Skip to main content

EDUCAUSE article on Enterprise Architecture

This is a useful introduction to the role of Enterprise Architecture in Universities:

Manage Today's IT Complexities with an Enterprise Architecture Practice

EDUCAUSE is the North American organisation for IT in Higher Education, filling roughly the same role as UCISA in the UK.  For the UK, I would add the UCISA EA Community of Practice to the "knowledge base", rather than the North American ITANA group.

The section in the article about formulating an EA practice strategy is highly relevant.  We started with a completely bottom-up approach and it quickly transpired that we didn't have the time or resources to produce the results we wanted.  Now we are sort of half-way between the two: we have top-down support within Information Services Group, and are reaching out in a bottom-up way to the rest of the University.

It's an interesting article and not too long. Take a look!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project Leadership

When I look back over recent projects that I've been involved in, it seems that one key to making a project successful is having someone on the team who really drives it forward: someone who is invested in the project as a whole and not just their own part in it. We (by which I mean the University's Applications division) have a well-defined project process, with defined roles, required milestones, deployment standards, and so forth.    All these are useful, but if the team doesn't have a leader, it seems a project can lose its way, perhaps not responding to changing circumstances, getting stuck on a technical problem, or not securing a needed resource in time to meet some external constraint. The leader can be any member of the team - it could be a developer, a project manager, or the sponsor, or someone in another role.  A team can include several people who are this committed to the project; it doesn't have to be a single person.   As an example, one of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation.  Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers).  It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs.  I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh.  Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...
2 comments
Read more

"That's not Grid!" - A cautionary tale

I don't usually attempt humour here, but see if you like this... Once upon a time, in the far-off world of Computerland, a great guru arose and declared a vision. "I see a future when all computers will be linked together and people will run their programs without knowing which computers are running them. People do not need to know where their jobs run; they just need the results. I call this Grid Computing!" The people of Computerland were excited by the guru's vision. They went away and worked to make it happen. When they were ready, they returned to the guru and said: "Oh great guru! We have implemented your vision. We can run our programs on whichever processor is free at the time, making sure that all programs can run and making best use of all our processors. No longer does one computer sit idle while another one is overloaded. Your vision is a great success!" "No, no, no!", said the guru, "That's not Grid!" The guru exp...
3 comments
Read more