Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

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)  Read more...

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

Last week, I presented the accomplishments of my applications team in 2009. I was blown away by the number and the scope of the projects my team delivered to our community. I firmly believe that the separation of our operational duties from our project work enabled us to be so productive. While most people would celebrate the project teams |(and we do!), I want to acknowledge the key enabler of this success – our Duty Analyst role.

I blogged previously about our Duty Analyst role here.

Implementing a duty analyst role minimizes the operational interruptions to our team members working on projects. Providing project members focused time to work on project challenges and meeting milestones becomes easier without operational interruptions.

I am proud to say my team delivered on our operational responsibilities and completed 43 projects in 2009.

Here is the breakdown of projects my team delivered:  Read more...

• Projects by Size : Small = 19, Medium = 14, Large = 10
• Projects by Governance : BCIT Executive = 3, IT Governance Team = 14, Business Applications Committee = 5, Departmental = 11, Operational = 10

This morning Jon Ayre (@EnterprisingA) tweeted:

#EAMantra (11) Failing to deliver perfection is not a crime. Failing to deliver is.

Something I totally agree with, especially if you have been following my blog and the theme of building an EA practice that delivers value using a virtual team.

Tyler Gooch (@tylergooch) then sent a response (Thank you Tyler!!) about The Cult of the Done by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark.  This is very cool stuff!  Here are the 13 statements:

The Cult of Done Manifesto  Read more...

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.

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)  Read more...

I am writing about a topic that came up this week when working with my colleagues at the University of Alaska Office of IT. A common challenge all IT Service teams face delivering projects when there are huge operational demands.  Here is the approach we took to address this critical and ongoing challenge in my Business Application Services team in IT Services, BCIT.

In Sept 2007, I took over as the Manager, Business Application Services at BCIT. For the first 4 months, I took a  meet, listen and ask approach. I held one-on-one interviews with each of my team members (23 systems analysts in 3 teams).  I setup regular meetings with all our key client stakeholders (Registrar’s Office, Finance, HR, Financial Aid, Student Services, Facilities, Alumni and others) around BCIT. I needed to hear from my team and our clients about the challenges they faced and their perceptions of our effectiveness in meeting commitments.

In all the meetings and interviews, I heard a common theme from…  Read more...

• My team: “We have too much to do and can not keep up with the demand from our clients.”
• Our clients: “Your team is working hard but we have important projects that are not getting done on time.”

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...

I borrowed a great book from a friend of mine who read it as part of her Masters program.  Leadership is an Art by Max De Pree is a must read for anyone who aspires to a leadership role. The book is short and easy to read. The best part are the real gems that can be applied immediately.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book:

• The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.  The last responsibility is to say thank you. In between, a leader is a servant and a debtor
• Peter Drucker said “Efficiency is doing the right thing. Effectiveness is doing the thing right” (interesting how this quote ties into what I have been saying about EA for a long time!)
• Effectiveness comes about through enabling others to reach their potential
• Encourage roving leadership
• Leadership is the “Interception of entropy”

I highly recommend this book. It was so good that I read it twice before returning it to my friend, thanks Karin!

I am at the point in my career where I feel the need to get a Masters degree to advance my career. The question is which one to go for? I have been asking friends and colleagues so I thought I would ask all of you.

Here are my criteria for the program:

• suitable for a senior IT leader who is working to move up to a CIO/CTO level
• focused on Enterprise Architecture and Technology Management
• offered in part time mode over several years
• delivered in an blended online/F2F delivery mode
• some residency portions would be good because I enjoy F2F interaction
• looking to start the program in September 2009

Please post any suggestions as comments.  Thank you for helping me!

I completed two training programs in December.  One program I wrote about in this post was the Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals from Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research International.  Good course run by Dr Scott Bernard who walked the group of students through his EA3 Cube Methodology from his book.  This was an online course with students from around the world.  I especially enjoyed the conference calls and the weekly discussion topics as forums to interact with my fellow students.  Here is the link to the work we did as students populating the EA3 Repository for a fictitious aerospace company.  I plan on registering for the Advanced Enterprise Architecture course which runs from Jan to Mar 2009.  Once I complete that course, Carnegie Mellon will issue me a Certified Enterprise Architect designation.

The second was a series of courses from the Sauder School of Business, Executive Education program at the University of British Columbia resulting in a Certificate in Management Excellence. These courses addressed a serious gap in my resume in the realm of management skills.  The courses were face to face and required high interaction with the instructor and the other students.  I now have a set of skills and reference materials that will serve me well in the future.  Here is the list of courses I took:  Read more...

September is always a busy time for Higher Education. This is BCIT’s big term startup in North America and we try to keep our technology changes to a minimum to ensure good service to our students, faculty and staff.

On Sept 4th, I completed one year as the Manager, Business Application Services and Enterprise Architecture. It was a great year in which I learned far more than I ever imagined in the areas of leadership, planning, team development and portfolio management. I am very fortunate to have a great team to lead and have mentors on the management team to learn from.  Thanks Team!!  I am looking forward to this next year as we begin to leverage the ERP upgrade from July 2008 to deliver new services to BCIT.

On a professional development side, I am working to complete a Masters Certificate in Management Excellence from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.  I also enrolled into the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research Certified Enterprise Architect program. This program is taught by Dr Scott Bernard who I met on my trip to the University of Alaska.  I am the Student Project Manager and will be working with a large group of students to deliver a populated EA model for a fictious aerospace company. We have students from around the globe on this project.  Read more...