Knotion Consulting, dynamic and visionary enterprise architecture (EA) consultant and training specialist, started 2014 on an exceptionally high note following its recent appointment as the exclusive LEADing Practice ('LEAD') partner for the African continent.
Gearing up for the wide-scale implementation of LEAD for the company's African client base, a large group of Knotion EA consultants has undergone two weeks of intensive training to attain LEAD EA eXpert certification. LEADing Practice is the fastest growing open standard and open source community, with over 2 900 practitioners in Europe, America and Canada.
To give the broader South African EA community its first appreciation of LEAD's potential, Knotion hosted an EA breakfast seminar, in Centurion, on 5 February. The training for the Knotion Consultants and the seminar was presented by the internationally acclaimed guru and pioneering thought leader in enterprise modelling, enterprise engineering and enterprise architecture, Professor Mark von Rosing, founder of LEADing Practice and Chairman of the Global University Alliance.
"One of the many high points of the training course and seminar was gaining insight into LEAD's innovative agile approach," said Knotion Director, Marius Snel. "Knotion has consistently advocated the importance of quick value-delivery cycles. We believe that LEAD's agile blueprint and implementation approach, combined with its large base of reference content, will enable us to deliver even more value a great deal faster. We have always viewed EA as a mechanism to unlock business strategies and business value. LEAD achieves this in a more effective and integrated manner by providing us with a complete set of value objects and supporting frameworks, methods and approaches."
The seminar theme of: "TOGAF. What now?" alluded to the difficulties current TOGAF-based EA practices often encounter, with illustrating real business value and meeting business demands in time. Delegates from banking, IT, telecoms, transportation and manufacturing, were treated to an introduction to LEAD and given an insight into how LEAD frameworks, methods and approaches, accelerators and reference content could be applied in a complementary fashion to a TOGAF foundation.
"It was great to be able to meet such a large diverse group of South African EA practitioners, to collaborate on solving common problems around business and IT alignment," commented Prof von Rosing. "The experienced delegates were intrigued and inspired to see how LEADing Practice was used as reference content that embodies years of university research packed into re-usable standards and templates. LEAD is a means to deliver projects that demonstrate true strategic business alignment and create measurable business value."
Ongoing LEAD training will be conducted by Knotion, which will follow a dual training/coaching approach to accommodate the demanding curriculum, and the fact that certification is based on the trainee's ability to display an advanced practical application of enterprise architecture. "The time for extensive EA practice establishment is over. Especially when faced with our tough economic climate, it is time for EA to add to the bottom line by increasing revenue, enhancing performance and service delivery, or saving costs," adds Snel. "We are eager to work with our clients to elevate EA to a strategic business enabler for their organisations."
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