Distributed Thinking

What do Universities do? This may seem a strange question to ask and the answer may seem obvious.  Universities educate students and undertake research.  And perhaps they work with industrial partners and create spin-off companies of their worn.  And they may work with local communities, and affiliation bodies for certain degress, and they definitely report on their activities to government bodies such as HEFCE.  They provide student services and support.  The longeryou think about it, the more things you can think of that a University does. In business, the things that an organisation does are called " capabilities ", which is a slightly strange term.  I think it is linked to the HR idea of a combination of the CAPacity and ABILITY to do a task.  Whatever the name, it is a useful concept.  A capability is more basic than a process: a University may change the way it educates students but as long as it remains a University it will educate them...

We're looking for an Integration Architect to become the fourth member of our Enterprise Architecture section, joining our Data Architect, CRM Architect, and reporting to me.  The Integration Architect will lead the design of the University’s system integration architecture and associated security controls.  Link to job advert .  I can't tell you which technology we will be using because we are currently investigating the options available.  Currently the vast majority of our data transfer is done by scheduled jobs to shift data files from one application to another.  We have a few areas in which we use web services and we are building an API framework now, but we don't yet have an integration middleware platform.  It might be an Enterprise Service Bus, or a cloud-based platform, or perhaps our new ETL system will support event-driven integration too. This architecture will be central to our implementation of our new ERP system, which will replace o...