One of the workshop sessions we put on as a group the other week in Munich was around ‘IT Governance’ in Higher Education.  John Townsend of Liverpool John Moore’s University facilitated the session by leading us through the current setup at LJMU and how well it’s working for them in managing investment and strategy across the University.

I’ve heard John speak through this before and he’s always rather self-deprecating about his involvement in how successful they have been in really getting to grips with Governance as a whole.   Their story is oneof adopting successful and proven approaches elsewhere in industry, without getting bogged down in intellectualising whether what’s good for everyone else is applicable in a ’special case’, as can sometimes happen in HEIs.

One of the points that came up on numerous occasions was the general displeasure at people using the prefix of ‘IT’ in IT Governance.  In short, the prefix tends to reinforces the whole ‘us’ and ‘them’ standoff between ‘IT’ and ‘Business’ where IT either think or are expected to govern themselves and have some artificial interface with the business.  I guess it’s a bit like having a service counter approach at the stores where the business rocks up and asks for a can of tartan paint, to which the IT shop’s response is to head off in to the back to try and come up with the goods out of sight.

So what this means for well-established institutions with large and sometimes seemingly unwieldy governance structures is that a more desirable behaviour would be to develop a more mature approach to practical engagement with IT development at the core of business and quality improvement, rather than having the two approaches be distinct from one another.

Even if an organisation can manage to change itself to be more optimised in its governance, then there is still the more complex and multi-faceted people dimension which fills that structure. As a force, this could either be good or bad, depending upon the culture of the organisation and how people conduct themselves within that.  That said, waiting for a perfect governance structure to roll along is not likely to happen without a significant external shock to the system – say, for instance, through a major security issue arising or through an unexpected cut in funding.

Place your bets on which is likely to happen first…

Posted: November 2nd, 2008 under Business, enterprise architecture.
Comments: none

Fair play to Telelogic folks.  After my annoyance last night, I had a response via Twitter from a Managing Principal Consultant at Telelogic North America Inc. – live from their annual conference. Ed’s blog has a recent entry on not getting Twitter.  Well Ed, I think you’re way past that hurdle now – thanks for the response.

Posted: October 27th, 2008 under WIN, enterprise architecture.
Comments: 1

Now Telelogic are market leaders in the supply of Enterprise Architecture software, with ‘System Architect’ and have been acquired by IBM to sit alongside the rest of the Rational stable at some future point.  However, being market leader and being fattened by IBM’s coffers shouldn’t mean that you sit back and let your website decay.

I was checking out the website for Archimate references this evening (given that SA is a certified Archimate tool).

Problem 1: You’re making me search for search?

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Can you see it?  Clicking on the right-hand side box with the ‘go’ button next to it just gives you a dropdown of territories covered.  Search is actually a tab-link on the main header to the left.  Hmm – not exactly the most intuitive start.

Problem 2: If you’re going to hide the search page, at least have it work when people use it.

Problem 3: When you ellicit feedback from people to report failures on the website, you really need to make sure the form works

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Posted: October 26th, 2008 under enterprise architecture, fail.
Comments: 1

We spent last week out in Munich at the last of this year’s Open Group Enterprise Architecture conferences.  The main theme of the conference for this quarter was Secure Architectures, although we were there to present our ‘State of The Nation’ views on our existing EA project, funded by JISC.  To that end, a rather hurried setup of a day-long track was put together by Open Group and JISC which was attended by both UK and Dutch Higher Ed institutions, backed by JISC and SURF respectively.

Turnout was probably lower than we expected on the day, but that was perhaps due to the late setup of the meeting and seemingly the general lack of interest in the UK for all things EA.  We know that there are a few other institutions in the UK who ‘do’ EA in some shape or form, but they tend to be entirely inward focussed on their own business rather than publically-active in promoting the discipline.

Details of the sessions will be available via the Open Group’s website at http://www.opengroup.org/conference-live/ (as are all the presentations from the other sessions and previous conferences).  Of course, if you find ours, then I must warn you that it will make not one jot of sense to you unless you were actually there.  You really do need to watc it presented with audio – so perhaps I should pull my finger out an put a voiceover together for it.

It was interesting to see just how embeded EA thinking is in Dutch institutions – particularly the couling between the TOGAF ADM as an architectural development methodology, and Archimate as a Framework and modelling language to put your modelled artifacts in.  I guess this isn’t so surprising on the Archimate front, given that the Archimate Foundation was originally formed out of Dutch technical institutions.  I’m definitely warming to the pan-domain use of Archimate over UML for use in cases where application development isn’t all that strong (as it isn’t with us).

If you have a lot of business users you need to talk with, and they’re used to simple diagrams, then Archimate may well be worth looking at.  I think it’s now reached the heady heights of being v1.0, as I believe it was an approved standard at this conference.  Archimate, for the uninitiated, was taken under The Open Group wing earlier in the year as a forum in its own right.

In other news, there were a number of sessions where much was made about what EA is, and whether it actually exists at all.  Essentially, (and apologies for this ahead of time), the conversations went something like this:

Enterprise Architecture has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people in it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches and TOGAF Certification.

Many of the architects were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

So you see, EA is a fluid and fun community after all.  I think the debate was pretty healthy to be fair – there are a lot of adopters who are now mature enough to realise that they need to do ’something else’ other than follow a prescriptive approach to their strategic architectural development.

More anon.

Posted: October 26th, 2008 under enterprise architecture.
Comments: none