Skip to main content

A new EA Repository

One of my goals since starting this job two years ago has always been to create a repository for architecture documents.  The idea is to have a central store where people can find information about the University's applications, data sources, business processes, and other architectural information.  This store will make it easier for us to explain our plans, to show the current state of the University's information systems, and to explain what Enterprise Architecture is all about.

It's taken a long time to reach this goal, mainly because we're often had more pressing and immediate work to be done.  The creation of a repository is one of those tasks that is very important but never quite urgent.  So I'm now very happy to say that we are in the process of deploying a repository and modelling tool.

Products_-_SS2.png

This is the culmination of a careful process to select the most appropriate tool for our needs.  We began by organising several workshops to gather requirements from a range of people who will use the repository.  These people included developers in Information Services and in schools, business analysts, project managers, and of course our core EA team.  Then we looked at the market and assessed a range of offerings against our requirements to produce a shortlist.  Next, we evaluated the systems on the shortlist in more detail, installing trial versions and trying some simple modelling tasks. 

Finally, we made a choice, and our choice was Avolution Abacus.  This tool lets us model systems in a choice of languages (including Archimate and BPMN, which are the ones we're most interested in right now). The Avolution Publisher component will let us share documents with anyone in the University.  We can import data tools such as Visio and Excel, which will simplify the task of collaborating with project teams and business analysts. 

We're deploying the system this week, linking it to our existing authentication, SVN and web hosting services.  We will soon be meeting the project managers on the University's Service Excellence programme to discuss how to use the new repository to store their business process models.  And we will be developing some exemplar architecture models that will, we hope, guide others in the creation of consistent models.  This will take a month or so, after which the new repository should be ready for wider use. 

I'm really excited by this development and I hope that other people will shortly see the benefits that a repository of architecture and process models can bring.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project Leadership

When I look back over recent projects that I've been involved in, it seems that one key to making a project successful is having someone on the team who really drives it forward: someone who is invested in the project as a whole and not just their own part in it. We (by which I mean the University's Applications division) have a well-defined project process, with defined roles, required milestones, deployment standards, and so forth.    All these are useful, but if the team doesn't have a leader, it seems a project can lose its way, perhaps not responding to changing circumstances, getting stuck on a technical problem, or not securing a needed resource in time to meet some external constraint. The leader can be any member of the team - it could be a developer, a project manager, or the sponsor, or someone in another role.  A team can include several people who are this committed to the project; it doesn't have to be a single person.   As an example, one of...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

"That's not Grid!" - A cautionary tale

I don't usually attempt humour here, but see if you like this... Once upon a time, in the far-off world of Computerland, a great guru arose and declared a vision. "I see a future when all computers will be linked together and people will run their programs without knowing which computers are running them. People do not need to know where their jobs run; they just need the results. I call this Grid Computing!" The people of Computerland were excited by the guru's vision. They went away and worked to make it happen. When they were ready, they returned to the guru and said: "Oh great guru! We have implemented your vision. We can run our programs on whichever processor is free at the time, making sure that all programs can run and making best use of all our processors. No longer does one computer sit idle while another one is overloaded. Your vision is a great success!" "No, no, no!", said the guru, "That's not Grid!" The guru exp...
3 comments
Read more