Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Tonight, I had the privilege of being a guest lecturer on Enterprise Architecture for a class at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. My colleague Brian Hosier invited me to give an overview of EA for his students.

I had to do some serious chopping of my 2 hour workshop to get things down to a manageable timeframe. Even then, I felt extremely rushed and barely skimmed the surface of all that Enterprise Architecture is.  The class went well and I got great questions from the students.  I hope this short introduction to EA helped some of them think about the big picture.

As I was presenting, I realized how much our EA practices are IT influenced. This is a natural thing being that we grew EA out of IT and IT is where it primarily resides. As I presented some of the artifacts we developed, it became apparent that I need to rethink how to present EA to newbies. After a bit of theory and overview, I presented how EA can be applied strategically, tactically and then a bit on business architecture.  The problem was that for each area except Business Architecture, my examples were very technology focused.  Read more...

I attended a half day seminar offered to IT leaders in Vancouver today by Microsoft Canada. Essentially, this was the launch of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 to the Vancouver market. There were about 100 people in attendance.

Here is my Twitter stream from the session today … http://twitter.com/#search?q=leodesousa msft

The day began with an engaging keynote by Jim Carroll – Futurist, Trends & Innovation Expert.  Jim spoke laid out themes of :

• Run the business
• Grow the business
• Transform the business

Next, Jim provided examples from his consulting engagements to highlight the themes.  One of Jim’s quotes was “Success comes to those who evolve.” Another quote, “Many kids going to elementary school will have careers in fields that don’t exist today. Think about a “location intelligence” professional.” With the huge growth of spatially related data, there is a real need for people skilled in location intelligence.

Jim also talked about the “new economy” typified by:  Read more...

1. A relentless focus on growth – changes in construction mgmt focused on green sustainable initiatives
   
2. Speed to change product lifecycles – auto makers who can retool production lines in 10 days vs 10 months
   

In my conversation with Gene Leganza, Forrester VP Research last week ( @gleganza), we spoke about how to address delivering technology in a consistent manner. It inspired me to write this post about our Solutions Council. Here goes:

How do you handle service requests in your IT organization?

Have you adopted an IT Service Management approach?

Can you confidently articulate standard solution architectures for commonly requested services?

In the past, we struggled with a lack of consistency in our technology solution delivery.  Even though we are a centralized IT department, clients received different solutions and services depending on who they contacted.  Imagine how confusing it was for our clients; they could get application solutions from one of LAMP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Lotus Domino application platforms.  Two clients with similar requests could get two different solutions based on which developer they talked to. This further added to the complexity of the application portfolio we manage – meaning more time spent on “keeping the lights on” and less on delivering new solutions.  Read more...

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...

Todd Biske asked this on Twitter “What are your EA services? In other words, what are the major functions your EA term performs and/or markets to the rest of the enterprise?”  He followed up with the following Ideas for EA Services:

1. Architecture Review Service (could be on-demand, could be required)
2. Project consulting (i.e. act as, or assist, project/solution architect)
3. Strategic Architecture Services (to-be architecture)
4. Architectural Reference Services (development of reference artifacts)
5. Architectural Standards Services (official standards, similar, but more official/specific to Reference Services)
6. Architectural Research Services

He ended with “What else should be on the list, or what items should be changed?”

We publish a Core Service Catalogue to articulate what our IT Services Department delivers to BCIT. We talk about this as our default service level agreement to the Institute. We currently are on Version 4 of the catalogue.

In the Core Service Catalogue, we included an Enterprise Architecture key core service to help our clients in the BCIT community understand what EA activites are available.

Here is the list of EA activities we defined:  Read more...

• Developing, documenting and publishing the Enterprise Architecture for business and technology at BCIT by:
  • continuously aligning technology with changing goals and objectives of the institution

Alan Inglis posted about What good looks like from a solutions architecture perspective.  How do you create a solution for a new project without creating architecture that already exists or making the same mistakes that previous projects made? This is a must read post and I recommend it.

Alan described 10 artefacts that he would expect a solutions architect to leave behind from a project implementation. They are:

1. Project Background
2. Terminology
3. Key Drivers, Principles, Standards and Constraints
4. Business Problem
5. Information View
6. Risk View
7. Application View
8. Data View
9. Integration View
10. Infrastructure View

I have some questions for Alan on this:

• How big a project would require this level of artefact creation? For small and possibly medium projects, the work to do the architecture may be more than delivering the project.
• Is there a subset of these artefacts that would be sufficient for small and medium projects?
• How would the next solutions architect find and assess the artefacts created?  Need a searchable, secured repository – wiki?, blog?, SharePoint?, network file share?, knowledge base?

We, Enterprise Architects, regular trumpet the value of having an archictecture and learning from it.  Some of the key factors for me would be:  Read more...

First, thanks to everyone who contributed via the Shared Insights EANetwork. I originally posted this on September 16, 2007. I got swamped and did not post my list so here it is:

Trends and Impacts  Read more...

1. Trend – More stakeholders are connecting EA thinking (alignment of technology to support strategic goals) with business innovation and investments in change.
   Impact – EA will become embedded into the planning, procurement, implementation and delivery of services.
2. Trend – Enterprise Architects more rare that IT architects. Growing your own EA might prove to be more successful than recruiting one
   Impact – Coaching, mentoring and training of internal staff to become IT strategic thinkers will help grow Enterprise Architects. Is there a path? Project Technical Lead to IT Domain Architect to IT Solutions Architect to Enterprise Architect to Chief Architect?
3. Trend – More acquisition of COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) technologies that are build for configuration and integration instead of requiring customization
   Impact – Configurable technology allows more time for upfront Business Analysis to gather the right requirements and simpler, more manageable ongoing support and maintenance.

Found this funny video by skyscrapr.net on youtube.  It is a cartoon video and presents the basics of architecture – Enterprise, Solutions and Infrastructure; in a fun way, using the city planning metaphor.  I showed it to my wife and now she gets what I do!!

Meet the Architects

I am in the process of creating a new role for our Institute called a Solutions Architect. In the past few years, we have put together a strong Business Analysis practice to gather requirements at the front end and a solid Project Management practice to deliver at the back end. What has been missing is the middle … solutions architecture.

I tried to take my Enterprise Architect job description and morph it but am not satisfied. So I did what everyone else does … Google for some help. Here are some great posts I found.

Karthik Vijayakumar posted a great diagram of where solutions architects fit.  This is a great picture of how the various architectures fit together.  EA has overall governance while SA delivers in a narrow band of architecture – over and over with each project.

Adrian Campbell built on Karthik’s post and spoke about how Enterprise Architects work in the top 2 rows of the Zachman Framework (broad and shallow) and the Solutions architects work in the bottom 3 rows (narrow and deep).

If anyone wants to share their job descriptions for a solutions architect, I would be very grateful.  Also I will post the job desc that I come up with for your consideration.  Read more...