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Open Comments: S2 Ep. 4 - Enterprise Architecture at the Crossroads of Business and Technology with Doron Orbach

• The Open Group • Season 2 • Episode 4

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Doron Orbach, Director of Product Management for Enterprise Architecture at ServiceNow, shares insights from his 20+ year career in product and engineering, exploring how collaboration and continuous learning drive success in technology leadership.

• Experience in aligning ServiceNow's Common Service Data Model (CSDM) with Archimate standards
• First involvement with The Open Group through the IT4IT™ standard while at HP
• Active participation in The Open Group ArchiMate® Forum to influence and develop Enterprise Architecture standards
• Collaboration requires openness, listening, and finding common ground despite different perspectives
• Enterprise Architects must continuously learn about emerging technologies like AI to guide organizations
• Influence through collaboration rather than mandates is key to effective Enterprise Architecture
• When facing career roadblocks, focus on learning new skills and following your interests
• Personal connections and informal discussions at conferences provide invaluable insights
• Setting goals and taking concrete actions toward them leads to professional fulfillment




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Ash:

The following episode has been recorded during the Open Group Amsterdam Summit on May 20, 2025. Hello and welcome back to Open Comments. Today we are joined with Doron Orbach. He is an experienced product manager with more than 20 years of experience in product and engineering. In his current role, Doron leads product management for enterprise architecture at ServiceNow. Previously, Doron led the configuration management and discovery at HPE. Doron's extensive career also includes a deep understanding of complex enterprise systems and a proven track record of driving strategic product direction. His expertise ranges from basic configuration management to innovative enterprise architecture solutions. Welcome to the Open Commons podcast, Doron.

Doron Orbach:

Yeah, thank you, great to be here, happy to talk to you today.

Ash:

Thank you. Now, before we dive in, please can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Doron Orbach:

Sure, yes. So I'm a director at ServiceNow product management for enterprise architecture. I live in New York City, a great place to live. I originated from Israel, so I came to the US 20 years ago and now I'm working in ServiceNow for the last three to four years managing the Enterprise Architecture product, and this is my first open group summit and I'm really excited about it, so this is great to be here so far.

Ash:

And can you tell us when you first heard about the open group and your relationship?

Doron Orbach:

with The Open Group so far? Sure, yes. So previously in my career I was in a round of companies that started with hp, then hp and then micro focus. Back then I worked at a standard together with my colleague, mark boardman, on standard that was called it for it. So hp was very much involved into the standard and this is actually the first time where I read about the standardization of processes such as IT and the ITIL process and how it works within the enterprise. And the IT4IT was a standard that was introduced in collaboration of other companies. And this is the first time that I've heard about the Open Group.

Doron Orbach:

But I wasn't part of the actual work with The Open Group, so I knew about it working with internal folks back then in HP. But when I moved to a service now, the initiative of ArchiMate, which is critical for enterprise architects to do their jobs, was the one that really led me to take part and be born involved in the open group and to first to understand ArchiMate. I came to this enterprise architecture. I wasn't born an enterprise architect, I came to it via product management, so this learning curve led me to a lot of reading in the open group sites and this is where I thought it would be a good idea to also be part of The Open Group. Luckily, servicenow was already part of several forums, but we joined the ArchiMate Forum also two years ago and since then we are actively participating in it.

Ash:

And please can you tell us more about your involvement in the ArchiMate Forum?

Doron Orbach:

us more about your involvement in the ArchiMate Forum?

Doron Orbach:

Sure, yes.

Doron Orbach:

So ArchiMate is playing a great role for Enterprise Architect to model the future state of IT and when I took the role of product management in service now enterprise architect it became apparent that having the functionality of modeling future state is critical and that while we have our own modeling language, which is called CSDM, we must align it to the Archimate model because this is a standard model that many companies rely on.

