Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Who is Your Customer?

Leo de Sousa — Sat, 04 May 2013 06:55:16 +0000

Who is Your Customer? This may be easy for many businesses especially if they are selling consumer goods. If you ask any service organization at a University, the standard response is “Students are our main customers”. The rationale here is that without our students, we wouldn’t have a university. At a very high level this [...]

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Implementing Organizational Structure and Focus

Leo de Sousa — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:28:41 +0000

When I joined the IT Department at the American University of Sharjah as the Director, I was presented with an organizational structure challenge. I found out that I had 21 direct reports and that my department did not have a concept of operational management! I had just come from being the Manager, Business Application Services [...]

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My First 180 Days as a CIO

Leo de Sousa — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:02:13 +0000

Hard to believe that time has gone so quickly in my CIO role. On March 17, 2013 I have been the Director of Information Technology at the American University of Sharjah in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates for 180 days. It has been a huge change for me especially after spending 20 years at the British Columbia [...]

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Take Every Opportunity to Document

Leo de Sousa — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:53:29 +0000

I am always surprised (and I really shouldn’t be) that we do a great job of responding to critical incidents but almost always fail to document what we did so it can be referenced in the future. As IT leaders we need to proactively document the impacts of planned and unplanned changes. Whethere it is [...]

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Knowing What You Have Supports Planning

Leo de Sousa — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:11:28 +0000

Enterprise Architects all over the world build guiding principles to support their practices and planning. We built one in 2005 and it still holds true today. “Reuse before Acquire, Acquire before Create, Create Reusable Components” The big problem with this is that it is all “Motherhood and Apple Pie” unless you do the hard work [...]

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A Personal Thank You for My Half Century

Leo de Sousa — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 08:12:12 +0000

Well this is timely – December 12 , 2012, my 200th blog post and my 50th birthday. I still can’t believe it because when I look in the mirror or at the mental image of myself, I feel like I am 35 years old with so much to learn. Yet everyday I go to work, [...]

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Leveraging Roadmaps to Link Business and Technology

Leo de Sousa — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 17:26:13 +0000

Enterprise Architects have used roadmaps as a standard model to describe the transition from the current state architecture to the future state architecture. Many of my fellow enterprise architects have described the many different ways to create a roadmap and to show how they link to an organization’s strategic goals. Nick Malik (@nickmalik) wrote [...]

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An Approach To Project Assessments

Leo de Sousa — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 16:53:13 +0000

Every IT leader at one point or another will be asked to conduct a project assessment. Sometimes it is a project that was initiated by your organization and others it is a project that was started in a different part of your business. Rarely are successful projects reviewed (even though we should as we are [...]

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Introducing IT Service Management Using a Core Service Catalogue

Leo de Sousa — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:03:01 +0000

Last week we started a journey to introduce IT Service Management to our AUS IT and Academic Computing teams. We have kicked off a project to build a Core Services Catalogue I am looking forward to see what our IT teams come up with as a list of services. We will be able to build on [...]

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Helping Your Helpdesk

Leo de Sousa — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:52:21 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks, our American University of Sharjah IT teams have been working on creating a simple Service Coverage Matrix. We found that we had a knowledge gap with the distributed IT support structure at AUS. Not everyone knew who was the primary and the secondary service support analysts for all the technology [...]

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