Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

This is my review of this morning’s Architecture & Governance magazine webinar ”The State of EA: Is 2010 the Transformational Year?”

Presenters:

• George Paras, Editor-in-Chief, A&G, Managing Director, EAdirections – gparas@EAdirections.com
• Alex Cullen, Vice President, Research Director, Enterprise Architecture, Forrester Research – acullen@forrester.com

1. What is the current state of EA? Forrester conducted a survey of 416 IT professionals and found the following:  Read more...

• Increasing awareness and acceptance of EA – this is change in that there is much more broad support for EA as a discipline in organizations
• EA teams are part of senior IT management – more focus at a senior level instead of a tactical level in IT (* true in my case moving from a staff EA position to a management EA position)
• Primary drivers for EA programs 1) better strategic planning 2) consolidation of technology 3) improve business agility4) enable business-IT alignment
• Infrastructure, Security and Application architectures are the most complete, next Integration and Information architecture are underway and business architecture is the least complete
• Where to architecture groups spend their time 1/2 time spent on non-project activities – supporting enterprise planning, strategic planning, collaborating with business and governance

Alan Inglis posted about What good looks like from a solutions architecture perspective.  How do you create a solution for a new project without creating architecture that already exists or making the same mistakes that previous projects made? This is a must read post and I recommend it.

Alan described 10 artefacts that he would expect a solutions architect to leave behind from a project implementation. They are:

1. Project Background
2. Terminology
3. Key Drivers, Principles, Standards and Constraints
4. Business Problem
5. Information View
6. Risk View
7. Application View
8. Data View
9. Integration View
10. Infrastructure View

I have some questions for Alan on this:

• How big a project would require this level of artefact creation? For small and possibly medium projects, the work to do the architecture may be more than delivering the project.
• Is there a subset of these artefacts that would be sufficient for small and medium projects?
• How would the next solutions architect find and assess the artefacts created?  Need a searchable, secured repository – wiki?, blog?, SharePoint?, network file share?, knowledge base?

We, Enterprise Architects, regular trumpet the value of having an archictecture and learning from it.  Some of the key factors for me would be:  Read more...

I have the honour to speak to the International Institute of Business Analysis (Vancouver, BC, Canada Chapter) tomorrow at a Lunch and Learn session.

I will be speaking about how we built a Strategic Practice group that uses EA as the framework to guide other practices like Security, Program Management and of course Business Analysis.  I will use the EA Model, I talked about in an older post to position how EA and BA fit for our organization.

Since we are still early in our development of these horizontal methodologies, I will be talking about how BAs’ requirements gathering become the source for our solutions architecture work. Over time, I hope we can grow our Business Analysis practice into a Business Architecture practice.

So if you had a chance to talk to a captive audience of BA’s, what would you say?