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Posts Tagged ‘communication’

Enterprise Architects – What attributes do you look for?

February 14th, 2010 5 comments

Building on my previous post Starting Your EA Practice – What roles would you pick?, this post looks at attributes of individuals and suggests some that have worked in our strategic practices of which Enterprise Architecture is one.

When my colleague and friend, Dave Cresswell and I started working towards building an EA practice, we coined the name “Strategic Practices”. Disciplines like Enterprise Architecture (Business Analysis/Architecture, Solutions Architecture), IT Security, Project/Program Management and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (Risk Management) cut across all areas of an organization are all represented in the Strategic Practice group.

First we discussed the difference between skills and talents.  Skills are critical for us to deliver services and it is management’s responsibility to ensure the people in their care have the skills to perform their duties.  I put as strong focus on personal learning plans for my team to ensure that together, we plan to keep them current and advancing in their chosen field. 

Our belief is that Talent is significantly more important than Skills – skills can be taught, talent is something a person brings with them.

Skills (examples)

  • create complex technical solutions
  • creating structured documents
  • manage structured processes

Microsoft Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Day 2 Summary

December 21st, 2009 No comments

Here are the Day 2 sessions linked into one blog post.  Again, lots of good content and multiple sessions that got me thinking about how to leverage the Microsoft capabilities we already own.  I wrote mini posts on each session and linked them here for your easy reference.

** Updated post with links to slide decks – Dec 21, 2009

Wednesday Dec 10th

Session 7 – Unified Communications Overviewslides

Session 8 – Office Communication Server Case Study

Session 9 – Windows Server 2008 R2 Strategy and Future Directionsslides

Session 10 – Live@edu Overview

Session 11 – Security Microsoft Strategy Overviewslides

Session 12 – Education Products Strategyslides

Day 2 was another full day with plenty of excellent information.  Thanks to Microsoft for hosting this excellent event. I now have a much clearer understanding of what Microsoft can bring to the table.  Now, our task is to understand and architect a roadmap to leverage our newly created Active Directory, migrate to Exchange, create and deliver a SharePoint platform service and protect it all using a multi-layer security approach using ForeFront.

Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 10 Live@edu Overview

December 9th, 2009 No comments

Frank Chiappone, Sr Project Manager Live@edu

Evolving Education Market – move to digital campus and manage IT costs and complexity

Software + Services drives this model  (left on-site progress to right cloud services)

  • Exchange Server – Exchange Online – Outlook Live (built on MS hosted Exchange – 10GB mailbox)
  • SharePoint Server – SharePoint Online – Office Live
  • Office Communications Server – Office Communications Online – Windows Live

Blend of IT Managed and Self Managed services like SkyDrive that gives 25GB per user – SkyDrive will transition to SharePoint Online to allow for management by organizations

Demonstrated a School Portal using SharePoint platform integrated with Live@edu and SkyDrive and Office Live. Using ADFS 2.0 will allow for AD federated authentication.

Provisioning uses a basic Identity Lifecycle Manager implementation to sync between AD and Outlook Live.

We need significant help to address the Patriot Act and how Canadian Educational institutions have been able to implement Live@edu.

Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 8 OCS Case Study

December 9th, 2009 1 comment

Session 8 – |OCS Case Study – Cambrian College, Sudbury, Ontario (Michael Alloy, CIO Cambrian College and Mauro Lollo, CTO UNIS LUMIN)

Business Situation – before

  • Nortel PBX with CallPilot
  • Novell Groupwise
  • Employees sharing phones
  • limited phones in classrooms

Needs

  • increase classroom phones
  • enhanced distance ed program
  • add more phone extensions
  • greater integration between communication and collaboration tools
  • future proofing & innovation

Challenges

  • cost
  • features and flexibility
  • lack of integration

Approach – engaged a consulting firm that specializes on Unified Communications

The Solution for Cambrian

  • OCS on premise Web conferencing – content sharing with audio and video
  • OCS Edge infrastructure – remote access
  • High Fidelity recordings
  • Integration with 3rd party video and conferencing equipment in the classroom
  • OCS Voice
  • Integration with existing Nortel PBX
  • Optimized for OC softphone endpoints for staff – headsets and USB phones
  • Office Communicator Phone Edition IP phones in the classrooms

Cambrian is facing significant revenue pressures and the implementation of UC is seen as strategic to the future of the college.

Results and Benefits

  • 20 to 1 cost savings

Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 7 Unified Communications Overview

December 9th, 2009 No comments

Session 7 Raj Gopalakrishnan, Enterprise Technology Strategist, Voice, Compete, Incubation

Currently – silos of communication with multiple inbox, phone numbers, etc

Future of Communications (centred around identity and presence)

  • Unified Inbox & Presence
  • Authentication – heavily leverage Active Directory
  • Administration – uses Exchange Server
  • Storage – SQLServer
  • Compliance

Unified Communications decreases costs by addressing ( estimated 40 -50% savings):

  • travel expenses
  • telephony and audio conferencing charges
  • real estate and facility costs
  • messaging and voice mail costs
  • cost of communication systems

Case Study – Microsoft Internal Deployment – generated 240% ROI and savings of > $212M USD annually (used Forrester’ Business Value Framework)

There is a significant Environmental Sustainability benefit with Unified Communications – significant reduction in carbon footprint and power consumption.

