Distributed Thinking

We're looking at how we can create a reporting and analytics service that can respond quickly to new requests for information.  The motivation for this is that business intelligence requirements change quickly; managers and data analysts frequently come up with questions for which they require access to new data in order to answer. Many organisations have a dedicated BI team who can concentrate on the needs of their data analysts and other users. The most effective BI teams - by which I mean those teams who provide the most useful information to the people who need it - are multi-disciplinary teams that include business users, data analysts, data architects, and ETL developers. Unfortunately, our current structure hinders this integrated approach.  We don't have the resources to dedicate a team to each of our services, because we run over 100 application services.  Instead, we have development teams and a support team, and a planning process that lets us assign staff ...

Over the last few weeks, we've been working with some consultants to assess our approach to integrating business processes that involve multiple IT systems.  We have an ambition to replace many old point-to-point data transfers with more modern integration technology, enabling a more responsive user experience.  As we are consolidating many of our existing applications and gradually moving to more cloud-based services, we will need to replace many of our existing integrations and this provides an opportunity to transform our approach. We're planning to support three types of integration: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) for message-based, inter-system processes API Management for enabling portals and innovative user-facing apps Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) for where we still need to move large amounts of data On the technical front, the consultants recommend that we adopt one of a small number of cloud-based integration platforms.  The next step is to plan a...

WonkHE recently posted an interesting opinion piece with the title Academics and Administrators: No more ‘us and them’ . In that post, Paul Greatrix rebutted criticisms of professional services (administrative) staff in Universites from some academics. To illustrate his point, he quoted recent articles in which administrators were portrayed as a useless overhead on the key tasks at hand (teaching and research). This flows both ways, as Greatrix himself points out. As Enterprise Architect, I work with Professional Services colleagues and I have heard some of them express opinions that clearly fail to understand the nature of academic work. Academics cannot be treated as if they were factory workers, churning out lectures on a treadmill. I think these comments reveal a fundamental clash of ideas about how a University should work. Some people who come into management positions for other sectors tend to frame the University as a business, with students and research funders as customer...

My mother, who turned 95 years old this month, has never used a computer.  She doesn't even have a mobile phone, let alone a smartphone.  She has only the vaguest idea of what the internet is.  So when she asked me what I do at work, I had to simplify things a bit. I'd be interested to hear other suggestions for how to explain Enterprise Architecture to someone who doesn't know anything about computers.  Arguably, this is good practice, because in our role we have to convey complicated ideas to people who vary considerably in their knowledge of IT.  Some are IT specialists, while others are specialists in their own areas, and we need to explain our work in language that makes sense to them. I told Mum that my job is to make all the University computers work together. As an example, I explained that one computer stores information about which courses the students have chosen, and another one handles stores the marks the students score in their coursework and ...

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...

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...

According to this article in Scientific American , there is a fair bit of psychological research into how we find meaning and happiness in our lives.  The two are often correlated; feeling that our lives have meaning helps to make us happy, although sometimes short-term happiness has to take back seat to longer term personal development.&nbsp Purpose is one key aspect of meaning.  It is not surprising that people feel greater satisfaction when they feel their lives have purpose, and that much of the literature on business leadership talks about motivating people by giving them a clear sense of purpose.  The classic (and possibly apocryphal) story is that of the NASA cleaner who, when asked what his job was for, replied that he was helping to send a man to walk on the moon. My academic friends tend to have a clear sense of purpose for much of their work.  They see their students learn.  They see their research grow, one paper at a time.  In the suppo...

As I noted in October , my rate of blogging has dropped noticeably, from 34 posts in 2016 to a mere 7 last year.  I don't really adopt new year's resolutions but as a goal for this year, I would like to wrote more posts.  I like to keep this blog both as a means for letting colleagues know what we're working on, and as an area of reflection for myself. The two main obstacles to writing more stem from the same source: the University has a large number of initiatives under way and we are trying to support them with a architecture team of just three people.  So on the one hand, we have a lot of other demands on our time aside from writing for this blog, while on the the other hand the initatives are large and ongoing, which makes them hard to summarise in succinct posts.  Yet to make our architecture work yield its best effect, we have to write, and talk, and communicate widely.  And, to be fair, we do this: via board reports, presentations, one-to-one meetings...

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...