The Open Group Conference, Toronto
23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference

Highlights of the Plenary, Day 2
(Tuesday July 21)

Kumud Kalia, CIO of EVP Customer Operations, Direct Energy, Canada kicked off the Enterprise Architecture Lifecycle Plenary with an opening keynote on: “The Role of IT in Mergers and Acquisitions”. Direct Energy, a subsidiary of the UK-based energy company Centrica, has grown into the leading competitive energy retail supplier in North America and is Canada’s 30th largest company. Kumud discussed the role of IT and enterprise architecture in successfully completing over 40 acquisitions over an 8-year period, and spotlighted where TOGAF fits into the mix. In his presentation, he emphasized the importance of establishing a prioritization process, building M&A skills into the IT team, and managing staff through dramatic change. He also explained that while enterprise architects are not cultural change agents at Direct Energy, they very much play a vital role as thought leaders within the organization.

Following the keynote address, Minaz Sarangi, SVP & Head of Architecture, TD Bank Financial Group delivered a presentation on the strategic role that standards-based enterprise architecture plays in financial services companies. Minaz explained that risk and compliance, time-to-market, and total cost of IT are often competing drivers for defining the IT investment within large financial services organizations. Based on this situation at TD Bank Financial Group, he realigned the company’s EA strategy to map with enterprise-wide business goals. In order to achieve this, TD Bank created re-usable EA technology building blocks based on open standards.  This “simplification” and standardization of the bank’s enterprise architecture has resulted in a superior customer experience, reduced overhead, and a more secure and scalable architecture overall.

After the coffee break, David Foote, Founder & CEO of Foote Partners, LLC spoke about the “Current State of Architecture Pay, Skills Demand, and Careers”. According to David, two diverging opinions dominate the discussion about the value of enterprise architects in an economic recession. One says architects are poorly suited to emergency situations where return on investment hurdles are primary directives, and another opinion argues that continued investment in architecture skills is critical during chaotic cycles. This session examined these positions and the current state of the architecture profession, drawing from Foote Partners rigorous proprietary trends research involving more than 1,900 US and Canadian employers, plus salary and skills/certifications pay benchmark surveys covering 87,000 IT professionals. According to his study, those architecture skills that have shown the most demand based on compensation growth over the last year include: project management, business process management, infrastructure architecture, business analysis, and ITIL. A summary of these findings can be viewed here.

After lunch, Jason Uppal, Chief Architect, QRS kicked off the “EA Lifecycle” stream with a TOGAF tutorial that described how to demonstrate the value of enterprise architecture and establish an effective EA Practice within complex organizations. According to Jason: “By being inclusive with all other management frameworks, EA is a discipline that helps the enterprise define, develop, and explore the boundarlyess information flow capabilities in order to achieve the enterprise’s strategic intent.” With this definition in mind, Jason provided attendees with a worksheet to audit key stakeholders at their organizations about key business concerns in order to drive EA in line with their specific requirements.

Over in the “Business Analysis” stream, Ron Tolido, CTO Continental Europe & Asia Pacific at Capgemini presented: “A Compelling Case for Open Business Analysis”. Ron emphasized the importance of clearly positioning the design, definition, and creation of architectural building blocks relative to the execution of TOGAF design projects. He concluded that standards-based professional certification programs that focus on skills and experience, such as ITSC and ITAC, will be key enablers of successful business architecture in the future.

In the “Service Oriented Architecture” stream, Heather Kreger, SOA Standards Architect for IBM delivered a presentation about the “SOA Standards Landscape and Value”. With so many standards for SOA, Heather’s presentation educated the audience on the different types of SOA standards being driven by The Open Group, OASIS, and OMG and what they should be used for. She also spotlighted a joint paper recently published by these three leading standards bodies, titled “Navigating the SOA Standards Landscape Around Architecture”, that provides some guidance on using these standards and their business value.