Participants in this podcast include Beth Gold Bernstein and The Open Group's James de Raeve.

BGB: Welcome, everyone, to this ebizQ podcast. I'm Beth Gold-Bernstein, Chair of the ebizQ In Action conference series. Today, I'm speaking with James de Raeve, VP of Certification for The Open Group. And we're speaking about The Open Group's upcoming IT specialist conference which will be held in San Francisco in conjunction with the seventeenth Enterprise Architecture Practitioner's Conference. Both conferences will be held January 28 through 30 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco; the ITSC is a one-day only event on January 30th. I'll be there and I'm hoping to run into some of you as well. Welcome, James, and thanks for taking the time to speak with me today.

JdR: Thank you, Beth.

BGB: Now, James, can you tell us, what is an IT specialist and why did the Open Group decide to develop a conference group around this profession?

JdR: The IT specialists are the people that are involved in development and delivery of IT solutions. It could be in service, support or training. And they're able to bridge the gap between client concerns and the actual delivery on technical challenges, delivery of solutions that enable business to get done. We decided to develop a conference track for the IT specialists basically as a request from our members. And we've had a very successful series, as you said, seventeen Architecture Practitioner's conferences that we run. And we were asked by members to expand that into covering and providing value to the people that actually create, develop and deliver the solutions, the architect. So we were asked to cover the rest of the piece, and hence our move towards IT specialists providing conferences and also other services for them.

BGB: The overarching theme for the inaugural event is "IT Is Our DNA." How critical is the IT specialist to the organization?

JdR: We believe IT specialists are absolutely fundamental. It's all very well for requirements and architectures to be created but if you don't have competent IT specialists, nothing's going to be built, nothing's going to get delivered, nothing's going to get supported, maintained and operated. So -- they're fundamental to the actual delivery of the value that enables business to take advantage of information technology to improve and operate their businesses. So absolutely critical, these people, and you know, we're very pleased to be starting to develop conferences and other programs in their support.

BGB: Now The Open Group is kicking off its IT Specialist Certification Program to attendees and Open Group members at this conference. Why do you see a need for an IT specialist certification?

JdR: Well, if you look at the market today, there are quite a lot of certifications that an IT specialist would be interested in. Nearly all of the are concerned with particular products or technologies and based upon a particular curriculum or training course, and an exam. So essentially they are certifications of knowledge, certification that you can read a book and understand it and answer questions about it. Now, our IT certification program is quite different. It doesn't compete or conflict with any of those existing programs. What it does is focus upon the skills and experience of the IT specialist. So what we're doing is having a board level interview process to assess candidates against a defined set of criteria for their skills, which are both technical and nontechnical. As well as their experience. And we're evaluating those against the criteria and certifying those who meet the criteria. So it's essentially a professional-level certification program as opposed to a product or technology-based program.

BGB: Now, how will the certification program benefit organizations who participate?

JdR: In several ways. One of them clearly is that for the first time, here's a yardstick for measuring the competence and professionalism of the people that an organization may wish to hire. But it's also a set of criteria that may be used within an organization to help them benchmark their own HR and career development criteria and practices. So we're expecting organizations to pick up the work that we've done and make use of it. And the good form requirements we've written can just be adopted by an organization and used internally without any further discussion with us, you can just pick it up and use it. And should the people that are being evaluated and working through those criteria in the organization wish to go for certification, then they'll know what they've got to do to achieve it.

BGB: Okay. So what will attendees gain from coming to this event?

JdR: Well, I think there's a variety of topics that we are going to be covering. Obviously, in the first conference of the series, we're going to be doing quite a bit of talking about what is the series going to be about. What is the theme? What is the Open Group doing here? What's in this new program? How does it all fit together? How can it be of value to you? So there's going to be a lot of information about that sort of thing. You know, there's going to be a long series of these conferences. There's not going to compete with conferences devoted to some particular technical topic. We're going to be a bit broader across the whole profession. And I think professionalism is probably going to be the thread that runs through all of the conferences in this series. Very much as it has done on the architecture side as well.

BGB: So who should come besides, obviously, IT specialists?

JdR: Well, I think because of the thread of professionalism, something that would be of interest to people who manage IT specialists, for the people perhaps in the HR divisions who are thinking about how they can develop their careers and how they can manage their IT specialists within a large organization. So I think, you know, it has quite broad interest beyond that of the individual specialists themselves who, clearly, they have an interest in certification and probably as an individual. But they will also be interested in what it means for IT specialists as a group and the evolution of that group and you know, the establishment of professional stands, professional ways of doing things. And probably what I haven't mentioned and should have, is because the Open Group is a global and vendor-neutral organization, this isn't just a program for the U.S. or for Europe. It's a program for the world. And it's a program where the same standards and the same processes will be applied worldwide. So, it in essence has lots of possibilities to do with the way in which global organizations currently work and the way they need their people and the people from their suppliers and their business partners to be able to work together and understand each other.

BGB: Now, how can our listeners find out more about the conference? Can you give us a URL?

JdR: Yeah, everything's hung off our main page which is www.opengroup.org and you'll see there links on the home page to the conference, you can find the agenda and you'll also see links to the certification information. I'll give you the URL of that as well. It's www.opengroup.org/ITSC/certification/>. So happy hunting!

BGB: Okay. Excellent! So, again, if any of our listeners are planning to attend, please give me a buzz and perhaps we can meet up there. James, thank you for joining me today and this is Beth Gold-Bernstein signing off for ebizQ. Hope to see you all in San Francisco.