Objective of Meeting
To assess the strategic direction of the Digital Portfolio, and the Digital Portfolio backlog, to review the product vision (what are we trying to achieve, and who are the stakeholders), with discussion over the Digital Portfolio backlog (priorities and contributors connected with the vision). To focus on product structure and content, and the cross-cutting collaboration between Forums needed to fulfill the vision.
Portfolio of Digital Open Standards Value Proposition and Strategic Direction: Product Perspective
The objective of this interactive session was to identify the personas, problems to be solved with the Digital Portfolio, solutions, and value proposition to ensure a clarity of vision. This is the template used.
Personas identified:
- Enterprise Architects, CEOs, CIOs, CDOs, Digital Product Managers
- Lead Architects, Business Architects, and Business Analysts
- Service Manager
- Technology and Solution Architects
- Users of The Open Group Standards
Main problems:
- I need a resilient Agile architecture for digital
- I need a digital platform to deliver a digital offering
- I need to know the steps and journey towards digital
- There are inconsistencies between the standards, unaligned guidance
- PDFs are monolithic, I need something more discoverable and searchable
- Need guidance in practical form, use-cases
- I need to support my consultants, serve my customers, and give value to my CEO
- Standards are large and difficult to adopt, where should I start
- Need to share information easily, and find it easier
- I need to know how to deliver and manage a Digital Product
- Need to have an improved certification practice and Body of Knowledge (BoK)
Solutions:
- Web native platform for standards
- Common taxonomy for standards
- Search and cross-linked capability
- Adoption needs to improve
- Solution that would facilitate the Agile delivery of new content
- Direct references, cross-linked
- Focus on the benefits for business in practical way – guides and use-cases, actionable
- Visual and 360 vision of the standards
- Customer journey for digital needed
- Categorization of the standards as building blocks
Value proposition and unfair advantage:
- Broad collection of open standards
- Standard development process and consensus base to deliver content
- Tried and tested standards, experience-based
- Positioning to drive adoption
- Content available that should be suitable to respond the why, what, how, and when
- Standard driving Certification
- Integrated BoK
- Enterprise Architecture Leadership
- Strong position of The Open Group in the market
- Community of experts
- Large set of members
- Openness
- Neutrality
- Ability to leverage contribution
- Consistency pursues – mechanism to cross-collaborate
Channels:
- Website, web pages, HTML
- Social media, YouTube™
- Events: The Open Group, and third-party events
- Webinars, videos, blogs
- Direct community awareness
- Having digital champions
- Certification enablement
Metrics:
- Web page visits
- Numbers: likes, followers, views, comments, feedback
- Track published pages
- Level of member engagement
- Numbers of certified people, adoption
Conclusion:
We have a wide set of different personas consistent with the fact that Digital Transformation, as opposed to just digitization, has stakeholders across all the areas of the company. Therefore, there is a wide range of personas interested. The needs of the different personas, even though different in content, converge on the need to have a digital platform to present the Digital Portfolio visually, in a cross-linked manner; searchable and discoverable with a consistent content and a common taxonomy.
For problem definition, the common points can be summarized into two areas:
1. The need to consume the Digital Portfolio in a visual, cross-linked, interconnected way; searchable and findable.
2. The content needs to support the Digital Transformation journey with guidance on the how: how to support the Digital Transformation journey and how to deliver and manage Digital Products – with use-cases and examples, resilient Agile Architecture for digital, a digital platform to deliver a digital offering, and consistency among standards.
There are three solution areas that relate to the two key aspects:
- The Digital Platform to solve the first problem (search, discover, visual, cross-link)
- The content of the Digital Portfolio, and its consistency in solving the issues raised in the second problem – Digital Product, guidance, common taxonomy, business-oriented, practical guidance, also provide the learning progression to improve certification
- The need to improve the standards delivery following an Agile CI/CD approach
It is interesting to note that the three solution areas are those covered by the Digital Portfolio vision shared with members: digital platform (Gitlab®/Antora), an aligned and consistent collection of standards to solve business needs toward Digital Transformation, and a platform to deliver standards in an Agile, componentized way.
Value proposition and unfair advantage is supported mostly through the recognition of The Open Group in the market, with content based on consensus, tested best practices, and community support of the content, as well as openness and neutrality.
The metrics set is well aligned, with a set of metrics that were defined for the Digital Portfolio when it was a board activity: level of use on the pages, visits, followers, and comments received. Adoption is more difficult to measure and that is an area we need to discuss further. The other challenge is how to improve certification numbers. This needs further work to define the Certification program for the Digital Portfolio as a product.
Digital Portfolio Backlog Prioritization
See the engagement matrix used.
Conclusions:
It is important to pursue engagement in the following topics categorized as high value but low engagement:
- Digital Portfolio metrics
- DPBoK™ maintentance/improvement
- Human factors – skills for digital/organizational design for digital
- Customer journeys/personas
- Measure customer engagement use site (supported by staff)
- Engage next generation
- Reference architecture – business areas
- Business benefits for digital
- Digital Products – lifecycle – IT4IT™ Standard, Version 3.0 alignment – product management (low to mid engagement)
For those categorized as high value and engagement, continue the support, and pursue even more participation: specific members for this engagement need to be defined:
- Customer-centricity, journeys (this was also classified as low engagement so needs to be checked)
- Security, risk, and compliance
- Link external content
- Application delivery: digital infrastructure, Digital Product (also classified as lower engagement so this needs to be checked)
- Multicloud governance
- FAQs – Support Forums and users (supported by staff)
- Digital Operational Backbone, DevOps, workflow
The ones perceived as less value could be handled as lower priorities in the backlog. However, if there are members willing to work on them, this should also be supported.
