Distributed Thinking

The annual EDUCAUSE conference attracted 8,000 people to the Philadelphia convention centre, including four of us from the University of Edinburgh.  My colleagues were giving presentations, while my main reason for attending was the pre-conference workshop on Enterprise Architecture and Digital Transformation, which I blogged about last week. The conference itself offered a smorgasbord of options.  I mainly attended sessions about new technologies, which I blogged about on the Applications Directorate blog, and a few others which consolidated my existing interests.  If these topics weren't to your taste, there were also sessions about research, learning technologies, enterprise systems, leadership development, equality and diversity, and many other aspects of IT in higher education. The exhibit hall gave opportunities to talk to many vendors, from the large established corporations to the newcomers in "startup alley". I chatted to several CRM vendors, and looked at o...

Yesterday I attended a rather good workshop on the topic of enterprise architecture and digital transformation, which was organised by the architecture group of EDUCAUSE , the American society for IT in higher education. This topic is of obvious interest to me because we are running several digital transformation initiatives at the University of Edinburgh.   The workshop was a good opportunity for the participants to learn what other universities are doing and to reflect on how we, as architects, can position our work to help these initiatives succeed. The presenters didn’t let us sit back and relax; there was a lot of group work and few presentations.   We began by compiling a list of the external factors driving digital transformation, both technical and cultural.   We produced a long list!   Then we divided into groups, each of which chose one value chain which would be affected – e.g. recruitment of international students – and discussed the drivers and...