Doron Orbach:

Many Enterprise Architects know it's the only standard for modeling future states. So my first involvement was really to learn it and to take care of this, and then I got more involved with the form leader, with kelly and jb who runs the forum, and we had several discussions in the past and I'm participating in the uh that there are on Fridays and trying first to understand it and then to also to influence it, for example, by participating in events like this. So this has been a process of about one to two years already that we've been more actively engaged in this forum, and actually yesterday was a great moment where I was able also to present some initiatives that we are doing in ServiceNow actually align the language of ServiceNow. The language of ServiceNow is the CSDM, the Common Service Data Model to the standard language of Archimate, which we think will open the gates for more usage of Archimate on one end, on the ServiceNow platform, and trying to create this collaboration between the business side and the technical side that can be represented together, bridging these two models.

Ash:

For those who may not know much about the ArchiMate Forum, can you share any nuggets from the forum so far or anything you'd like them to know, say if they were just stepping foot into the forum, things that they should know about beforehand?

Doron Orbach:

yes. So in general, the forum is has the mandate to govern and to create the this language and to to say what is going into the standard and what is not, and what I like in general about this forum and about this collaboration. In general it's a collaboration, so it's an open group that you get to both to see what others are doing, what others are working on, and you get also to comment and have your opinion and to say if you think it's the right thing to go through or if you have any other comments. So any draft that is going to these publications, you can review it. So you get an opportunity, you can collaborate, and the collaboration is really between knowledgeable people. Usually these are companies and people that have a vested interest in improving the standard. So I think it's a.

Doron Orbach:

This is a. The result is a open, a group that share ideas. You can both learn, you can both influence and eventually to create a better standard that works both for your company. But you understand that it's not only the interest of your company or your product, or whether you are a bank, whether you are vendors trying to sell enterprise architecture, whether you are an institution that is, a university, have a shared model, which is very hard to achieve, because eventually it can bridge industries, it can bridge countries, it bridges, say. It's a global standard and the nice thing is this collaboration happens and eventually there's a standard that everybody can agree upon and can act upon.

Ash:

It's not always easy, but this is what's good about this process and staying on the theme of collaboration, what does collaboration mean to you and do you think it's an ever-growing thing, where collaboration can take different forms, whether it would be with a group of people, whether it be working alongside someone, but coming together to work towards a goal, but also learning from each other and discovering more about each other in terms of you know where you're going professionally, where they see a project going, how do you balance expectations, you could say, within collaboration?

Doron Orbach:

Yeah, no, it's a great question. So I think for me, collaboration starts with the fact of being open and being coming on one end with an agenda and interest. We're all doing this, or most of us are doing it, as part of our jobs, so we have vested interest to succeed and you always have your own opinions and your own direction. But the key thing about collaboration is to first understand that there are other people that see the world differently and have different experience and bring in different point of views. And being able to collaborate is being able first to listen to what they say, to ask them the right questions, to try to really understand what they are saying. Sometimes you will find that in many cases you agree on many things and in many cases you don't agree. Where this is where collaboration really is. I would say taking the life of trying to discuss and to agree on common ground that you can work, both agree upon and work towards it and if sometimes there is a conflict, trying to find ways to also to get create a bridge on the conflict. Sometimes it's to get the other side opinion. Sometimes it's to collaborate in a broader forum that helps you to guide it towards the right place. Usually the crowd wisdom is crowd wisdom. It leads you usually not always to the right place, but I think the most important is to listen, is to understand that there are different cultures, different opinions, different interests, different directions, and your job is to try to influence as best as you can, but to keep the courtesy and understanding that it's a joint work and joint collaboration.

Doron Orbach:

And one more thing is collaboration. I work in a large organization. I work in a service. Now, it's pretty large. We are almost, I think, 30,000 people or something like this. You need constantly to collaborate, even within your own organization. This you need constantly to collaborate, even within your own organization and enterprise architecture, by the way, is the absolute place where you must collaborate, because as a team, as a group, you are usually a small team surrounded by a much larger teams operational team, application teams and business teams, and CEOs and CIOs and you need to be in the central and to collaborate and to try to influence with this collaboration.

