The Strawberry Project » enterprise architecture

How you say what you say

breadedcod — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:02:57 +0000

I spent Monday afternoon in “The Gearhead’s Intervention Programme” which was being presented by Chris Howard, Mike Rollings, Jack Santos, and Mike Disabato. This was pretty much a closed-door session run with 15 attendees and based around constant participation by the audience. There was nowhere to hide, which for most Gearhead’s you would think would cause immediate discomfort. Thankfully, the entire group was communicative and happy to participate – no doubt much to everyone’s relief. Easily the most fun I’ve had at a conference in a long time – if you get the chance (and they chose to repeat the workshop) – it’s well worth considering.

Anyway, the goals of the workshop were to:

examine barriers to communication between IT executives and IT practitioners
challenge perceptions of stereotypes
identify behaviours and tools that will result in better outcomes for both
explore career self-development implications

Whilst what we talked about was exactly news to anyone who, the format made for very open discussion of issues that people were facing in their row careers and work areas. Jack Santos lead a session by inviting the audience vote of a number of slides ultimately leading to a discussion around points of view, which in previous EA work we have discussed in the form of different lenses being applied to a particular problem. The workshop provided a broad-based overview of the sorts of things that Gearheads and upwardly-promoted techies should try to understand adn get their heads around when dealing with senior management and other colleagues. None of what we talked about would appear directly in the Staff Training Handbook, that much was certain.

In summary, there was so much to think about that was raised in the workshop it would be an injustice to try and reflect it here. it will almost certainly provide me to follow up once I’m back in the UK. This is particularly true in fleshing out where some of our staff development needs to go in the future, and to bolster skills people already have by putting appropriate context around what tools and techniques could help them further.

References for reading around what we talked about:

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Leadership Made Simple: Practical Solutions to Your Greatest Management Challenges

Nice Guys Can Get the Corner Office: Eight Strategies for Winning in Business without Being a Jerk

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (J-B Lencioni Series)

Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators (J-B Lencioni Series)

Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ

First Things First

The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You

The Future of Management

The Feeling Good Handbook

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Stuck inside of (a) Mobile with those strategy blues again

breadedcod — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:35:31 +0000

Like a number of other institutions, we are investigating how to best meet the burgeoning demand for mobile access to information via smart phones and other consumer devices. Historically, access to information in an enterprise like ours has been driven from provisioning web user interfaces to various stovepipe systems, e.g. library system, student information system, VLE, Finance etc. Previously the common approach to dealing with disparate systems with different user interfaces has been to simply provide access via an enterprise portal, e.g. uPortal, Liferay, Websphere etc.

Whilst this type of approach has improved the lot of many end users previously, it is questionable whether such an approach is still viable in the present day. There are a number of reasons that this, not least of which is that the real world changes in both power and functionality of portable devices has outstripped changes in desktop access.

In the past 2 to 3 years the landscape for portable/Mobile devices has changed beyond all recognition. This is due in no small part to the role that Apple Inc have played in this arena by the introduction of the iPhone, but equally it is also testament to the slow burn success of 3G network provisioning across Europe and the US.

A number of surveys undertaken by HE institutions points to a growing evidence base or students wishing to engage with universities via their mobile devices in preference to, or at least in addition to desktop/laptop access. Certainly our own internal survey across staff and students in the learning and teaching space has concurred that this view exists and is today it is unfulfilled by any of the technologies we would use in providing web-based solutions.

Certainly in other institutions there has been considerable work expended on looking at mobile provisioning of applications. JISC funded a number of projects to look out mobile access in the learning and teaching arena. Oxford and Bristol have both presented framework solutions developed around mobile access to information and provisions through iPhone apps in the first instance. The source code for these solutions is readily available via the projects and can be used under the appropriate licences adopted by these projects.

In the commercial space, it would seem that there are two contenders in the UK market are least, with oMbiel and latterly Blackboard Mobile providing access to a similar range of services. The question is whether the current approach is being taken in Mobile provision is sustainable in the longer term for small development groups within university IT shops. At the moment it would seem that there is something of a land rush for institutions to provide repeat functionality at significant cost to individual institutions in order to provide what is assumed to be a key differentiator in service provision.

One of the difficulties in getting it right would seem to be in the relatively broad base of proprietary delivery mechanisms available across the major mobile platforms. For example the areas: iTunes app store; Blackberry world; Nokia’s Ovi store, and: Google’s android market. Not only does this mean that there are four separate distribution channels, but a minimum and there are four different platforms to release tests and manage and support. And, that’s without getting into the various hardware differences across platforms such as Blackberry, Nokia, and Android.

The danger in being an early adopter in one of these market areas is that it’s a little like whitewater rafting without seeing everybody else do the course. You can’t learn from other people’s mistakes all that readily, and once you’re in you are at the mercy of being pushed in a direction without much chance of getting out of it easily. Today it’s Apple have continued to grow in numbers in terms of usage of deployment of iPhone. However, the mobile market can be fickle and it only takes manufacturers a couple of bad releases for the fashion to change. One could cite Eriksson and motor road in this category for having had “it” for some time with previous mobile models only to lose ground seemingly overnight when people flocked away from their handsets.

