Come for the Certification. Stay for the Transformation

With the recently announced partnership with Microsoft Azure, my Enterprise Architecture team with our partners, has a goal to certify 1000 technologists in 12 months. At the 2 month mark, we are at ~500 trained & 220+ certified. A new concept called #certfest - short for Certification Festival, has been a key lever.

The day we announced the cloud deal, we internally kicked off certfest - an 8 week learning journey to help us train and certify our employees in Azure Foundations (az-900). We wanted to pilot small and aim for 200 aspirants. But, we got over-subscribed 5x in 24 hours and had to up our game ! We did. We enrolled ~500 enthusiasts in March for our first edition (slated to wrap in 2 weeks). We have already started our 2nd edition as well … ?

The engagement, results and partnerships have been heart warming. 500 trained, 220 certified and counting, 15,000 hours of learning, 30+ volunteers. Those 30 volunteers have been from across business lines, many as cohort captains helping us pull this off ; employees that certified in batch-1 are now the new captains for batch-2 ; mainframe engineers and project managers who were a little intimidated by cloud have certified and are inspiring their peers.

8 weeks with ~500 people, getting to know them personally, understanding the friction points in their day jobs, knowing what they work on, helping them meet other developers in the firm, all while helping them certify, is the real win. So, while the numbers are good, the camaraderie, priceless.?

We will do three #certfests / year in our endeavor to hit the 1000 certifications /year mark. That touches ~2000 employees annually. We have plans to expand this beyond az-900 and into AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform as well ?

Enterprise Architecture should not just be about governance, review-boards and approvals.

"Governance is good, but collaboration is way better ; is EA training the organization in what is needed for tomorrow? are we engaging, educating and inspiring our employees?" - those are key questions an enterprise architecture team of today, ought to ask itself. #certfest is one of the many programs in our endeavor to constantly keep asking those questions to ourselves and keep evolving to a better EA.

EA 2.0. ?

A few other key constructs we are spearheading in this space :?

Modernization parties (ModParty) : 4 day offsite aimed at focused modernization. Objectives preset before the party, ~25 applications will be aligned to this offsite that puts 200+ people in a single site to go focus on how to better their applications, be it migrating to cloud, doing a proof of concept or adopting an internal framework. Any and all help needed, any and all resources needed (internal/vendor) will be on-site and ready to partner with the application teams. EA facilitates it and forms the enabler, the accelerator and the connector. Our certfest graduates help us as volunteers - we need quite a few to manage, help, guide 25 teams across 4 days !?And yes, there will be happy hours and celebrations. It is a party after all ..

Demystifying Cloud : For our business partners who may not be as conversant with cloud and azure, how do we ease them into learning cloud? How do we de-mystify it? Sample attached. Our ModParty organizers as well as certfest graduates who love to teach will help us run these de-mystify sessions firm-wide. Helps spread the knowledge while providing platforms for employees to influence the organization??

Both ModParties and Demystify Cloud in-turn helps us with certfest enrollments. A nice little eco-system you say? Yes, that’s the intent and the objective. ?

To me, EA 2.0 in 2022 boils down to 4 key imperatives :?

• Partner with the CIOs to define Target States & Deliver : Active, ongoing white glove architectural engagement on top-10 items for the firm. Manage to outcomes ; not approvals ?
• Engage, Educate, Empower and Inspire our Engineers : This post sheds light on this pillar (certfest ; modparties, hackathons, grassroots tech meet-up groups)
• Automate Build and SDLC : Firmwide pipeline for builds ; evidence as a service ; policy as code. Make deploys and SDLC seamless ?
• Focus on Application Health and Hygiene : Measure application health, quantify it via a health score. Drive modernization via this score. Gamify???

I hope to be able to delve into each of these areas and share the thinking behind these concepts in the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, I will leave you with this.

At a recent industry forum, the panel I was a part of was asked what our key objectives were. Many had stats and numbers. We have em too. But mine was a 4 letter word. No, not that 4 letter word ! but this acronym : FOMO - Fear of Missing Out .

If my team and the firm as a whole can create that angst that there’s some good happening here in EA 2.0 and if I do not get engaged, I will be missing out, we would have created something right, we should have created something worthwhile …?

PS :

• If you like what you see, a lot of my colleagues and I are hiring. Come join #usbank?
• If you would like more info on these constructs, we’d love to help you and your organization as a fellow traveler ; sharing is caring?