Ash:

Nice.

Doron Orbach:

And do you have any advice for any future enterprise architects out there? Yeah, I think, especially in today's world. I think that enterprise architect are challenged by a change of technologies and rapid movement in the industry that we have never seen or we haven't seen in the last 20 years, maybe since the internet, and talking, of course, especially about new things like AI and generative AI. That is coming to play and it's very up to keep to organization. But also before this, enterprise architect need to keep pace with things like move to the cloud, everybody move to mobile, and how do I scale up my systems and how do I keep operational resiliency so when everything changes, I know that things are still continuously providing value to my business. So I think the first thing that enterprise architects needs to do is continuously learn. They need to be the ones that to understand what are the new trends in technology and what is the next thing that is going to happen, so they can guide the organization to the right place. So learning, I would say, is the number one thing that I'm trying to do in my profession, but I think for enterprise architect is absolutely crucial.

Doron Orbach:

And if we're looking into the second advice, it goes back to the previous question that we had. It's about listening and collaboration. I think, eventually, enterprise architects are a team that is influencing other teams, is not dictating or is not mandating other teams. Teams is influencing by showing them the standards, presenting them, showing them the direction, understanding what is the business transformation that we're trying to do and trying to align the technology and the other people who work on the application towers this vision, tower these goals. So listening, collaborating and providing the the guardrails for doing things is the best thing to do. So it eventually comes down to listening and collaboration, and when you have the learning and the knowledge of how to guide these teams, to guide them to the right direction, then you will probably be on the best path, regardless of the technology, regardless of the business that you're in.

Ash:

And how do you overcome challenges and what advice do you have for those facing career roadblocks?

Doron Orbach:

Well, career roadblocks, yeah, in general. I think first you need to take into account that in this era of work, you will usually face roadblocks in your career because things change so fast.

Doron Orbach:

I can give advice family story. Like my son just finished computer science and four years, five years ago, we all thought computer science is the profession of the future. Now, when everybody is ending the school, it's very hard to find a job. It's not easy to find a job because suddenly the voices are oh I will replace all the programmers. So you never know what is the right job. So first is, when you look into your career, you need to follow a little bit your art. You.

Doron Orbach:

I'm also believing in the fact that you need to be practical. I came from a very practical, I would say, a tradition. You need to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. So my belief is you need to be practical. But you need also to listen to your heart and try to focus on the things that you do. And when you come to a career challenge, it might be you're not being promoted when you think you need to be promoted or you unfortunately got fired.

Doron Orbach:

Usually, if you take a little bit of time, you'll find that with time things will work out the right way. Usually you need to just keep on moving. It might be learn new skills, learn AI, learn how to leverage AI within your job. I think this is the number one skill that you do. Maybe learn something else, maybe learn some skill that is not relevant at all For me, when I was in crisis of work, I took some time and I learned new skill. I learned music. I felt that music was the thing that was missing in my life, so I learned the music and now I'm drumming for several years now, and this gave me the realization that even at any age, any time that you have an obstacle or a challenge, you can still learn something new. You can apply this new thing that you do and with this new I would say realization of yourself and what you can do, you will also eventually find the path forward in your career, and this is good for enterprise architecture as much as it's good for other personas, would you say as well.

Ash:

It's a bit like a pendulum swing, in the sense of, say, where you're going in your career, the direction you may have, or there may be moments where you feel a bit deflated. In certain situations, for example, you may feel like you know you need to progress a little bit faster, or you imagine yourself being in a different position than you already are. How, as you just mentioned earlier, in terms of you know um carrying on, you could say keep on carrying on. How would you manage that, for example, in a world that is so fast moving and there's so much that everyone needs to learn at one given time? You know you can easily um up skill, but there's so much available. Do you think it gets to a point where there may actually be too much available? So how do you almost like block out the noise and streamline what you need to focus on first and practice and gain those skills as you go, instead of being overwhelmed doing everything all at once?

