Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Tonight, I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer on Enterprise Architecture for a class at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. My colleague Brian Hosier invited me to give an overview of EA for his students.

I had to do some serious chopping of my 2 hour workshop to get things down to a manageable timeframe. Even then, I felt extremely rushed and barely skimmed the surface of all that Enterprise Architecture is.  The class went well and I got great questions from the students.  I hope this short introduction to EA helped some of them think about the big picture.

As I was presenting, I realized how much our EA practices are IT influenced. This is a natural thing being that we grew EA out of IT and IT is where it primarily resides. As I presented some of the artifacts we developed, it became apparent that I need to rethink how to present EA to newbies. After a bit of theory and overview, I presented how EA can be applied strategically, tactically and then a bit on business architecture.  The problem was that for each area except Business Architecture, my examples were very technology focused.  Read more...

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

Session 9 Kevin Lan, Senior Program Manager, Windows Server Division

Windows Server Release History – every 2 to 3 years for a new release

Technology Investment Areas

• virtualization – Hyper-V with Live Migration
• management – PowerShell scripting
• web – ASP .Net and WebDAV, IIS 7.5 component install
• scalability and reliability – 256 core support, componentization, boot from SAN or VHD, support solid-state devices, file classification infrastructure
• better together with Windows 7 – DirectAccess, BranchCache

Scalability

• designed for groups of 64 processors
• SQLServer can take advantage of 256 logical processors

R2 Power Management

• reduce power consumption by only powering cores that are working – Core Parking
• Power AQ program – 10% savings in power from CPU utilization all managed from Group Policies
• V4.0 ACPI spec supports this to allow power metering

Server Core Changes  Read more...

• 64 bit delivery only
• minimal installation option for window server (no GUI shell, command line interface), excellent for Read Only Domain Controllers and for Hyper-V virtualization
• types of servers:  Web, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter
• reduces patch burden due to fewer components by approx 40%

I had a great phone call with Roger Sessions (@RSessions), CTO ObjectWatch a month ago about IT Complexity.  Over the past few weeks, I got a chance to read about Roger’s approach Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) in a series of white papers:

• Controlling Complexity in Enterprise Architectures – Executive Summary
• Controlling Complexity in Enterprise Archtiectures – Mathematical Foundations
• Controlling Complexity in Enterprise Architectures – The SIP Methodology

Some key points that resonated with me:

1. Autonomous Business Capabilities (ABC)
2. Mathematical Basis for Understanding Complexity

Years ago, we used a simplified model to articulate why we needed to build our Enterprise Architecture practice.  The central premise of the argument was that as functionality increases so does complexity.  We proposed using IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture to manage complexity.  See the slides here.

Roger has published a new white paper – The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity on October 22, 2009.  The main sections of the paper are:  Read more...

• The Coming IT Meltdown – calculating the costs
• Cause of Failure – measuring IT complexity
• Designing Simpler IT Systems
• Impediments to Simplicity
• Call to Action

I attended a half day seminar offered to IT leaders in Vancouver today by Microsoft Canada. Essentially, this was the launch of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 to the Vancouver market. There were about 100 people in attendance.

Here is my Twitter stream from the session today … http://twitter.com/#search?q=leodesousa msft

The day began with an engaging keynote by Jim Carroll – Futurist, Trends & Innovation Expert.  Jim spoke laid out themes of :

• Run the business
• Grow the business
• Transform the business

Next, Jim provided examples from his consulting engagements to highlight the themes.  One of Jim’s quotes was “Success comes to those who evolve.” Another quote, “Many kids going to elementary school will have careers in fields that don’t exist today. Think about a “location intelligence” professional.” With the huge growth of spatially related data, there is a real need for people skilled in location intelligence.

Jim also talked about the “new economy” typified by:  Read more...

1. A relentless focus on growth – changes in construction mgmt focused on green sustainable initiatives
   
2. Speed to change product lifecycles – auto makers who can retool production lines in 10 days vs 10 months
   

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.

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...

Nick Malik just posted about All the questions fit to answer …

“Make sure you write down the questions that the business wants the Enterprise Architecture team to answer.  Then collect only the information that you need to collect in order to answer them.”

… and it triggered something that I have been thinking about for a long time.

How deep do you go in capturing your Enterprise Architecture? At what depth of detail (or abstraction), do you go to ensure that you have enough to support Strategic Planning (like Nick talks about) and IT Governance? At what point have you gone too deep, making your EA practice into a resource sucking documentation exercise?

During our lunch last week, Nick talked about Business Capabilities as an abstraction layer. I am sure Nick is going to blog about this in the future. We are putting together a Institutional new strategic plan in the next few months and I plan on writing down those business questions.  We should then be able to look at our EA artifacts like our Application Portfolio and see the gaps.  More importantly, we should be able to determine data we are capturing that do not provide value or help in answering the questions.  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.