If you look at the analogy of the desktop, we have been fortunate in that enough “standards” have been available for us to reduce the amount of testing and complexity in providing applications to our end users. Whilst the Software Development Kit is available free to the major mobile platforms fully intend to provide that kind of standards capability, it is already known that some of the hardware platforms available show inconsistent use of software and therefore immediately provided more of a testing, debugging and support headache.

Kirk Knoernschild of Burton group published guidance framework for developing mobile applications strategies back in April of this year. His bottom line was that:

“Mobile technology offers numerous business opportunities that organisations must leveraged its judiciously. The momentum generated by that first application will be lost if the organisation is prepared to follow it up with more solutions that leveraged key elements of the mobile ecosystem. Every organisation engaged in Mobile competing initiative should craft a strategy that enable the organisation to capitalise on the unique opportunities of mobile technology. The strategy will guide organisations in the use of mobile technology and help align the Mobile solutions with key business objectives.”

Locally, we have the opportunity to take advantage of blackboard Mobile as a potential solution in this space. The team involved consists of both technologists and line of business representatives in operations who have a genuine interest in making this work. It is obvious that this is a considerable departure from our normal service release and delivery. Providing applications to smart phones is both a public and private initiative of the business. What this means is that the normal business lines of responsibility that one would see within a large organisation like University become blurred and organisations are forced to consider the service introduction more holistically than perhaps they would have had this just being a website or desktop application. I think this is “a good thing” TM.

I’m sat in Kirk’s session at Catalyst right now and am hearing that we probably don’t know enough, or at least haven’t thought enough about our mobile strategy yet. Not many people have.

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Renew and rejoice, or be rejected

breadedcod — Sun, 16 May 2010 11:15:32 +0000

A couple of things have cropped up recently that have had me thinking about EA professional development, and how it fits in a HigherEd context. The first incident was something I was expecting to happen, namely that my TOGAF 8 Certification was about to expire. I know this as an email dropped in from The Open Group to tell me as much, and also offered me the chance to renew my certification for $300 plus local taxes. A snippet of the auto-generated email follows:

The benefits of renewal include:

Continued entitlement to membership of the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) at no additional cost (www.aogea.org).

Continued inclusion in the register of certified practitioners. Employers are increasingly seeking TOGAF certified practitioners and will check the register for proof.

Continued rights to use the TOGAF Certified logo

Renewal is for a further two year period. You can renew during the 30 day grace period after your certification expired, the additional certification period will be added to the date on which your certification would have expired.

In order to renew your TOGAF Certified as an individual for a further two year period you are required to pay a $300 fee (plus local taxes if applicable).

What’s surprising about the full text of the mail is that it doesn’t actually refer to continuing education or training in any form. There’s no mention of TOGAF 9 or any direct career benefits of continued professional development at all, other than being able to ‘keep the badge’ for TOGAF 8. This is, perhaps, no different to any other form of certification in IT-related realms, but it still misses the mark for me. I mean, what would be the point of extending for 2 years? What would it actually provide that was of direct use to us as an organisation? How would spending $300 for continued certification stack against, say, paying for someone to attend ArchiMate training instead?

The second area of interest is around the ‘Enterprise Architect’ role, and how the sector is starting to get to grips with making use of EA in the current business climate. I have to confess that I haven’t seen many institutions (any institutions?), in the UK at least, actually hiring EAs. It’s still more the case that the kind of activities an EA would undertake are hidden in other jobs or spread across multiple roles.

However, according to the weekly digest from Jobs.ac.uk, we now have our first ask for Enterprise Architects (plural) at Bournemouth University. The two roles on offer actually split the domains out to be one concentrating on Communications and the other on Infrastructure and Information. You can get at both job descriptions here.

From what’s presented, it looks very much like both posts are primarily technology-focussed domain specialists with a demand for project management skills on top. So the question is, are they really looking for Enterprise Architects, or is it still a mismatch of expectation and ask? If it’s the latter, what are we missing in shaping the EA agenda in HE? Discuss.

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Secrets of Successful SOA

breadedcod — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:44:57 +0000

This is more an aide memoire for me than anything, but might be equally as useful out in the depths of JISC FSDland. Mike Kavis retweeted a link to Brenda Michelson’s “6 Secrets of Successful SOA” presentation on Slideshare which I thought was a pretty succinct and useful summary that will undoubtedly see the light of day again quite soon.

Also – there should be more trucks in HE.

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Open Modeling

breadedcod — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:48:28 +0000

I missed out on the last JISC FSD Meeting and workshop – paternal duties came first for the week – and so I didn’t get to see the demo(?) of the CETIS work on an opensource ArchiMate modelling capability. Anyway, I cam across Open Modeling the other day and have put it on the ‘to do’ list for near-future attention. It’s probably already been looked at and I’m likely being slow on the uptake, however I haven’t seen it referred to in the programme yet.

Open modeling is a web-based application to model and publish architecture models, procedures and related structured information. Not only publishing is done on the web, but modeling and maintaining the information (texts and diagrams) is done using the well known web browser. The modelers of this information can see exactly the same (WYSIWYG) result as those who view the information. The built-in staging facility takes care of separating development models from production models. In case of emergency, changes can be executed directly in the production models.

If anyone’s already had a play with it, then please shout and save me some time!

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