Since I completed both the UBC Sauder School of Business – Certificate in Management Excellence and the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Software Research International – Certified Enterprise Architect program, I have been looking to take the next step in my education.  Here is an older post where I asked “What Masters Program should I choose?“  I now have an answer to my question!

I applied for and received funding from my employer, BCIT to pursue a graduate level degree.  With the funding approved, I applied to the Masters of Science in Information Management Program at Syracuse University’s iSchool.  Last week, I received my formal letter of acceptance!  I will begin my program in September 2010.  It has been a very long time since I have been in a formal education program.  It should be an interesting ride.  I will be continuing my day job and will be taking most of the program online.  I am looking forward to a trip or two to Syracuse University and will now cheer for the Orange!!

Here is a video about the program:

I will regularly post my progress on this blog. Wish me luck!

I have been thinking a lot about re-engineering the service delivery model for the application services team that I lead. I have been guiding my team to think about:

“We deliver the platform and work with the business to provide services”.

Our applications team is made up of subgroups aligned by major application services.  Here are the major applications:

• Business Intelligence
• Collaboration Tools
• Document Management
• Email and Calendaring
• ERP (Student, Finance, HR, Doc Mgmt)
• Identity Management
• Learning Management Applications
• Microsoft Applications
• Oracle Database
• Portal (for students and employees)
• SQL Server Database

Currently, there are 3 teams in place in our Business Application Services group. Here are the roles in each team:

Support Team

• Oracle DBA
• Document Management
• Business Intelligence
• Project Management
• Business Analysis
• Identity Management

Email and Collaboration Team

• Email
• Calendaring
• Instant Messaging
• Collaboration Platforms
• SQL Server DBA
• Microsoft Applications
• Enterprise Portal

Developer Team

• Oracle Developers
• Lotus Domino Developers
• Microsoft Developers
• Java/Web Services Developers

I am interested in hearing from any of you that lead groups with similar responsibilities.  Do you have a suggested structure for me to consider?  Do you split your team based on roles (technology domains)  or by application (vendor) platforms? Do you split operational work from project delivery?  Does your governance structure influence your teams organization?

Any suggestions are very welcome and I hope to learn from some of your experiences.  Thanks in advance.

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
• utilize complex tools
• technical skills
• writing
• logic

Talents (examples)

• conceptualization – explaining complex ideas
• enterprise perspective – big picture thinking
• innovation – willing to try and fail
• facilitation – consensus building
• leadership – creating a vision and guiding people
• communication – listening as well as presenting

As we looked for people to fill the roles, we needed a way to describe what “type” of person we thought would be successful as a “Strategic Practitioner”.  To start we identified two types of people 1) the specialist and 2) the generalist. Neither quite fit our picture of a Strategic Practitioner.  Below are the attributes for each role type:

The Specialist

• deep skills and experience
• narrow scope (domain)
• peer respect and recognition
• unknown outside their domain (few interactions)

The Generalist

• shallow skills and experience
• broad scope (multi-domain)
• lack of peer respect and recognition
• widely known (many interactions)

What we needed was a blend of both the specialist and the generalist – the strategic practitioner!  This is a very hard person to find. I really believe organizations need to create career development programs to help develop these attributes.  Read more...