Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education – some global resources

 conference, enterprise architecture, higher education, it governance  1 Response »
Dec 182011
 

Last week, John Gotze (@gotze) sent me a call to action by tweeting:

Finnish universities adopt #entarch, and look for international inspiration and collaboration. Who’s doing EA for universities? @leodesousa?
My first reply to John was the Twitter handles of practicing Enterprise Architects in higher education as well as the Educause group ITANA.  Educause also has a reference section for Enterprise Architecture. http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/EnterpriseArchitecture/17214

@gotze there is an @educause group called #itana chaired by @jimphelps. Some others @pauldhobson @EAinHE @ricphillips many others and me @leodesousa

This got me thinking that a quick post with some links to enterprise architecture resources in higher education might be worthwhile.  So here goes in no particular order:
In Australia and New Zealand, The Council of Australian University Directors of IT sponsored the annual Enterprise Architecture Symposium.  I had the privilege to be one of the guest keynote speakers at the inaugural conference organized by my friend and colleague David Bedwell at Charles Sturt University in November 2006. David’s leadership and vision has resulted in the conference becoming a “must attend” annual event.  I presented at the second and third conferences via Skype video conference and was curious where the group has gone since I last participated.

Summary of CAUDIT EA Symposium Links – with presentations resources

In the US,  Marina Arseniev from the University of California, Irvine has a very mature EA practice and her work definitely should be considered.  https://apps.adcom.uci.edu/EnterpriseArch/index.html.  Brian Cameron, at Penn State has founded and leads the Center for Enterprise Architecture.  MIT has an outstanding site that also proved very valuable to helping me along in developing our EA practice http://web.mit.edu/itag/eag/.

In the UK, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has conducted pilot projects and published papers that are very worthwhile reading and provide insights on ways to adopt EA into higher education.

From Canada, there is my blog Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education that I have been writing since 2007.

I am sure I missed many excellent sources of EA practices in our higher education and apologize in advance to my colleagues.  Hopefully, this gives you a good start.

Evolving IT Change Management into an Enterprise Service

 it service management, management  No Responses »
Dec 152011
 

In 2004, we began down the road of adopting the IT Infrastructure Library framework. We began implementing our ITIL processes with Incident Management and Service Desk. We quickly followed with creating a Service Catalogue. The next major process was Change Management. A group of  key people were assigned to become our IT Change Advisory Board (CAB). The membership of the CAB was solely IT Services technical staff and managers at the start.

The IT Services CAB had representation from all our teams: Service Desk, Desktops, Satellite Campuses, Applications, Web Services, Servers, Storage and Network teams.

Over the years, we have worked to establish the credibility of the CAB and the value that it brings to our organization.   I am the current Change Manager and take every opportunity to talk about our Change Management Process to stakeholders in our community.

We have slowly grown our IT CAB into an enterprise CAB.  We now have membership from our Learning and Teaching Centre, our Library, our Facilities Management group and now from our Broadcast Engineers (from our School of Business – Broadcast programs).  As more and more groups ask to join, we get better communication about enterprise wide and campus wide (we have 5 campuses) changes.

The end result of this maturing process is that we can better manage changes initiated by service departments. reduce risk and maintain highly available, quality services to our students and our stakeholder community.

Here are some links to information about our change management process:

IT Services Scheduled Downtime http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/downtime.shtml

IT Services Maintenance Announcements http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/maintenance/

Flexible Leadership – Self Knowledge, Guiding Principles and Flexible Approaches

 leadership, management, personal  No Responses »
Oct 182011
 

Leaders, who are self-aware, create personal guiding principles and are flexible in their leadership approaches, will have success navigating any situation.   There are a set of leadership traits, behaviors and styles that support flexible leadership.  Leaders need to develop self-awareness.  Understanding what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they react to different situations is the foundation for a flexible leadership style.  Next, the leader needs to create their guiding principles defining who they are and how they work.  Finally, leaders need to provide structure and flexibility in their organizations.

Leadership traits are described by Trait Theory.  The presumption of this theory is that “effective leaders possess a similar set of traits or characteristics.” (Williams, 2011, p. 236)  Peter Drucker discounts Trait Theory by saying; “Nor are there any such things as ‘leadership qualities’ or a ‘leadership personality’.” (Drucker, The Essential Drucker, 2001, p. 269)  Other writers disagree with Drucker and show that leaders’ traits make them stand out.  Williams lists these traits as “drive, the desire to lead, honesty/integrity, self-confidence, emotional stability, cognitive ability and knowledge of the business.” (Williams, 2011, p. 263)  Jim Collins supports this thinking with the concept of Level 5 Leadership.  Collins writes that the two sides of Level 5 Leadership are Professional Will and Personal Humility. (Collins, Good to Great, 2001, p. 36)

Drucker wrote “Know your strengths and values” describing the need to be self-aware.  Drucker advocates “feedback analysis” as one way to find out one’s strengths and weaknesses.  (Drucker, The Essential Drucker, 2001, p. 218)  Williams’ list of traits noted above also refer to attributes that are personally focused. Personally, I used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MTBI) analysis to get a clearer understanding of my strengths and weaknesses.  There are four dichotomies that describe 16 personality types. (The Myers & Briggs Foundation, 2003) I wrote a blog post about understanding the personality types of Enterprise Architects called “Being a Teacher works for me …” (de Sousa, 2008)

Flexible leaders build on their self-awareness by creating a set of guiding principles.  These guiding principles are applied daily by the leader to their work.  Peter Drucker writes “Nothing better prepares the ground for such leadership than a spirit of management that confirms in the day-to-day practices of the organization strict principles of conduct, and responsibility, high standards of performance, and respect for the individual and his work.” (Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954, p. 160)  Jim Collins provides a set of principles for Level 5 leaders.  “Clock Building not Time Telling” focuses on building a company that is built to last.  The “Genius of AND” stresses personal humility and professional will.  A “Core Ideology” of ambition for the company over ambition for self. Finally, Level 5 leaders are “relentless in stimulating progress toward tangible results and achievement, even if it means firing their brothers.”  (Collins, Good to Great, 2001, p. 198)  Read more...

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