The global skills and competency framework for the digital world
Australia - SFIA 8 Scoping Workshop Outcomes

Australia - SFIA 8 Scoping Workshop Outcomes

The SFIA 8 Scoping Workshop this afternoon was a great success. Almost too much so. There were so many areas of interest that we could not do justice to them all.

From Grant Nicholson on LinkedIn

We tried a new tool for conducting this workshop: Mural. It allowed us to have a virtual white wall on which we could place and organise virtual post-its. The picture at the top of this article gives you just a small glimpse of it. Long live the post-it!

After we all got a little more familiar with the tool, we brainstromed areas we would like to see further developed in SFIA and then we categorised and voted on them. The key areas of interest, in voted order were:

  1. Behavioural skills - extending SFIA more into 'soft skills'
  2. Data skills - including data science, data matching, data classification and information management
  3. Machine Learning and AI - including some loosely related areas like Robotic Process Automation, High Performance Computing and Blockchain
  4. Workforce Management - including things like workforce planning, coaching and mentoring

Additional areas explored but prioritised lower were:

  • Business management, including things like business case development, public relations and decision making
  • Definitions - some form of glossary to ensure common understanding of terminology and a list of standards relevant to specific SFIA skills
  • Foundation skills - those capabilities everyone may need at some level such as basic digital literacy, communication and facilitation
  • Cloud skills, including service brokering
  • Cyber/Information security, potentially including skills related to cyber offensive capabilities
  • External links with SFIA - exploring how SFIA relates to other specialisms and the skill of using SFIA and other capability frameworks
  • Policy & law, including the interpretation of law and formulation of policy

Next Steps

We assigned a lead to champion each of the key areas and we identified many of the key interest groups with whom these should be explored. We will make contact with these interest groups and discuss follow-on workshops to develop detailed change recommendations.

The items not covered in the key areas may still be important and anyone who would like to follow through with any of them might like to organise their own workshop or formulate their own change recommendations. Anyone can submit a change request via the SFIA website at any time: SFIA Change requests

There were a couple of areas of interest I had that didn't make the top 4, so I'll be working on change recommendations for these myself, and I encourage anyone with a bright idea for SFIA to do likewise.