Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

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.

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

Today (Mar 30) and through to Wednesday (Apr 1), Microsoft is hosting the Windows in Higher Education Conference on their Redmond Campus. Pretty handy for us as it is a short 2.5 hour drive south from Vancouver. Over 40 higher education organizations are represented with just over 100 folks attending.  The Twitter hash tag for this conference is #winhied. I will be tweeting on this conference … follow me on Twitter.

I am having lunch with Nick Malik today. Really looking forward to the dialogue. Nick writes the Inside Architecture blog and is one of the best EA blogs going. His posts are must reads for me as I continue to learn and progress in Enterprise Architecture.

I am attending the SunGard HE Summit Conference in Philadelphia, PA this week. I taught a 2 hour EA Intro workshop, that I will blog on later and am on a panel session about our work in redesigning the Student information system using SOA and UX.

I am trying something new at this conference; using Twitter as my notetaker (my Twitter name is leodesousa). I am using my own tag #sghes09 and tweeting on the content of the sessions I attended. I will be using TwitterSearch to pull all of my tweets together and see if I can get a chronological log of my conference experience and learnings. Note SunGard HE is on twitter and are using the #sghesummit tag. Stay tuned …

Here is the Twitter Search to get my timeline of notes (I messed up a couple times with my personal tag):

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=sghe09+OR+sghes09

Our Web Services team delivered some real cool innovative projects in the past 6 months.  In partnership with our Marketing & Communications and Student Recruiting departments, our team has launched two new approaches to communicating about BCIT and recruiting students to come study here.

Leveraging our public web properties as well as blending social media tools like YouTube, Drupal Blog and Twitter, the team built whatwouldyouchange.ca   and 3 BLOG Nights.  The 3 BLOG Nights initiative is running right now and you should check it out. You can search Twitter using #3bn.   Each year BCIT runs a Big Information Session and Program Expo  to “provide a unique opportunity for people interested in attending BCIT to find out more about BCIT’s full-time programs and part-time courses and programs all in one place, at one time”.  This year we are extending Big Info (which usually runs in one evening) into 4 days/3 nights - 67 hour event by leveraging live blogging, twittering and video shoots all about BCIT, our programs, faculty and most importantly our students!

We have a very talented group in our Web Services team and they are really pushing the boundaries to leverage open source tools to create more attention for BCIT and in turn generate new students!   Great job team and will be checking in regularly on Twitter!

A casual lunch room conversation crystalized something that has been in my thoughts over the past month.

One of our Service Desk analysts commented about my posting of status updates.  He said “You sure love Facebook don’t you? You are always posting status updates. Is that all you do all day??”  

I wanted to respond “Are you nuts? I am running harder than ever to keep up with work!”  Instead, I took a couple of seconds to digest his perceptive observation. (I will need some more thinking time about where I update my status and how … that is a different post.)  My response was “I rarely go onto to Facebook any more. I use Twitter to post updates and Facebook is one of the social network sites that I choose to update.” 

He said “Twitter what is that?”  I did a quick overview of Twitter which reminded me of a good post by JP Rangaswami.

At the end of his post, JP said :

“It is reasonable to suggest that when we got the world’s biggest copy machine (as Kevin Kelly called the internet) we would see another shift.  Read more...