Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

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...

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...

Over time, technology provides more and more functions and hopefully value to your enterprise. The challenge is how to manage the complexity that comes with technology. I started my IT career as an IBM 360 mainframe computer operator managing VM/CMS and DOS/VSE CICS systems. IT architectures were relatively simple. One large computer, a few large boxes for hard disk drives, several tape drives and an a large line printer. For the most part, our clients interacted with printouts and some lucky ones got access to 3270 green screen terminals.

Think about today … while our technology provides a very functionally rich environment for delivering value to our organizations, the technological complexity has gone through the roof.

Delivering our ERP in 1992 took one IBM RS/6000 RISC box with Oracle 6 RDBMS and Oracle forms installed on all client PCs. Now we need a P Series Server running AIX (Unix) for the Oracle database, VMWare Servers running SUSE (Linux) for the Oracle Application Server(s), Load Balancers, DNS servers, DHCP Servers, Novell network servers and various workstations (PCs running Windows XP and IE 6 or 7 with client side Java)!!!  Read more...