By Ash Patel, Marketing Specialist, The Open Group
Recently we sat down with some of the authors of the game changing book titled ‘Ecosystems Architecture: New Thinking for Practitioners in the Age of AI’, to discuss the conception of the book and where it all began. The full interview can be found below involving Paul Homan and Rahul talking in depth about the beginnings of the book as co-aut hors (along with Phil Tetlow and Neal Fishman), of the Ecosystems Architecture: New Thinking for Practitioners in the Age of AI book.
Paul Homan CTO for Industrial Sector, IBM Services UK & Ireland
Paul is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Industrial Sector Clients, IBM Global Services, responsible for Technology Strategy & Industry Architectures for Automotive, Aerospace & Defence, Oil & Gas, Electronics, Industrial Products and Construction industries. Paul Homan has been with The Open Group for 25 years. He st arted in the Architecture Forum and was involved in the early days the development of the TOGAF® Standard, a standard of The Open Group, including the TOGAF 7 standard.
Rahul CA, BSc, Senior Research Engineer for the Emerging Technology Lab , Honda R&D Europe UK
Rahul, MCA, BSc, is a Senior Research Engineer for the Emerging Technology Lab at Honda R&D Europe UK. He primarily focuses on deep tech strategy, data privacy, and decentralized architecture research for next-generation systems and services. He is also a co-author of Ecosystems Architecture: New Thinking for Practitioners in the Age of AI.
Paul Homan:
“One of the earliest pieces that formed the book revolved around the word ecosystem being bounced around in a lot of strategies, a lot of conversations, and a lot of business talk. This was a term that we were finding that people would be talking about when it came to ecosystems. We also noticed that a lot of people had spoken about the importance of ecosystems and the need for them and how vital they were to business success and organizational use. However, there was no sc ope around what is one and how do I actually know if I’m looking at one precisely, but more importantly, how do I create one or join one or be part of one? And what do I have to do differently and what do I have to do the same?
“ The next wonderful bit of serendipity was with Rahul, as he knew that the area that he was working in had a problem which looked like an ecosystems problem, as a mutual friend and colleague of mine called Sham had been working with Rahul on this challenging problem. This prompted us to explore whether what we’ve been thinking about ecosystems wa s relevant to it. We then picked up the previous work and drove it another cycle or two and went, this is interesting and relevant.”
“A number of people that I was talking to we’re talking about an extended collaboration. This is where it struck me that to take the architectural thinking further, we needed to get it out in the open. When you say the word open, I instantly go The Open Group. I think I said before because The Open Group is an organization which itself, if you look at it, fosters the building of little ecosystems of multiple people from multiple different organizations coming together for a common purpose to create something and evolve. There’s a lot of great serendipity there in terms of not only is it a good place to do work like that, but it is a place which is essentially a builder of ecosystems or a fosterer, a facilitator of ecosystems itself.
Rahul
“If there is a field of research where I’ve spent my entire career, then it would be systems research. My professional and personal interests are kind of coinciding in that area of research, technically speaking. When we had the business problem which Paul alluded to earlier in his description, it was part of my journey of understanding how business systems evolve over the years from being totally internal, totall y centralized, totally controlled by 1 organizational company into moving to clouds, moving to other system architectures where they are located in different geographies.”
“But still being controlled by one company somehow under different regulations, etc and the main problem that we had identified as part of our research is that at certain point in time, at certain size of the of the data, certain size of the customer business scale. The current enterprise architecture. Would hypothetically break down. So, you can’t really control everything as a central entity anymore and the current enterprise architecture mental model would no longer be able to scale up to the rapture, which was coming into the organizations in near future.”
“The research question which I was focused upon is what’s next? How do we reconfigure the technical architecture that will allow organizations to scale across. Different domains, different geographies, different services, different platforms. And still be able to manage well, scale well and do the function as necessary? We were thinking about things like Federated architecture hybrid to go from centralized to Federated and decentralized etcetera and that was the kind of problem which we were discussing with Paul’s team and Sham was one of the guys who kind of coordinated it for us quite well. What’s next? How do we scale business services and technical architecture and platforms and Customer experience user UI/UX as well in such a way that it is co hesive?”
“We then viewed all from a technical angle, which is around the time decentralization had been gaining a lot of traction in terms of new platform design, new service design, blockchain and everything included. This was an open challenge; with the way the businesses have been traditionally very centralized and controlled. Therefore, we thought about how to make them ready for the decentraliz ed world where things like blockchains will become a critical part of infrastructure. Further merging the legacy architecture of the system. Those are the three kind of vertices of triangle which was the focus of our discussion with Paul, Phil and everybody else as well. Then came the technical investigation, which me and Paul have been discussing for quite a while now and said the second thing, which I pushed quite strongly in my discussion with Paul is that we should think of writing up a white paper and put it out in open. Put it out there for as a centre of gravity, at least for people to look at it and see, oh, you, you know, we have this problem as well. Let’s talk about it. So we s tarted with a white paper out there and then it became a question of what’s the most suitable venue, and where do we put it out because it didn’t make any sense to do it in either under one organizational banner, IBM or otherwise.”
“Therefore, we had been looking at The Open Group as one of the key options, mainly because as Paul has only already explained it, it’s quite resonating with the ethos and the philosophy and the way the open group works. And I think after that basically Paul carried that seed of idea and took it all the way to the board members and sold the idea and kind of did the necessary heavy lifting for creation of the work group as well, pulled in Phil, Neal, and everybody else who is around in the work group today. And the funny thing which happened is that that seed of White paper with all the eyes and all the hands on the deck grew into a book and that was totally unplanned, totally unexpected. It just happ ened that when there was such a talented group of people within the work group, everybody put in such a creative force (energy) into that initial draft. I think we still have a draft floating somewhere within all the emails and that, multiplied by the sheer creativity of everybody who was in the initial working group, turned into a book. That is what I think is in our hands today and that’s how it came to grow from a seed of an idea to a working white paper, and then to a book today.”
To read the Ecosystems Architecture: New Thinking for Practitioners in the Age of AI , click here .
Pleas stayed tuned for Part 2 coming soon….
Ash Patel – CDMP, Marketing Specialist, joined The Open Group in 2020, initially working in the Certification Team as a Certification Services Agent, before moving into the Marketing Team where he now works on marketing collateral, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and co-hosting The Open Group, Open Comments Podcast . Ash holds a First-Class Bachelor’s Degree in Media Production (BA hons) from Coventry University and has a background in content writing, copy writing, script writing, photo editing, and video editing. He is based in the UK.
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