Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge™ Standard

The Open Group is a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objectives through technology standards. Our diverse membership of more than 700 organizations includes customers, systems and solutions suppliers, tools vendors, integrators, academics, and consultants across multiple industries.

The mission of The Open Group is to drive the creation of Boundaryless Information Flow™ achieved by:

Further information on The Open Group is available at www.opengroup.org.

The Open Group publishes a wide range of technical documentation, most of which is focused on development of Standards and Guides, but which also includes white papers, technical studies, certification and testing documentation, and business titles. Full details and a catalog are available at www.opengroup.org/library.

This document is the Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge™ Standard, a standard of The Open Group, also known as the DPBoK™ Standard. It has been developed and approved by The Open Group.

The high-level structure of the document is summarized as follows:

Applied computing, now popularly termed "digital technology", is transforming economies and societies worldwide. Digital investments are critical for modern organizations. Participating in their delivery (i.e., working to create and manage them for value) can provide prosperity for both individuals and communities. Computing programs worldwide are under pressure to produce an increasing number of qualified professionals to meet voracious workforce demand. And skill requirements have undergone a seismic shift over the past 20 years. Digital Practitioners require a wide variety of skills and competencies, including cloud architecture and operations, continuous delivery and deployment, collaboration, Agile and Lean methods, product management, and more.

Industry guidance has over the years become fragmented into many overlapping and sometimes conflicting bodies of knowledge, frameworks, and industry standards. The emergence of Agile [8] and DevOps [165] as dominant delivery forms has thrown this already fractured ecosystem of industry guidance into chaos. Organizations with longstanding commitments to existing bodies of knowledge are re-assessing those commitments. Changes in digital delivery are happening too fast for generational turnover to suffice.

Mid-career IT professionals, who still anticipate many more years in the workforce, are especially at risk. Learning the new "digital" approaches is not optional for them. But how to reconcile these new practices with the legacy "best practices" that characterized these workers' initial professional education? Now is the time to re-assess and synthesize new guidance reflecting the developing industry consensus on how digital and IT professionals should approach their responsibilities. Modern higher education is not keeping pace in these topics either. There has been too much of a gap between academic theory and classroom instruction versus the day-to-day practices of managing digital products.

The Digital Practitioner in today’s work environment thus encounters a confusing and diverse array of opinions and diverging viewpoints. This document aims to provide a foundational set of concepts for the practitioner to make sense of the landscape they find in any organization attempting to deliver digital products. It strives to put both old and new in a common context, with well-supported analysis of professional practice. Practically, it should be of value for both academic and industry training purposes.

In conclusion: this document is intended broadly for the development of the Digital Practitioner or professional. It seeks to provide guidance for both new entrants into the digital workforce as well as experienced practitioners seeking to update their understanding on how all the various themes and components of digital and IT management fit together in the new world.

While this document draws from a wide variety of industry sources, there are two primary sources of material of this work.

The Forums of The Open Group

The Open Group has a number of different related programs of work that contributed substantially to the content of, and interest in, the DPBoK Standard (this document). The initial groundwork was laid by the Digital Business Customer Experience (DBCX) Work Group, which was the predecessor to the Digital Practitioners Work Group, the current maintainers of this document. In addition, this document is informed by and makes reference to other Forums of The Open Group, including:

The University of St. Thomas

This work is in part derived from material developed by Charles Betz between 2014 and 2017 for use in teaching in the Graduate Programs in Software Engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, for SEIS 660 (IT Infrastructure Management), later replaced by SEIS 664 (Information Technology Delivery). Graduate Programs in Software at University of St. Thomas offers Masters' degrees in Software Engineering, Data Science, Information Technology, and Software Management. It is the largest program of its kind in the US and emphasizes rigorous, realistic preparation of practitioners. No suitable collegiate texts were available providing comprehensive survey coverage of the Digital/Lean/Agile transition and its impacts on IT management generally, so this material was developed collaboratively, incrementally, and iteratively via an open Github project over the course of three years.

The resulting textbook, Managing Digital: Concepts and Practices, was contributed by the author and published by The Open Group Press to serve as an experiment in collaborative, open source document development, and also to support worldwide distribution on a low/no-cost basis. That material is separate and distinct from this document, but the agreement allows for the "harvesting" of material from that text. Such harvesting will not be cited, as it is expected to be substantial. The reader of both documents will, therefore, notice deliberate similarities and identical passages. However, the textbook also includes extensive quotations, sidebars, anecdotes, cases, tangential elements, personal observations, exercises, and so forth that will not be found in this document. In general, this document is briefer, drier, and written with a normative should/shall/may/must framing (see IETF RFC 2119, [40]). Eventually, the textbook may be the basis for a "Guide", supporting this document in the same way that (for example) the IT4IT Management Guide [12] supports the IT4IT Standard. See definitions of Standard versus Guide in The Open Group Standards Process [280].