Participants in this podcast include Beth Gold Bernstein and Phil Stauskas, Distinguished Engineer and IT Specialist Profession Executive for IBM and Ron Tolido, CTO for continental Europe and Asia Pacific for Capgemini.

BGB: Welcome everyone to this ebizQ podcast. I'm Beth Gold-Bernstein, Chair of the ebizQ In Action Conference Series. Today, I'm in San Francisco at the first Open Group IT Specialists Conference and I'm speaking with Phil Stauskas, Distinguished Engineer and IT Specialist Profession Executive for IBM and Ron Tolido, CTO for continental Europe and Asia Pacific for Capgemini. Welcome, Ron and Phil.

RT:: Thank you.

PS:: Thank you, Beth.

BGB: Now, both of you were involved in creating this IT Specialist certification. Can you tell me a bit how it all started?

RT:: Sure Beth, I can. Actually, the start is no longer ago than 15 months, I think. And at that time, we saw a very successful IT Architect certification standards, which was created in The Open Group. And of course, it only pertained architects, which is a very interesting population and interesting people to certify. But we felt that is -- there was potentially a much larger base in IT Specialists that could benefit from having a certification standard, a globally recognized Open Standards as well. So Capgemini and IBM we got together and we concluded that we had similar internal certification processes for our IT Specialists and then -- and then suggested to the Open Group boards to start a process to create a global open standard for IT Specialist certification. And within 15 months we managed to create that.

BGB: Wow. And do you have anything else to add to that, Phil?

PS:: Well, IBM was involved in the creation of that IT Architect Certification Program working with the Open Group. So when they done with that, I had been watching closely with what my partner, and my peer within IBM was doing and when they were completed, you know, we had some interests. Suddenly, you know, Capgemini approached the Open Group with the idea of, "Let's do the same thing now for specialists," and I was quick to jump in and say, "Yes, it's the right thing to do."

BGB: Okay. Great. And obviously, IBM's a very large organization and Capgemini has 85,000 consultants out there. Why do you see a need for it?

PS:: Well, this is important to me because IBM, as the first name implies, is international and I have a responsibility for making sure that we have consistency in the way specialists perform their work. It's important to me and important to IBM that a specialist in Brazil, in Russia, in India, and China, in Dallas, Texas, where I'm from, all are working to the same level, the same level of qualify and delivery of excellence to our clients. And a program like this, which we've actually been running inside IBM, for about a dozen years, to help drive global consistency was critical and the opportunity to take it to the whole industry just adds to the credibility and drives that consistency more effectively.

BGB: And Ron, how does Capgemini see this certification program?

RT:Okay. I would add to Phil's comments that we are definitely reaching a critical point in time in terms of the need for a true global standard. So like IBM, we had our own internal certification process, which was very well established and was very good also for our people to work towards. But we are a company that delivers in a distributed way more and more. So the greatest growth of our company clearly takes place currently in India and we're delivering projects across the worlds. Typically, we're distributed teams that that might be located all across the world and working in different time zones so we need a -- a global perspective on competency skills and capabilities and experience. And furthermore, it's not only a matter of one company delivering but in many cases it also will be a collaborative effort involving multiple companies, which even more suggest that we need open standards to bind that all together.

BGB: Okay. Now Phil, I witnessed today that IBM was accredited by the Open Group as an organization that can certify IT Specialists, meaning that the IBM processes are compliant to The Open Group processes. Now, you've said this took a great deal of effort and resources and it was an elaborate process. How has this benefited IBM or what do you see the ongoing benefits going forward would be?

PS: Well, the fact that we were accredited does a couple of things. First, you know, two people who -- who work for me, Sheila Thorne and Brian Mitsuki did tremendous amounts of work over a short period of time to get the various documents that the Open Group required being put together to demonstrate compliance with the criteria that they have for an organization to be accredited. A lot of the credit goes to them and I'd be remiss if I didn't bring their names up. What it means it means to IBM is simply now that we have the ability to have our professionals certified within IBM and as they are certified, and just as importantly if not more so, the professionals over the past dozen years that have been certified by our program in the past can participate through grandfathering. We are now an organization that's ready to stand the test of what The Open Group has put together in the area of quality and global consistency when it comes to specialists.

BGB: And Ron, how do you think this certification will help Capgemini?

RT: It will help Capgemini as I said in delivering our solutions in a distributed way, which is crucial to our clients. Also, it will help us to demonstrate to our clients that we are compliant to to the requirements that they have regarding the quality of what we deliver. By the way, just uilding on Phil's remarks, Capgemini is currently involved also in getting the accreditations. IBM already has had some experience with the accreditation because they're also accredited in the ITAC for the ITAC standard so we're currently working on this as well and expect to be accredited in the forthcoming three months. And I think some other large organizations will do something similar in the forthcoming year or two.

PS: Ron made a very good point. We did have some advantage in that we did participate in the Open Group's Architect Program so we had a little bit of sense of what it was going to require and as I said, those two individuals that I mentioned earlier, you know, really put their noses to the grindstone to get that work done.

BGB: Okay. Now, do you think this is something that will only benefit very large global organizations or do you think it would help smaller consultancies, maybe people you work with as well?

PS: I think it help everyone across the board from the small one-person business that is looking to establish some credibility in the industry; if they get Open Group certified as a specialist, they've immediately identified that their business -- the individual, the business of one, meets a standards that IBM and Capgemini and other large companies are using to monitor and evaluate that their professionals in the specialist profession. And it's something that's important for not just vendors like IBM or Capgemini, it's important for every company who wants to just make sure that their talent in their IT specialist arena is truly adhering to a global consistent approach to the work that they do for their their organizations.

RT: And to build on that, I do think that having an open standard certification available that you can actually download and have a look at certainly will trigger a lot of companies to start their own certification process as well. And of course, they don't need to make it up themselves from now on so there's no point in designing or inventing that themselves, they can simply take the standards as we have established right now and use it as a starting point.

If they are large, they can create their own journal certification processes and get it accredited. If they are smaller, obviously, there's also the direct way. And for that matter, there's also a third way, because I do think the Open Group will work with some partners that will do some of this certification work as well because we are potentially talking about a much larger base of professionals that need to be certified. And so it's clearly a much larger scope than you will find around the ITAC Program.

BGB: Like such as the training companies that certify people in the TOGAF, is that what you're talking about there?

RT: I'm not really sure if it could be. I think there are potential partners for the Open Group. It still needs to be investigated so this hasn't been settled yet but -- but just talking about the sheer volume of specialists that potentially could be certified, it's clear that the Open Group will also work together with some partners around this certification.

PS: One of the things -- it's very nice about this program and obviously since, you know, Ron's team and my team was involved in creating it, it's something that we put a lot of time into. The program The Open Group provides serves as a foundation but a company can add to it. IBM, for example: We have been accredited, we meet the requirements of the Open Group's Program but we internally have added things to it, things that I'll generally describe as making a -- a specialist specifically an IBM Specialist.

And that's an interesting piece that an organization that might be interested in doing this should realize that they can get the foundation from the Open Group and they can work on that. But they can feel comfortable in knowing that if they have some uniquenesses to their business, to the industry they're in, to the culture they're in, that it can be tailored and added to, to support whatever they really have as a goal.

BGB: Okay, great. Well, in the post, we will provide the links to the pages and people can go and check it out for themselves. So Ron, Phil thank you for taking the time for talking with me today. This is Beth Gold-Bernstein for ebizQ.