Posted by Leo de Sousa on June 3, 2009
Recently, we have been talking about creating a single repository for IT Services departmental information. The idea being that our team members need to go to one place to get the information they are looking for. Instead of wasting time looking at multiple repositories each with their own taxonomies, UX and search features, put it all in one place with one UX and taxonomy.
Today, my thinking took a 180 degree turn with a vendor presentation on “enterprise search“. Instead of making people conform to rigid rules about where to put information, what if we gave them a tool to find the data wherever it resides behind our firewalls? Like someone said today, “Google search for our stuff”
No some of you might say, not taking time to architect an information repository and relying on a search engine is the lazy way out. I have some thoughts that I hope will make you think otherwise. When presented with business challenges, I find it is rarely the technology that is the problem. Instead, it is the ease of use for our clients, customers and stakeholders that should be considered. Enforcing compliance is expensive and in many cases ineffective. What if we made it easy for people to comply? Educate them on some simple tagging and then let them work like they always have. The difference is giving them a tool to search for what they need and work to tune that tool so that we see a significant reduction is costly “Search and not find” scenarios.
I will now begin some research on enterprise search and report back later. Have any of you implemented an enterprise search capability? What do you use?
Here are some links:
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Posted by Leo de Sousa on November 10, 2007
It is so cool and easy to do. Right now I am Skype’d wirelessly and my colleagues are on a wireless connection in Canberra at the CAUDIT EA Symposium 2007. This year the conference is taking place in Canberra and hosted by Katarina Christenson of the University of Canberra.
My very good friend David Bedwell of Charles Sturt University, who ran the CAUDIT EA Symposium 2006 last year which I spoke at in person, is running a preconference session.
David is running an Introduction to EA session for a group of people before the conference.
Started with a group problem. What do you need to consider if the Vice Chancellor has just said the University is delivering 3 new programs and they need to be up and running in the next year.
- took a Zachman Framework Approach – what, how, where, when, who, why
- next Enterprise Artifacts – data and process are the most difficult
- discussion on Zachman primitives and composites
- Data – excellent approach: data issues are highlighted in new projects and it is the project’s responsibility to fix the data issues as part of the project … simple and brilliant!
- Organization – is very complex; can be derived from the published orgn charts on your university’s website
- Process – is the big area of work; process is the constant. Showed the CSU process model
- Core and Supporting processes – conceptual view
- Talked about how projects fit with process – “wants” or “bids” based project requests vs what projects were funded. Saw that supporting processes got the projects but the core processes were under served
- Service providers all had the same 3 processes: infrastructure, support clients, provide strategy
- Now you can look for common approaches to deliver services to the institute or university
- must involve people and discussion
- Events – smaller topic; all over your website are calendars
- Where – not too exciting but need to communicate
- Strategy and Legislation – huge amount and growing
- Next start to build matrices from process – Sam Holcman technique
- Derivatives and Spinoffs – start to use this to educate new staff based on processes
Here are some key points that David makes:
Read more...
- “EA – It is not about technology…”
- “work with the business at the top of the Zachman Framework”