Distributed Thinking

I've started to evaluate the potential of using the Archimate modelling language for our architecture practice.  As architecture is primarily about communicating ideas, I didn't want to just start using this in my team and leaving everyone else mystified by the strange diagrams we started to produce.  Also, I wanted to judge how best to use the language.  So we arranged training for people from different teams and with different roles, partly to share the knowledge and partly to evaluate which aspects of the language (if any) would suit each teams. Archimate can represent many aspects of a system, starting with the motivations, drivers and stakeholders; moving to map business services and processes; then the applications that provide those services, and finally the infrastructure on which they run. You rarely display all aspects at once; instead there are a host of views that present particular aspects of the system.  The diagram above is taken from a JISC worksh...

I am preparing a business case to justify the building of a data warehouse for the University.  This has some challenges.  While everyone acknowledges that our current BI reports need improved, it is far from obvious how to measure the benefits of improving our BI.  Suppose we our student satisfaction score increases in two year's time: how much of that would be due to which specific initiatives, and which of those would result from decisions made with better BI data?  It's a tenuous thread of causality. Nonetheless, if we believe that the decisions made by staff have some impact on outcomes, and that by having better information available to them they will make better decisions, it follows that a successful data warehouse project will have a positive effect.  Even if the impact on University income is one tenth of one percent across the board, that would quickly repay the cost of developing and running the service. Another approach is to look at the costs o...

We were fortunate to have a visit from Neil Randall of Southampton Solent University last month.  Neil and his colleague Paul Colbran gave an excellent presentation at this year’s UCISA conference about their experience of setting up an effective BI service.  I invited Neil to visit Edinburgh to explain their approach to our team and to review our proposed BI architecture. We began the day with Neil reprising his part of the UCISA presentation and discussing several points arising.  We presented our draft architecture, and then we discussed topics including how to structure and manage a BI service, which ETL tools to use, how best to model data, and how to integrate a data warehouse with relationship management (CRM) software.  We had a very information conversation about “Extract, Transform, Load” (ETL) tools, which load data from source systems into a data warehouse.  Neil recommended we look at file-based tools rather than database-oriented tools.  Wit...

Today, I attended a meeting of the UCISA EA Community of Practice , at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).  The focus of today's meeting was on data architecture, and I contributed with a talk about our data warehouse plans at the University of Edinburgh. The first presentation of the day was from the University of Birmingham, who are using data architecture techniques to support the upgrade of their Finance and HR systems to a new ERP system.  This was a good example of the benefits that enterprise architecture can contribute to service transformation projects . Next was a talk about the HEDIIP Data Capability Toolkit for the HE sector.  This sets out the case  that we can make data a tangible asset, capable of adding value to our universities.  The programme is effectively taking an EA approach, mapping the as-is state and defining the target to attain, all mapped to a data strategy.  From the talk, it sounds like the toolkit has some elements ...

I spent an intense two days this week attending Gartner’s Enterprise Architecture Summit in London.  The event covered quite a range of topics; indeed, it is only now that I am looking back over my notes that I realise just how much ground was covered.  What follows is a brief overview of some key messages and highlights. The keynote speakers were keen to emphasise that digital transformation requires EA to move even further out of the IT department and to partner the business in technology-led business innovation.  If the business leaders don’t see this, we need to get our foot in door and insist on coming into the conversation. The internet of things was mentioned several times, along with analytics from sensors, wearables and smart devices.  “Smart machines” were one thread that Gartner has identified from emerging technologies, including autonomous personal assistants and virtual advisers. The need to focus on human behaviour was another theme, especia...

Our University Secretary has sponsored a major review of the University’s administrative processes, coining the banner “ Service Excellence ”.  The aim is to look at the services we provide to staff and students with a fresh eye, making them more effective, more efficient, and focussed on the user rather than administrative convenience. Our CIO is sponsoring a similar programme called “ Digital Transformation ”. This will replace old paper-based processes, starting with the question of what would processes look like if we designed them afresh for the modern connected world.  The aim is to make processes that are more focussed on the user and hence more effective and efficient. Both of these ambitious programmes will need an effective enterprise architecture, if they are to succeed.  Digital Transformation is intrinsically about using opportunities provided by new technology to improve services and, as such, it requires effective technology services to make data available ...

An important part of my role is to get out and meet people, to explain what enterprise architecture is about and how it will benefit the University.  I have regular meetings with a number of people across the University.  In addition, I am often invited (or put myself forward) to speak to particular groups.  Here follow a few examples. The College of Science and Engineering IT Committee asked me to explain what my role was about and I was happy to do so.  I kept my presentation short and high level, to get across the main ideas rather than delve into technical details.  The Q&A turned into a really good discussion about the issues that staff face trying to get their jobs done and how a solution needs to address better integration of business processes as well as the supporting IT applications. As a result of this discussion, I will meet some of the admin staff in the School of Chemistry to hear first hand examples of where our current processes cause probl...

Earlier this month, I spent a week on a BCS training course.  This combined two three-day courses on the topic of Enterprise and Solution Architecture – the first course being Intermediate level and the second Practitioner level. Both courses had an exam on the Friday afternoon.  This is the first time that I’ve taken an exam in almost 30 years!  I was quite tense.  The outcome is not actually that important (hardly comparable to my son's Advanced Highers which determine University entry), but I still wanted to do well. The intermediate course covered the range of enterprise architecture: business, applications, data and infrastructure, as well as solutions architecture.  With such a breadth, it didn’t have time for much depth, but did present some useful ideas and concepts.  The terminology and structure was given in the BCS “reference model” (really more of a glossary than a full model), which is different in detail to more widely-used frameworks such ...

Architecture descriptions tend to be dry and technical-looking affairs, with pictures of structure and process flow.  I’m pleased to say that we are seizing an opportunity to present a much more visual explanation of what our target architecture will mean for our users, particularly for our students. For the last couple of months, we’ve had usability consultants on site working with our students and staff to review the “online experience” that students receive from university systems.  They presented their findings last week, including an outline proposal for a better approach. To no-one's surprise, the mirror they held up to us showed a rather fragmented set of systems, with unhelpful names, instructions that were often unclear, different versions of the same information, important e-mails buried among less important information, inconsistent look-and-feel, and so forth.  The details of their report are fascinating but far too long for this blog. What is relev...

We are looking at how best to store data so that we can map trends over months and years, in what is known as a data warehouse .   We do have some digital records already, for example we can looks at trends in student numbers for over a decade.  With more and more processes online, the University administration want to look at trends over a wider range of data, and to ask questions of data that go beyond the individual administration units.  This is not trivial, especially as we don't know which questions people will want to ask in the future.  We need a flexible data model that allows reports to link data that was taken from more than one operational system.  For example, a question about the cost of running any particular course would need to know about the cost of the rooms used, the staff, library materials, any special equipment, and so on. We have looked at a number of ways of tackling this problem.  The approach we are now proposing ...