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EA at the University of Lincoln

Last week, Allister Homes from the University of Lincoln gave a presentation to the UCISA EA group about how Lincoln have set up their Enterprise Architecture practice and where they are now in using Enterprise Architecture. The presentation is online and you can see it here:

Enterprise Architecture at Lincoln

Do take a look. 

I found Allister's talk both interesting and reassuring.  Lincoln's EA practice is 12-18 months older than ours, and as a result it is a bit more embedded into university culture and processes than us, as one might expect. But we're on a similar path and not too far behind.  EA seems to be delivering good results at Lincoln, which bodes well for us.

Both practices are based in our IT departments and are reaching out to the business areas.  We are working with similar principles (because we both used the same set of TOGAF principles as our starting point).  Lincoln have an established design authority which reviews all projects; we have put in place processes that do the same and are planning to create a formal design authority.  Lincoln have a set of architecture requirements that all procurements and developments must adhere to; we have a similar set of standard procurement questions, which we are about to review and formalise further.

Allister has made good use of the BizzDesign modelling tool.  We are just in the process of finalising our choice of modelling tool.  We're a bit behind in developing EA models but people are seeing the benefits of those we have produced.  Getting the tool and repository in place will accelerate us down this part of the EA path.

The occasional meetings and presentations run by the UCISA EA community are a really useful way of sharing experience and information among UK universities.  I recommend joining the mailing list if you are at all interested.

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