My Vision for The Open Group’s Architecture Forum

I envision The Open Group’s Architecture Forum being the dominant such forum in the world. Linked to that I see valuable new partnerships evolving dramatically with other organizations sharing our interest in architecture and radically improved participation in conferences, webinars, and overall governance of change. There is a huge new demand for EA globally that we need to take advantage of with increased out-of-the-box thinking and greater agility.

Because of the fundamental requirement to customize TOGAF for organization-specific use, the Architecture Forum can ultimately lead to a dramatically improved architecture approach that better harmonizes with stakeholder needs in an age of “customer journey” perspectives. It must more urgently address the concerns pressing on the architecture community today, including how best to adapt TOGAF and related Open Group standards for different kinds of organizations in different verticals globally and to do so in an easier, more agile, scalable way that also facilitates the creation and customization of associated capability models.

The Architecture Forum needs itself to begin to better apply some basics of the TOGAF standard, which would include documenting an overall Architecture Vision for the Forum and an associated Architecture Roadmap. Then we could start defining Courses of Action for multiple concurrent and/or overlapping cycles of work, including maximum leverage of ArchiMate, moving aggressively toward a Level 3 of applied TOGAF certification, and launching the world’s best Architecture Conference on an annual basis. I envision a Performance Dashboard maintained showing our progress on such multiple fronts — performance enhancements planned, done iteratively linked to the continued delivery of value, and measured to arrive at consensus faster and to results that overall mean the more rapid and satisfactory, even exhilarating breakthroughs in maturity for the EA discipline.

Written by Dr. Steve Else, Chief Architect & Principal Instructor