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...

This is my review of this morning’s Architecture & Governance magazine webinar ”The State of EA: Is 2010 the Transformational Year?”

Presenters:

• George Paras, Editor-in-Chief, A&G, Managing Director, EAdirections – gparas@EAdirections.com
• Alex Cullen, Vice President, Research Director, Enterprise Architecture, Forrester Research – acullen@forrester.com

1. What is the current state of EA? Forrester conducted a survey of 416 IT professionals and found the following:  Read more...

• Increasing awareness and acceptance of EA – this is change in that there is much more broad support for EA as a discipline in organizations
• EA teams are part of senior IT management – more focus at a senior level instead of a tactical level in IT (* true in my case moving from a staff EA position to a management EA position)
• Primary drivers for EA programs 1) better strategic planning 2) consolidation of technology 3) improve business agility4) enable business-IT alignment
• Infrastructure, Security and Application architectures are the most complete, next Integration and Information architecture are underway and business architecture is the least complete
• Where to architecture groups spend their time 1/2 time spent on non-project activities – supporting enterprise planning, strategic planning, collaborating with business and governance

Session 9 Kevin Lan, Senior Program Manager, Windows Server Division

Windows Server Release History – every 2 to 3 years for a new release

Technology Investment Areas

• virtualization – Hyper-V with Live Migration
• management – PowerShell scripting
• web – ASP .Net and WebDAV, IIS 7.5 component install
• scalability and reliability – 256 core support, componentization, boot from SAN or VHD, support solid-state devices, file classification infrastructure
• better together with Windows 7 – DirectAccess, BranchCache

Scalability

• designed for groups of 64 processors
• SQLServer can take advantage of 256 logical processors

R2 Power Management

• reduce power consumption by only powering cores that are working – Core Parking
• Power AQ program – 10% savings in power from CPU utilization all managed from Group Policies
• V4.0 ACPI spec supports this to allow power metering

Server Core Changes  Read more...

• 64 bit delivery only
• minimal installation option for window server (no GUI shell, command line interface), excellent for Read Only Domain Controllers and for Hyper-V virtualization
• types of servers:  Web, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter
• reduces patch burden due to fewer components by approx 40%

I had a great phone call with Roger Sessions (@RSessions), CTO ObjectWatch a month ago about IT Complexity.  Over the past few weeks, I got a chance to read about Roger’s approach Simple Iterative Partitions (SIP) in a series of white papers:

• Controlling Complexity in Enterprise Architectures – Executive Summary
• Controlling Complexity in Enterprise Archtiectures – Mathematical Foundations
• Controlling Complexity in Enterprise Architectures – The SIP Methodology

Some key points that resonated with me:

1. Autonomous Business Capabilities (ABC)
2. Mathematical Basis for Understanding Complexity

Years ago, we used a simplified model to articulate why we needed to build our Enterprise Architecture practice.  The central premise of the argument was that as functionality increases so does complexity.  We proposed using IT Governance and Enterprise Architecture to manage complexity.  See the slides here.

Roger has published a new white paper – The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity on October 22, 2009.  The main sections of the paper are:  Read more...

• The Coming IT Meltdown – calculating the costs
• Cause of Failure – measuring IT complexity
• Designing Simpler IT Systems
• Impediments to Simplicity
• Call to Action

I am back at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this week to collaborate on IT Service Management with a focus on:

• service definition
• service delivery
• service catalogue.

I will also be a presenter at Univeristy of Alaska Office of Information Technology 3rd Annual Techfest 2009 talking about BCIT’s Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) strategic initiative that wrapped up this spring. I has been just over a year since my first visit and I am keen to work with my colleagues again. Will blog more later in the week.

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...

Nick Malik just posted about All the questions fit to answer …

“Make sure you write down the questions that the business wants the Enterprise Architecture team to answer.  Then collect only the information that you need to collect in order to answer them.”

… and it triggered something that I have been thinking about for a long time.

How deep do you go in capturing your Enterprise Architecture? At what depth of detail (or abstraction), do you go to ensure that you have enough to support Strategic Planning (like Nick talks about) and IT Governance? At what point have you gone too deep, making your EA practice into a resource sucking documentation exercise?

During our lunch last week, Nick talked about Business Capabilities as an abstraction layer. I am sure Nick is going to blog about this in the future. We are putting together a Institutional new strategic plan in the next few months and I plan on writing down those business questions.  We should then be able to look at our EA artifacts like our Application Portfolio and see the gaps.  More importantly, we should be able to determine data we are capturing that do not provide value or help in answering the questions.  Read more...

I am doing my final packing for my trip to the University of Alaska. I will be there for the week of May 26 to 31. I have been very fortunate to be invited to the University to present and teach workshops on how we built our Enterprise Architecture practice.

I will be making presentations/delivering workshops on:

• Practical Approaches to EA – presentation (a few versions)
• Building a Roadmap using CMM for EA – workshop
• Developing EA Guiding Principles and Taxonomy – workshop
• EA Roles and Processes: Integrating EA with PM and Chg Mgmt – workshop (a few times)
• How EA and ITIL Fit Together – presentation
• Building an Application Portfolio Management Capability – workshop
• Building a Technology Management Capability – workshop

I really am looking forward to working with the University of Alaska team – Steve Mullins, Sue Sharpton and Jim Durkee as well as my fellow presenters Ernie Nielsen and Scott Bernard. Collaboration at its best … this is what Higher Education is all about! Stay tuned for reports from Fairbanks.

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.

We are in the middle of constructing a 3 year technology plan at BCIT. We are conducting Environment Scans of our significant business areas and our technology areas. As the leader of the EA Strategic Practice, I have been tasked with determining 5 major trends in EA from now until 2011.

So my colleagues, I am asking for your help and guidance … what do you think are the 5 most significant trends? I will summarize and publish the results at the end of the week. I would really appreciate your feedback by Wed, Sept 19th.

Thanks in advance!