Competency Development For Digital Transformation

Digital enterprise architecture (EA) can help to bridge the gap between strategies and realisation, driving business goals to achieve long term sustainable digital transformation, or DX.

But, are the competencies and capabilities required on-the-ground, in place to see digital transformation through to its ideal state goal?

To fully embrace the power of digital technology, there has to be a comprehensive capability and competency development plan, as well, to equip the people resource within the organisation, with the relevant skills, knowledge, attitude, experiences and qualifications.

So, skill competency assessment is valuable, in accelerating your business towards its goals.

Assessment
An assessment of your organisational resources, can give you a visual of the gaps that exist and how you can plan to overcome them. This is an important challenge your business has to address, so that it is able to reach its goals, quickly and with minimal hiccups.
Besides ensuring that a staff competency program is effective and in place, you also need to ensure departmental and working team capability to drive and support the business strategic goals. On top of that, you likely will have to ensure a connected digital ecosystem via orchestrating activities across business, data, application and technology domains.
This is no mean feat. Not to mention, any capability and competency building plan you develop must include consideration for the following areas – skills to be learnt, the knowledge to do the right things at the right time, experience to jumpstart an initiative, qualification, and the right attitude.

So, where does one start?

IASA, the Global Association for All IT Architects, which has been working to formalise enterprise architecture (EA) standards and certifications, has also determined the skillsets, which now form the five pillars of IASA’s IT Architecture Body of Knowledge (ITABoK), as Business Technology Strategy, IT Environment, Design Skills, Human Dynamics, Quality Attributes.
IASA’s ITABoK is a living repository of experiences, standards, knowledge and best practices shared and maintained by IT architects for IT architects. It consists of the 5 Pillars of Skillsets, and also 4 Areas of Specialisations.

Architect specialisations’ skillsets

The business architect role is dubbed by Gartner as the significant role that is missing from most Digital Transformation implementations. The business architect is the digital strategist who knows technology as well as business, and as such is the enterprise trouble-shooter when it comes to applying the right technologies to create the right business capabilities impact.

He or she create and refine business architectures and owns the business technology strategy.

The role is 60-percent about financial savvy because the business architect has to show the value of a technology investments. In fact, the other four architecture specialisations – information architecture, infrastructure architecture, software architecture and solution architecture – should require the foundation of business architecture, as well.
Information architecture requires its architects to define how data will be stored, consumed, integrated and managed by the different IT systems and users, while infrastructure architects overlook the server topology, network infrastructure, and data centre environment, so that they are able to plan for business continuity.
Software architects creates and refines the software architecture, as well as own the application components and connectivity. They also have to be application strategists, and should learn about and be certified in application components.
Solution architects refine the solution architecture ready for implementation. They are usually inserted into project management offices, and IASA defines that they can take on more than one project simultaneously, as long as these projects do not exceed five in total. They own the governance of system implementation, and besides being an IT strategist, they are also product and technology-focused.
They are required to know the discrepancies in the architecture and the system that is being implemented, hence they should be well-versed in object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), as well as Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN).

http://atdsolution.com/atd-learning/certification-road-map/architecting-software-ooad-uml/

The industry speaks
At the sidelines of ATD Solution’s Competency Development seminar in KL, IT manager of a local conglomerate, Rajesh Ravella, shared, “The competency assessment allows me to gauge myself and my skills level. http://atdsolution.com/enterprise-architecture/upcoming-events/digital-transformation-competency-development-seminar-2/
“Attending seminars like this, I have realised that being just good in the technical areas, is not enough to survive (in this industry). So, I want to continue to gain more knowledge in enterprise architecture and the business (I am in). The IT head of a huge company in the financial sector, was also in attendance and at the end of the seminar, he opined, “Before the start of any project, the business has to be very clear about their business goals, and do an assessment of their resources.
“People are key. (Consultants) need to be able to stand in front of the client and advise them, equip their people with the right skillset and experience to provide the right advisory,” said this head of IT, who had recently experienced big consulting companies that are assign consultants who are not competent enough, and cannot provide enough strategic advisory. “My project drifted off target (as a result),” he shared.
On the subject of skill-proofing the workforce, he also observed, “ATD provides skills future that is available today. They can help companies to train and prepare, including transforming their employees to be digital-ready.”

You can take a free digital competency assessment at this link. http://atdsolution.com/enterprise-architecture/article/competency-assessment-development/

About the Author:
Aaron Tan Dani is a thought-leader in Digital Enterprise Architecture. He is also actively driving Digital EA adoption and is currently the Chairman of EA-SIG, the Singapore Computer Society ([email protected]), Chairman of Iasa Asia Pacific ([email protected]) and Chief Architect of ATD Solution ([email protected]).