2007 October | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Educause Day 2 – Preconference Sessions

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Oct 242007

Day 2 @ Educause – Preconference Session

I registered for two preconference sessions …

Aligning IT Leadership with Institutional Missions: The Reality of Being a CIO

The session was lead by 4 CIOs. The session had about 60 attendees. Each of the 4 presenters took turns talking about various factors that a CIO needs to align with in order to be successful. Some key points:

have a prepared short message about several key topics so your are ready to communicate when you get a chance
Culture is important – build your team with people who have a customer service approach ( also refer to Jim Collins “Good to Great”)
Identity Management will drive the creation of a service team made up of IT, HR and Registrar Office staff
as a CIO book regular meetings with your key stakeholders – proactive communication
when making architecture decisions; it is not just yes or no – try “whoa” so a discussion can occur

I found the discussion and Q and A sessions with the attendees to be very valuable on various levels.

Let’s Get Visual! Integrating Concept Maps, Rich Media, Social Software, and the LMS into Teaching and Learning

This was a fun and innovative session with presenters from the University of British Columbia and InHolland from the Netherlands. We explored concept mapping and the integration of rich media. Take a look at this open source tool called VUE

Sleepless in Seattle … Educause 2007

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Oct 222007

This week I am in Seattle, WA at the Educause 2007 Annual Conference. I am really looking forward to the week starting with a train ride from Vancouver, BC to Seattle, WA on the Amtrak Cascades route.

Today, I spent the day with peers and colleagues at the Microsoft Redmond Campus at the Higher Education Technology Symposium. The day started early … 7:30am pickup in downtown Seattle and did not finish until after 6pm.

The first session talked about shifting Microsoft to:

customer driven innovation
global commitment to education
relevance in programs, products and policies

Saw a familiar graphic with a vendor twist …

Instead of the standard EA and IT “people, process and technology”, we saw a de-emphasis (I hope that is a word!) of technology and got “people, process and preparedness“. I was pleased to see a common theme of “Scalability” all day long.

Collaboration was a big focus with Sharepoint Platform Services – deployed as hosted services as well as installed as local software. Hosted services will continue to be a challenge for Canadian (and non US) Higher Ed Institutions as long as we have to deal with the US Patriot Act. There was a great talk on Campus Infrastructure Platform that is very informative in a discussion of building a solid base infrastructure for future delivery of technology.

Other topics included Windows Server Hardening – in particular defense in depth and only installing the component services that are needed using “server roles”, BitLocker Drive Encryption, Network Access Protection and Virtualization of presentation, desktop, applications, server and storage.

Lots more to come … I will try to get a blog entry in each night during the conference. Stay tuned …

Spreading the word nationally …

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Oct 032007

I am at the Canadian Banner Users’ Conference in Prince George, BC this week. CBUC EA Day I ran a pre-conference Enterprise Architecture full day session on the work we have been doing with Enterprise Architecture.