Higher engagement:
- Digital infrastructure and technology for digital
- Innovate / UX
Lower engagement:
- One common course for universities
The quadrant “Low Value and Low Engagement” contain work that is not worth pursuing in the short term:
- Digital for Citizens
ACTION 1: Sonia to prepare a report with the workshop results and share it with the meeting minutes. Pursue some DPWG discussions to analyze the results and to define the corresponding curse of action for the vision, and value proposition to refine the Digital Portfolio approach and way of working if needed.
ACTION 2: DPWG officers to plan for a session to discuss the results of the backlog prioritization discussion, and to define courses of action and items to be added to the Digital Portfolio roadmap.
Digital Portfolio Metrics Framework Workshop
The following list of topics was used to lead the discussion:
- Agree on product vision and direction
- Align / agree on the deliverables / product content
- Identify key participants / stakeholders / personas
- Agree on positioning in the market (and within The Open Group portfolio)
- Agree priority (for this product)
- Define how the metrics are embedded into the various standards (within the Digital Portfolio)
- Explore metrics (and scope)
- Define high-level plan (of how to proceed)
Initial Discussion for Vision and Approach:
- Where do we have something in the standard, and where should it come?
- Idea for a taxonomy metric?
- Model x metrics into The Open Group, and how members can support that
- Common set or market for metrics and taxonomy - different views on which ones are valid
- Different metrics by subject and how they interact – back to the personas
Objective: The importance of vision, scope, participants, approach, and next steps:
- What do we want to achieve?
- Which are the metrics that matter?
- It is important to confirm a baseline, and gather content related with metrics into the different standards
ACTION 3: Sonia and Michelle to work together to collect metrics from the different standards, in connection with the Forum Directors and Forum Officers. This list will be used as a baseline list of metrics for this work to start. The next sensitive action is to create a metamodel of framework for the metrics and to identify the gaps.
ACTION 4: Sonia and Michelle to coordinate with Rob on the next steps for the activity. It is important to define categorization for metrics and a kind of hierarchy, from general high-level metrics (Strategy, CEO), business lines metrics, product metrics, to team metrics.
This categorization presents metrics at different levels, but aligned and connected. Every set of metrics should have their own set of personas (key stakeholders) that also need to be identified.
Personas that need to be defined:
- Product owner – customer
- Enterprise – CEO, CTO, CDO, COO
- Regulators – shareholders, customers – partners, community (ecosystem)
- Different stakeholders want to measure something
Create persona framework – KPIs by every Forum and standard to link it
- Set of metrics to support the digital journey from different perspectives and levels?
- Whole enterprise, business lines, and value streams, products, and teams
- How to deliver them and value delivery (customer satisfaction)
Approach and Scope
- Workstream into DPWG connected with all Forums?
- This should be a workstream into the Digital Portfolio, but with engagement from other Forums
- We need to name a Leader – Rob is a candidate but we need more members engaged
- Representative from forums
- Have inventory is the first step
- Review – priorities – roadmap for incremental delivery
- How to create metrics or provide the list of metrics?
Target audience
- Zero guidance for different metrics levels – examples coming from the standards
- Product structure and cross cutting collaboration between Forums – content and collaboration needed to fulfill the vision
Discussion (see the baseline figure) focused on the product structure.
Comments:
1. Important to follow the Conway’s Law approach independently. Important to deliver with customers in mind.
2. Work in individual standards should always happen in the Forums. Joint activities will require coordination and management to be sure there is consistency and alignment. Every Forum will own their own products but should be connected with the Digital Portfolio and in the Digital Platform. The DPWG will have the prerogative to have visibility over digitally-related content to be sure consistency is followed.
3. The DPWG should focus on the integrity of the Digital Portfolio and manage the alignment and consistency across Forums. As well as maintaining and evolving the DPBoK Standard, they might imply connecting with other standards that should complement and enhance its content.
4. Delivery of content into the DPWG should be limited to DPBoK maintenance, and to coordinate the content produced by other Forums in joint activities. If there is specific content to enhance the DPBoK Standard, that should happen in the DPWG.
5. The Digital Portfolio will own and maintain the digital platform and pursue an incremental content adding. Own the top landing page.
6. The other important thing is to keep consistency across the Digital Portfolio, this implies connecting and working inter Forums avoiding silo independent work.
7. A Steering Committee needs to be confirmed as part of the governance structure, with representatives from the different Forums.
8. From a technical perspective content lives in different Gitlab repositories for every standard. For joint activities along with the DPWG, a child site into the Gitlab group can be handled to give the proper access and visibility and pursue contributions.
9. Important Gitlab/Antora used as CI/CD to deliver standards as code as a key part of the upcoming releases for the Digital Portfolio. This activity should be owned by the Digital Portfolio.
ACTION 5: Judy and Sonia to work together to define the process and policies for the cross-cutting collaboration to pursue the proper governance and communication structures. This includes taking the action to form a Steering Committee.
ACTION 6: Sonia to communicate with DPWG members in relation to the discussions held in the meeting in relation to content and cross-cutting collaboration to test that it has consensus on the views.
ACTION 7: Judy to take action at the Executive level to change the name of the DPWG to become Digital Portfolio Working Group.