The Open Group Enterprise Architecture (EA) Practitioners Conference, to be held at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, Johannesburg on 5 September 2013, will feature presentations by a number of local and international EA experts, all of whom will be sharing their experiences in the EA environment.
The theme for this year’s conference, the sixth to be hosted by The Open Group South Africa, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, is “Positioning Enterprise Architecture to Deliver Business Value”.
Heading the programme for 2013 is Chris Forde, The Open Group VP for Enterprise Architecture and GM for Asia Pacific and China. Based in Shanghai, Forde is an enterprise architect and has held various leadership roles in business architecture, application development, information management and technology operations throughout his career.
Prior to joining The Open Group, he worked at American Express as vice president for strategy and architecture for the organisations’ customer servicing capability.
“It is a great privilege to have someone with Chris’s knowledge, capabilities and experience in EA presenting at the conference,” says Stuart Macgregor, CEO of Real IRM, which represents The Open Group in South Africa.
“Chris has deep expertise in EA and, as Director of The Open Group Architecture Forum, was instrumental in driving the successful development and launch of TOGAF9 from 2007 to 2009. We are looking forward to the experiences he will share with everyone at the conference.”
What really distinguishes this EA Practitioners Conference, says Macgregor, is that it’s an open event that brings together like-minded people from all industries who are using EA to better equip their businesses to manage complexity and the ever accelerating business and technological change.
“It provides an opportunity for EA practitioners and others to interact with members of the EA community and share their experiences,” he adds. “This is in line with The Open Group’s philosophy of knowledge-sharing and collaboration through which it develops international standards such as TOGAF, a standard of The Open Group. That is the spirit in which The Open Group operates.”
The conference will also feature EA presentations by South African experts. Shannon Naidoo, business, information and data architecture manager at Eskom, is an EA practitioner with 13 years’ experience in establishing, running and transforming EA teams within the utility sector.
Lamont Theron, systems architect at South African Breweries, has worked for more than two decades in IT systems management and EA, particularly in manufacturing execution systems in the brewing industry. Neil Adamson, development manager at Discovery Health is an EA specialist who manages people and projects across multiple locations around the world.
“Our speakers will look at how they have positioned EA within their organisations, as well as the experiences that they have had while implementing EA,” says Macgregor.
