International TOGAF Certification for enterprise architects now available from FTI

Johannesburg, 05 Feb 2009

Faculty Training Institute (FTI), a leading national training provider, has partnered with leading global enterprise architecture experts Inspired/Promis Solutions AG to offer world-class TOGAF training in South Africa. TOGAF is the most widely recognised method and framework for delivering enterprise architecture worldwide.

Competent experienced enterprise architects are becoming highly sought after as organisations seek to align business and IT initiatives, improve delivery of services, cut costs, lower risks and improve governance. Enterprise architects need good IT skills, strong analytical ability, excellent understanding of computer-based information systems and a good appreciation of business imperatives.

A well designed enterprise architecture offers great benefits to an organisation:

* Improved ability to respond to new business demands or roll out new systems.
* Greater business value from alignment between IT and business, greater re-usability, less redundancy.
* Faster, simpler, cheaper procurement, underpinned by company standards.
* Increased capability to harness, encapsulate and manage company know-how and expertise.

TOGAF Certification is a globally recognised benchmark of EA competence. "Research shows that a TOGAF Certified Architect qualification can add up to GBP5 000 to salaries in the UK and nearly $10 000 dollars to a salary in the US. It also makes the enterprise architect more marketable, and accelerates career prospects and promotion," states Graham McLeod, Managing Partner of Inspired and CTO of Promis Solutions. "Leading companies in South Africa are beginning to invest heavily in their enterprise architecture efforts, and we are seeing a growing demand for scarce architecture skills in South Africa.”

The partnership is part of FTI's strategic expansion into providing world-class skills development in key knowledge roles. "Our courses appeal not only to corporates seeking to grow their capacity in critical roles like business analysis, enterprise architecture, software testing, project management or technical writing; they are also ideal for individual delegates seeking to advance their careers through certified training programmes," says FTI MD, Steve Erlank.

"Our partnership with an organisation of the calibre and expertise of Inspired/Promis Solutions is consistent with our focus on the high-end of the skills development space, but also with our strategy to grow our market penetration by partnering with organisations with the same level of drive, expertise, passion and values that we have. This is an exciting move for us."

This intensive, five-day course is currently offered in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The course leads to international certification via the Open Group for successful attendees. The course itself has been developed by EA experts at Inspired and Promis Solutions, with twenty years of EA experience and even more of designing and delivering effective, practical training. The course covers the full body of knowledge for TOGAF, including the Architecture Development Method (ADM), the TOGAF framework and reference models, use of building blocks and repositories. It incorporates many hands-on assignments via a real world derived case study, ensuring good understanding of principles taught.

TOGAF

TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework, is an industry standard architecture framework that may be used freely by any organisation wishing to develop an enterprise architecture for use within that organisation.

TOGAF has been developed and continuously evolved since the mid-90s by representatives of some of the world's leading IT customer and vendor organisations, working in The Open Group's Architecture Forum. Details of the forum, and its plans for evolving TOGAF in the current year, are given on the Architecture Forum Web site, http://www.opengroup.org.

The Open Group

The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium. Its vision of 'boundaryless' information flow will enable access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability. The Open Group operates as a not-for-profit organisation, with more than 20 years of experience in the field. It has more than 300 member organisations, with over 6 000 participants in The Open Group activities from 19 countries.

Faculty Training Institute

Faculty Training Institute (FTI) is a private training company that specialises in offering world-class career-oriented training courses for professional knowledge workers, mainly in the corporate world. Focusing on mid-career rather than entry-level training, FTI specialises in project management, business analysis, systems analysis, technical writing, IT management, enterprise architecture, and technical writing training. It offers a variety of training options, including public or in-house, part-time or full-time courses.

FTI was founded in 1989 by five experienced lecturers from the Department of Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, who perceived a gap between the technical or entry-level training offered by most private training companies, and the longer degree programmes offered by tertiary institutions. During the past 20 years, FTI has expanded its successful product offerings from the initial two diploma courses into a growing range of diplomas, certificates and short courses that serve the career needs of corporate South Africa.

FTI is a Charter Endorsed Education Provider with the International Institute for Business Analysis (IIBA), and a registered education provider with the Project Management Institute.

Inspired/Promis Solutions AG

Promis Solutions AG is a Swiss Registered company specialising in the delivery of IT strategy, enterprise architecture and process improvement to corporate clients in Europe, USA, Middle East and southern Africa. It was formed from Promis GMBH, Inspired SA and UK and elements of Agilense USA in 2008, bringing together the experience and unique expertise of these organizations. Inspired has been recognised as a thought leader in strategy, EA and delivery methods for many years in the SA market and increasingly abroad, where its unique IP and software tooling for collaborative enterprise modelling was marketed by partners. Promis AG now serves to leverage the IP and take this expertise to the international market. Promis has unique enterprise architecture expertise, having delivered services in this space as far back as 1989 and to a wide range of clients across banking, assurance, retail, government, healthcare, software, telecommunications and other industries.

Promis has extensive EA frameworks and meta-models that integrate business, process, project, applications, information and technology domains in a service-oriented manner. Aspects of risk, cost, quality, improvement and governance are also addressed. An advanced toolset, Enterprise Value Architect (EVA) Netmodeler has been developed and is marketed worldwide to critical acclaim.

Promis has TOGAF certified personnel, has developed the Practical TOGAF certification program, approved by the Open Group, and has achieved Open Group certification for in depth TOGAF support implemented in the EVA Netmodeler product. Course designers and leaders, Graham McLeod and Ian Cambell have extensive experience over decades and have consulted and presented extensively internationally in both academic and commercial forums.