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Showing posts from December, 2016

2016 has been a good year

So much has happened over the last year with our Enterprise Architecture practice that it's hard to write a succinct summary.  For my day-to-day experience as enterprise architect, the biggest change is that I now have a team to work with.  This time last year, I was in the middle of a 12-month secondment to create the EA practice, working mainly on my own.  Now my post has been made permanent and I have recruited two members of staff to help meet the University's architectural needs. I have spent a lot of the year meeting people, listening to their concerns and explaining how architecture can help them.  This communication remains vital, the absolute core of what we do and we will continue to meet people in this way.  We also talk to people in other Universities in order to learn from what they are doing and to share our own experience back.  A highlight in this regard was my trip to the USA last January. Our biggest deliverable for the past year was the design of the da

CRM Strategy from Plymouth University

Last week, we were delighted to receive a visit from Rupert Frankum of Plymouth University.  Rupert was the technical manager for Plymouth's project to replace their old student recruitment and admissions processes with a modern system based on a CRM platform  You can see a shorter presentation that Rupert and his colleague Paul Westmore gave at this year's UCISA conference on the conference website. Rupert gave an excellent talk, covering many aspects of their project.  For me, the highlight was the discussion of their CRM vision, which used an analogy of a Rubik's cube to give an image of how common technical components can support different parts of the recruitment process.  This explained the issues, and how they can be addressed, in an engaging and effective way. This visit was timely for us. We have been building a business case for a CRM platform for several months, and the University is currently reviewing how we manage (or fail to manage) student recruitment.