Doron Orbach:

yeah, for sure. I think, uh, what you're saying is absolutely true, and one of the feelings I think we have in this uh environment is that you always feel, if you miss something or if I'm learning this, I need to learn this. Yes, there is always this feeling of missing something and I think at least important thing for me was to think that if I like what I'm doing now, it's a passion. Yeah, it's the passion, and if I like it, I don't miss anything. I mean, other people can do other things and they probably like it and probably it's good for them. So if I like what I'm doing, it's probably a good thing for me, and you don't need to know everything.

Doron Orbach:

It goes back to collaboration and understanding that you are. Eventually, you are as good as you are. You are part of a bigger thing and you are doing your best. You need to always do your best. You know you need to have your aspiration and you need to have your goals and motivations, but there is a certain degree that you need to understand that it's not just up to what you're doing. So do your best, learn the things that you like, learn the things that you enjoy learning and focus on this, and I believe that good things will come, because this is the best that you can do, and if you're doing this, then you will feel fine with your choices and you will find that you'll also get your opportunities. Eventually it's about, if you feel that you're using your opportunities, so you're trying to find your opportunities, then you're in the right place. Yeah, there is so many things you won't be able to do, but focus on what you can do instead of the other things that you won't be able to do.

Ash:

It's fine would you also say osmosis may play a part in that as well, in terms of, say, when you're collaborating others and you're in all these sessions and meetings, the knowledge that you gain from those meetings may hit you afterwards or a few months, overwhelming. When there's so much knowledge and information, you want to get so much out of the session, but you also don't want to give, I guess, so much information.

Doron Orbach:

That's overwhelming, right and it may sink in later absolutely, and I'm just reflecting of my role as a product management manager for enterprise architecture product and truly saying, when I joined ServiceNow three and a half years ago, I knew that they are enterprise architect, but what was exactly their job? What are they doing? Truly saying, I didn't know. And I came to ServiceNow in order to rebuild or build a product, a new product for Enterprise Architecture, and my goal was to learn what are enterprise architects doing. And when you talk to, it's like the story for the elephant you talk to one enterprise architect and you describe it in one way.

Doron Orbach:

And it's all about technology and you need to have the right technology. You talk to another one, it will tell you about the business, and the third one will be from maybe a university and it will be completely different story, or it might be about regulations. If you talk to the banks and at one point you understand I either don't understand anything, yes, or just wait, and things will eventually, you know, put themselves in buckets and things will get a little bit more. And you find out that. So you start to do things based on what you know.

Doron Orbach:

They are not exactly the right things, but with the time you start to hear common motives again and again and then suddenly things are being categorized within your mind and eventually, for me at least, within the product, within the direction of the product, because you start to understand what is this beast really all about of enterprise architecture. You start to understand, in this case, that it's simply not the same for everybody else, and everybody else will eventually get the product and use it in the best way that they can. But you need to build the things that are common to all this organization, just by the way, like we discussed in the beginning, the Archimate. So eventually, archimate is great, but every group, every team will probably have some ways that they use it which is a bit different than the other organizations, because not every organization is exactly alike and these things usually come with time, with learning. So listen, absorb and eventually you will figure it out. Yes, that's what we do.

Ash:

That's great. And would you say there's been any projects that you've been a part of that you felt you would have maybe have liked to do a bit differently? Or, you know, say if you could revisit any projects and change certain parts of it, and if you could, would you do that? Or do you believe things work out for a particular reason? Or even if the goal that you had in mind for that project didn't work out, you still got a lot from that project yeah, I think first, yeah, there were many projects in my life.

Doron Orbach:

You know that either built and didn't succeed, or built and eventually you find out, oh, that's not the right way to to do it and maybe I should do it a different way.

Doron Orbach:

And usually it happens when somebody enlightens you and comes to tell you you know, but this is not right what you did, you connected these two parts in the wrong way, or you build this UI and it's not right.