The core of Microsoft’s UC solution is that it is “presence powered”. Impressive demo starting with Outlook, moving to IM, audio and then a video conference.  Impressed with the ease of use and seamless integration.

Three Phases of Rolling out UC – start simple and add onto your existing investments in Exchange and SQLServer by adding Office Communication Server.

Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 3 Office System Futures

December 9th, 2009 No comments

Session 3 – Tony Ollivier, Enterprise Technology Architect – Office Systems Futures – Office 14

The User Productivity Challenge – balance between Business and User Focus (economic efficiency) and CIO Focus (IT efficiency)

  • common platform – with the goal of cost-effective platform heavy dependence on SharePoint 2010
  • Unified Business Platform
    • Unified Communications
    • Business Intelligence
    • Enterprise Content Management
    • Collaboration
    • Enterprise Search
  • starting to focus on device independent data delivery – workstation, phone, browser

Features – Work better together

  • co-authoring leveraging SharePoint 2010 – collaboration in real time, ability to integrate with presence, lock sections of a document, etc
  • Share a Presentation – broadcast Slideshow via PowerPoint – creates a weblink to share with viewers
  • common Ribbon toolbar for all Office products including SharePoint, Visio, Project, Outlook, etc
  • Backstage view – improved printing experience, connects to services, customizable and configurable
  • Excel – data slicers – more intuitive than pivot tables and sparklines for data visualization
  • Use Office Anywhere – Office Web Apps hosted on premise via SharePoint 2010 – allows for light weight editing, hi fidelity viewing and runs on any browser
  • Interesting of OneNote – for shared collaboration

Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 2 Exchange 2010

December 9th, 2009 No comments

Session 2 – Jim Lucey Senior Product Mgr, Exchange Product Mgmt

  • deployment flexibility – on premises, Microsoft Online Services, Live@edu (range from control & flexibility->choice->student centric)
  • SharePoint for free for academic institutions coming from Microsoft
  • Demo of Web Exchange Admin functions – lots of new capabilities and flexibility
  • Outlook Web Access (now called Outlook Web App) – excellent UX improvements, scrolling for all sub-windows, ability to ignore a conversation (especially when reply all gets abused), conversation views (finally works like GMail ;) , get mail tip that person you are sending mail to is out of office – BEFORE you send the email, feature called Moderation (Message Approval) which allows control of send to all, presence is integrated
  • Mail Tips are powerful – also have the ability to setup a custom mail tip
  • Native BES integration
  • OCS – voice mail preview in text
  • Support for Firefox and Safari browsers
  • Calendar sharing in Outlook Web App – allows for federated calendars outside your organization with encrypted transport
  • Email Archiving that is integrated with archiving, retention and discovery with granular retention and legal hold policies
  • Discovery – allows for multi-mailbox search – good for FOIPOP and Security

Driving IT Value Realization: The Marketing of IT – Review

November 9th, 2009 No comments

Last Thursday Nov 6, 2009, I spent a valuable day at the Forrester Western Canadian IT Summit.  The day began and ended with  keynotes and in between there were 3 breakout tracks – CIO, EA and IT Ops.  This post covers a keynote by Bobby Cameron on Marketing IT.  I will write a separate post on Jeff Scott’s (@logicalleap) two sessions.

Morning Keynote – Driving IT Realization: The Marketing of IT – Bobby Cameron, VP and Principal Analyst, Serving CIOs

Here is my summary of Bobby’s presentation highlighting the 3 key points:

1. What key factors improve the perception that the IT organization is aligned to the business?

Bobby provided 3 pieces of research  and a summary of key factors that keep IT a cost centre.

First, “CEOs – 75% are happy with IT overall – but they don’t expect IT to deliver much“.  IT is not seen by CIO’s as a source of innovation or a source of process improvement. We even struggle being seen as capable of managing the people and assets under our control. (Me: we do not have the reliability of a utility yet)

EA Communication Plan Development

July 20th, 2009 4 comments

Serge Thorn wrote an excellent post called “Development of an Enterprise Architecture Communication Plan“. I really enjoyed the read and completely agree that communication is a key success factor for the success of any enterprise architecture practice.

In the post, Serge set the stage by making a case for why a communication plan is key:

“Communication significantly impacts how IT is perceived by the organization, and therefore it plays a crucial role in the successful positioning of IT as an internal partner.”

“Effective communication is part of the overall plan for management of an Enterprise Architecture Program.”

Next, Serge lays out the key steps in developing an EA Communication Plan with supporting artefacts:

  • Stakeholder General Communication
  • General Information Needs
  • General Communication Tools
  • Communication Matrix
  • Communicaton Planning
  • Implementation Steps

Building on Serge’s post, let’s explore how we create communication plans in IT Services at BCIT.  My colleague, Dave Cresswell developed a template for project communication plans that we use for communication planning for large projects and our ongoing strategic practices like enterprise architecture, project/program management and business analysis. I will explore the steps to creating the plan next.