had found out what TOGAF is, we still had little idea of how to apply it in concrete circumstances.
8.2 The Open Group
Participation in the JISC pilot programme included a year’s membership of The Open Group, at a cost of more than £9,500. It is not clear what membership of The Open Group provides to the college that is worth the cost. The TOGAF material can be downloaded anyway, and is provided as part of the training course. If it weren’t for the fact that JISC are funding the membership for this year, it would not have been possible to convince KCL (nor indeed ourselves) that the college should join, and it is doubtful that they will authorise the expenditure next year (nor will we ask them to do so). Although the cost is low for commercial companies, to a university it is not insignificant. One area in which we were hoping that Open Group membership might have helped us was in the provision of case studies and worked examples, but none were forthcoming. Apart from The Open Group representative who engaged with the JISC programme, our main encounter with them was at their conferences (in Glasgow and Munich). As part of the JISC pilot, KEAP project staff attended the full conferences, with mixed responses. The Glasgow conference felt very sales- or business-focused with little concrete or practical information (perhaps because of concerns around commercial sensitivity), although there were some interesting talks. The Open Group sessions that addressed TOGAF and other issues were closely involved in the minutiae of these topics, and so were less useful to us at our level of engagement. That said, the session at the Munich conference that was organised jointly