Doron Orbach:

So usually I think you know there are very few mistakes that you do in technology or in life in general that you cannot fix or you cannot change. And if you made such a mistake, so usually either you, you know, you write some things down and you say, well, we wasted six months of work, but we at least learned something out of it. So you either try to fix it or you do it from scratch, as long as, again, as you know that in the time of bidding and in the time of doing it you rely on your best knowledge, on your best judgment that you probably did the right thing. So usually it's better to look forward and to see what you can do now instead of looking into what was wasted and what. What went wrong? Again it's. It's good for the project that you built, or for career decisions that you made, or for a life decision that you made, better to realize what I can do now, not what I could have done one year ago, because that's already gone.

Ash:

You cannot change it and finally, would you like to share any takeaways from the open group amsterdam summit so far?

Doron Orbach:

yes. So for me it's really about the. This first, my first Open Group Summit that I'm attending, so really a great event. And for me it really goes down to meeting people that you can discuss and share experiences in the same material coming but from different angles. So just yesterday, in the event we had the in the Heineken brewery, we I met a few folks that one is consulting for a company South of the Blue, enterprise Architects, one is running enterprise architecture for educational institution and just talking, you know, over a beer and getting their deep insights.

Doron Orbach:

Of course it needs to be much more discussed and shared, but getting sometimes bulbs of ideas even during a session like this. This is, I think, the main idea about this conference is you cannot get it by sitting remotely in your office and doing a Zoom meeting, because everybody is very much to the point and suddenly when you have this one-on-one collaboration, informal collaboration, it's really open up, the personal communication and the ability to really get to this idea. So I think it's this personal connection that we are looking, which is also playing part in this Open Summit. That is really the strongest thing for me personal connection that we are looking, which is also playing part on this open summit.

Ash:

That is really the strongest thing for me and before we wrap up this episode, would you like to share anything else with our listeners?

Doron Orbach:

yeah, I think in general in this life, you need to try to learn as much as you can, but, as I mentioned before, it's learning what you enjoy is also a way to learn things. So it's not just about learning the necessary thing and pushing just. I'm not just learning enterprise architecture to be a better product manager for enterprise architects. I'm also trying to learn other things and seeing other ways of thinking in order to improve my capabilities to do it. So I think being wide, trying to learn more things, trying to learn things that interest you, will also help you to be more specific in what you're doing.

Ash:

So I think the more you enjoy what you learn and what you do, the the better you will succeed at it are there any quotes that have stuck with you that you, like you know, you just mentioned uh, you know, uh, learning collaboration. Are there any that you fall back on or that inspire you, for example?

Doron Orbach:

first, I'm very inspired by our ceo bill. He's having every monday a quote in linkedin that video and quotes in LinkedIn that I'm really interested in. So just this morning he mentioned you know that if you want to achieve something, you need first to dream about it. You need to think about it big. But dreaming is one thing and many of our dreams are not being fulfilled. But if you want to really get something, eventually write it down or put yourself I want to achieve this by this. Write it down or put yourself I want to achieve this, taking action manifesting take action on this.

Doron Orbach:

So I think this is this is really the key part. So, and as long as you know that you're moving towards your goals and your goals might change over time, and this is fun but as long as you know that you have something in your mind, you have a vision, you're moving towards you, you would better with yourself, with what you're doing on a daily basis.

Ash:

So to you know. To summarize that, I guess you could say as long as you're putting in the work and you're passionate about what you do, the rest will follow and things will work out Absolutely.

Doron Orbach:

They're supposed to work out.

Ash:

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on the Open Comments podcast. We hope our listeners have enjoyed this episode as much as we have, and it's been really great talking to you about collaboration and your experience so far at the Open Group Amsterdam Summit and we look forward to seeing where you go in your career and hope to have you back in the future soon.

Doron Orbach:

Thank you, hope to see you soon. Thank you very much.

Ash:

Thank you so much. Thank you Hope to see you soon. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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