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.

Comments

Webinar: Powering your business with Cloud Computing

On October 14th, I will be hosting a Grid Computing Now! web seminar on the topic of Cloud Computing. We have lined up two very interesting speakers who are using Cloud now to make businesses work. Ross Cooney had a good technological solution to sell but couldn't make it economic until Cloud Computing allowed him to pay for his computation only when he needed it. He will discuss the instant benefits and long term impact of cloud computing to the development, competitiveness and scalability of your application. Alan Williamson created the BlueDragon Java CFML runtime engine that powers MySpace.com. He advises several businesses and will give an overview of the different types of services available and how to avoid being locked-in to a single supplier. You can register for this event here .

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...

Changing Principles

In EA, architecture principles set a framework for making architectural decisions. They help to establish a common understanding across different groups of stakeholders, and provide guidance for portfolios and projects. Michael Durso of the LSE gave a good introduction to the idea in a webinar last week for the UCISA EA community. Many organisations take the TOGAF architecture principles as a starting point. These are based on the four architectural domains of TOGAF: business, information/data, applications, technology/infrastructure. These principles tend to describe what should be done, e.g. re-use applications, buy in software rather than build it, keep data secure. See for example the principles adopted at Plymouth University and the University of Birmingham . Recently though, I encountered a different way of looking at principles. The user experience design community tend to focus more on how we should do things. E.g. we should...

Distributed Thinking

Search This Blog