work
of senior resources -- both in the pre-sales and the product side. This has had a
cumulative, multiplier effect on how Oracle is able to present what it can do for its
customers.
We are able to see the native digital-generation folks understanding their role as a digital
practitioner, bringing that strength into play. And that not only seamlessly complements
the existing work, it elevates the nature of how the rest of the senior folks who have
been in the business for 10 or 20 years are able to function. As an organization, we are
now able to deliver more effectively a credible solution to the market, especially as
Oracle is moving to cloud.
That’s a great example of how culturally each player – it doesn’t matter if they are a
college-plus-two or a 20-year person -- can be a huge part of changing the
organizational culture. The digital practitioner is fundamental, and this is a great example
of how an organization has accomplished that.
Fulton: This is hard work, right? Changing the culture of
any organization is hard work. That’s why the guidance
like what we are putting together with the Digital
Practitioner Body of Knowledge is invaluable. It gives us
as individuals a starting point to work from to lead the
change. And it gives us a place to go back to and
continue to learn and grow ourselves. We can point our
peers to it as we try to change the culture of an
organization.
It’s one of the reasons I like what’s being put together with the Digital Practitioner Body
of Knowledge and its use in enterprises like Nationwide Insurance. It’s a really good tool
to help us spend our time focused on what’s most important. In Nationwide’s case, being
on our site for the members that we serve, but also being focused on how we transform
the culture to better deliver against those business objectives more quickly and with
agility.
Lounsbury: Culture change takes time. One thing everybody should do when you think
about your digital practitioners is to go look at any app store. See the number of
Changing the culture
of any organization is
hard work. That’s why
the guidance of … the
Digital Practitioner
Body of Knowledge is
invaluable.

14. Page 14 of 15
programming tutorials targeted at grade-school kids. Think about how you are going to
be able to effectively manage that incoming generation of digitally savvy people. The
organizations that can do that, that can manage that workforce effectively, are going to
be the ones that succeed going forward.
Gardner: What stage within the Body of Knowledge process are we at? What and how
should people be thinking about contributing? Is there a timeline and milestones for what
comes next as you move toward your definitions and guidelines for bring a digital
practitioner?
Contributions welcome
Lounsbury: This group has been tremendously productive. That Digital Practitioner
Body of Knowledge is, in fact, out and available for anyone to download at The Open
Group Bookstore. If you look for the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge, publication
S185, you will find it. We are very open about getting public comments on that snapshot
as we then finish the Body of Knowledge.
Of course, the best way to contribute to any activity at The Open Group is come down
and join us. If you go to www.opengroup.org, you will see ways to do that.
Gardner: What comes next, David, in the maturation of this digital practitioner effort,
Body of Knowledge and then what?
Lounsbury: Long-term, we already began discussing both how we work with academia
to bring this into curricula to train people who are entering the workforce. We are also
thinking in these early days about how we identify Digital Practitioners with some sort of
certification, badging, or something similar. Those will be things we discuss in 2019.
Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been discussing the creation
of new guidance and a Body of Knowledge around how digital professionals should
approach their responsibilities. And we have learned how The Open Group is
ambitiously seeking to close the gap between issues around IT education, business
methods, and what it will take to really succeed in the new generation of digital business.
For more information on this architectural approach, cultural change, and topics related
to Digital Practitioners, do please check out The Open Group website at
www.opengroup.org.
Please join me in thanking our panel, Venkat Nambiyur, Director of Business
Transformation Enterprise, and Cloud Architecture at Oracle; Sriram Sabesan,
Consulting Partner and Digital Transformation Practice Lead at Conexiam; Michael
Fulton, Associate Vice President of IT Strategy and Innovation at Nationwide Insurance
and Co-Chair of The Open Group IT4IT Forum, and David Lounsbury, Chief Technology
Officer at The Open Group.

15. Page 15 of 15
And a big thank you as well to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion. Lastly,
thank you to our audience for joining. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next
time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript.
Sponsor: The Open Group.
Transcript of a discussion on how The Open Group is closing the gap between IT
education, business methods, and what it takes as a culture to succeed over the next
decade. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.
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