Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

I am back at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this week to collaborate on IT Service Management with a focus on:

• service definition
• service delivery
• service catalogue.

I will also be a presenter at Univeristy of Alaska Office of Information Technology 3rd Annual Techfest 2009 talking about BCIT’s Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) strategic initiative that wrapped up this spring. I has been just over a year since my first visit and I am keen to work with my colleagues again. Will blog more later in the week.

In my conversation with Gene Leganza, Forrester VP Research last week ( @gleganza), we spoke about how to address delivering technology in a consistent manner. It inspired me to write this post about our Solutions Council. Here goes:

How do you handle service requests in your IT organization?

Have you adopted an IT Service Management approach?

Can you confidently articulate standard solution architectures for commonly requested services?

In the past, we struggled with a lack of consistency in our technology solution delivery.  Even though we are a centralized IT department, clients received different solutions and services depending on who they contacted.  Imagine how confusing it was for our clients; they could get application solutions from one of LAMP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Lotus Domino application platforms.  Two clients with similar requests could get two different solutions based on which developer they talked to. This further added to the complexity of the application portfolio we manage – meaning more time spent on “keeping the lights on” and less on delivering new solutions.  Read more...

On August 11th, Gartner announced a “new approach for enterprise architecture” that they labelled “Emergent Architecture”.  I got a chance to read some responses from Todd Biske, Mike Rollings, and Dion Hinchcliffe.  Thanks for the great insights and commentary.

In the press release, Bruce Robertson, Gartner Research VP states the two characteristics of “Emergent EA”:

1. “Architect the lines, not the boxes – which means managing the connections between the different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves.”
2. “It models all relationships as interactions via some set of interfaces, which can be informal and manual”

On characteristic 1. is if you only look at the connections between parts of the business, how can you look for opportunities to reduce complexity, increase efficiency and implement reusability? I believe enterprise architecture is about the whole organization and its environment, not just pieces of it. As an example, our EA practice encompasses IT Service Management (ITIL), Business Analysis (BA) and Program Management (PMO).

On characteristic 2. , again all this says to me is to take a “user experience” approach to describing the architecture. This is nothing new as far as I can tell … perhaps I am missing something?  Read more...

Andy Blumenthal wrote a great post “Adaptive Leaders Rule the Day“. In his post, Andy reviewed a Harvard Business Review July 2009 article “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” and commented on the article’s insights on adaptive leadership.

I really liked Andy’s quote “Leaders need a proverbial “toolkit” of successful behaviors to succeed and even more so be able to adapt and create innovative new tools to meet new unchartered situations.”

Andy listed some of the successful behaviours in the “toolkit”.  I recommend you read the full article to get all of Andy’s insights. 

Here is the list of successful behaviours:

• “Foster adaptation”
• Stabilize, then solve
• Experiment
• “Embrace disequilibrium”
• Make people safe to question
• Leverage diversity

Taking a similar approach to my previous post on Generative EA Principles, I will explore and share how Andy’s list of behaviours fit with our EA practice (and maybe yours).  We have a long way to go to fully leverage the successful behaviours but having some clear names for what we have accomplished helps.  Thanks Andy!  Read more...

Todd Biske asked this on Twitter “What are your EA services? In other words, what are the major functions your EA term performs and/or markets to the rest of the enterprise?”  He followed up with the following Ideas for EA Services:

1. Architecture Review Service (could be on-demand, could be required)
2. Project consulting (i.e. act as, or assist, project/solution architect)
3. Strategic Architecture Services (to-be architecture)
4. Architectural Reference Services (development of reference artifacts)
5. Architectural Standards Services (official standards, similar, but more official/specific to Reference Services)
6. Architectural Research Services

He ended with “What else should be on the list, or what items should be changed?”

We publish a Core Service Catalogue to articulate what our IT Services Department delivers to BCIT. We talk about this as our default service level agreement to the Institute. We currently are on Version 4 of the catalogue.

In the Core Service Catalogue, we included an Enterprise Architecture key core service to help our clients in the BCIT community understand what EA activites are available.

Here is the list of EA activities we defined:  Read more...

• Developing, documenting and publishing the Enterprise Architecture for business and technology at BCIT by:
  • continuously aligning technology with changing goals and objectives of the institution

Mike Kavis posted another great piece on why we should use Enterprise Architecture. As always, Mike has some real gems in his post.  Here are a some:

• “It sounds to me like people have a technical solution and are now looking for a problem to solve with it.  It needs to work the other way around!”
• “Well, coming to the business with technical solutions asking for help to justify them with business drivers is not alignment.”
• “At this point the ROI should be much easier, because the solutions were driven by the problem statement(s), not the other way around.”
• “Without this alignment, IT will constantly struggle to sell technical solutions to the business and come up with appealing ROIs.”

With the recent economic situation, business leaders are looking more and more to IT leaders to help enable cost savings and business performance. In my regular meetings with my business colleagues, this is becoming a consistent theme. The only way this will happen is for IT leaders to sit with business leaders and understand their issues and problems.  Once this problem is understood, then the  IT leader can bring to bear the appropriate technology solution.  The ROI is put back on the business (where it belongs) and how the problem is solved not on the technology that enables the problem solving.  Read more...

This post is in response to a question from Nick Malik about my thinking of how EA and ITIL relate to each other. In my post on the EA Model I use to help communicate with our community, I added IT Service Management (ITIL) into the V2 graphic. I was not clear about the relationships between ITSM and EA.

This spring I created a presentation for the University of Alaska EA and PM Workshop I was invited to speak and teach at. Instead of just posting the PowerPoint, I thought I would turn it into a post.  

I am not going to give you all the definitions of IT Service Management or the history of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library).  I want to focus on how EA and ITIL work together in our organization. Note I have not had a chance to investigate all the ITIL V3 changes so this discussion is about ITIL V2.

In ITIL V2 there are two main categories of services under the IT Service Management umbrella – 1) Service Support and 2) Service Delivery.

Looking at Service Support, I will focus on Incident, Problem, Configuration and Change Management.    Read more...

Alan Inglis wrote a great post about Enterprise Architecture. He put up a very good diagram linking Management to Delivery with Architecture bridging them.

What I found interesting is that Alan used the same words I have been using in our EA practice for the past two years. Simply boiled down, Enterprise Architecture is about two things :

• Doing the Right Things – using EA to support Governance so that the right things are done to support our Education, Research and Business mandates
• Doing Things Right – using EA to improve our planning, manage complexity and encompass best practices like ITIL for IT Service Manangement

Thank you Alan for a great post and I hope you are good with me leveraging your final diagram in my organization.

Two years ago, Dave Cresswell and I came up with a graphic to represent Enterprise Architecture @ BCIT. We needed a simple graphic to communicate EA and also knew that showing our senior Executive the Zachman Framework was too complex. Here is first draft EA model:

and Version 1 :

At that point, I was just getting introduced to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and did not have a clear sense of how it fit within the bigger realm of Enterprise Architecture. We were also just beginning our work on developing IT Governance (ITG) and again I did not have a clear sense of how it fit with EA.

Here is Version 2:

I want to share with you my new thinking on how to represent the relationship between EA, ITG and ITIL. The new EA Taxonomy graphic now shows that BCIT will use ITIL Service Delivery and Service Support as a backplane to guide our IT Service Management work. ITG fits in the first backplane with Strategy and Policy and ensures alignment to BCIT’s strategy and vision.

Looking forward to your thoughts on this.