Related posts:

1. Burton Group Catalyst Keynote – John Seely Brown
2. Heading to Burton Group Catalyst 2010, San Diego
3. Lotusphere Keynote

Anyway, I can’t remember who said it on the day (I was busy trying to find out why the volume in Julian Hodge Lecture Theatre was so low), but there was definitely a reference to that Business-IT divide again.  It’s not there.  Don’t believe it.

An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem…. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.

Related posts:

1. EA Implementation and Business Transformation Track
2. Aside: Enterprise Information Architecture
3. (IT) Governance for complex organisations

To continue this theme, I’ve been catching up on a little light reading from the book that they released last year. “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know To Go From Pain to Gain” distils much of the material from both the “IT Governance” and “Enterprise Architecture As Strategy” books published previously. At some 170 pages, it’s a pretty easy read hand will fill the time quite handily between university and arriving at a JISC meeting of the majority of those people involved with the FSD program.  John Townsend  also reviewed this book last year, And also cited a post I’d read by Peter Evans Greenwood entitled “from doctrine to dogma”. Note to self: you have spectacularly failed to make anything more of that and should come back and visit is again.

As ever the quality of the material is excellent, and in this case reaffirms points made in the previous publications. However the context for this present publication is obviously in the throws of the current downturn. In the preface refers to the current financial crisis and outlines that businesses will need to rethink how they operate. We know this to be true for the university sector, even if it is often easier for us to hope that we can ride out the current crisis ‘out there’ safely inside our offices.It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that this is not going to be the case.

The continued success and in some cases even the survival of institutions will be very much dependent upon their ability to change their business practices. I think that this is is not necessarily about simply re-organisation and/or IT (or rather) rationalisation. We know that such approaches provide short-term relief to pressing financial issues, but rarely set an organisation on the new trajectory toward sustained growth and success.

Perhaps the crisis has an upside. People and organisations will be much more willing than usual to make the necessary and far reaching changes that are usually very difficult. Machiavelli put it well: “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things”

Personally, I think that the FSD program fits the bill in this case. There are those among us who instinctively know that shared services make sense. It is clear that there is a movement towards trying to understand how we might provision and use shared services more widely. The problem seems to be that universities still haven’t managed to make that leap between discussing the principles as a good idea and physically putting those ideas into action.

I think potentially this may reflect more a level of comfort with providing a different set of constraints and the loss of control, perceived or otherwise, of handing over all premises services to either a third-party or some off premise location.

Equally it is less to do with the technology that can enable such a move and far more to do with understanding how the business operates at the moment.

How well do you learn from experience? IT savvy firms learn from experience and don’t make the same mistakes over and over. For example, we know intuitively that we shouldn’t spend any money on IT before we optimise the business process. We know this, we really do–but somehow in the heat of the moment we don’t always do it. IT savvy firms and bared their lessons from the past–and from other firms–into their governance processes.

There’s probably also something in remembering how to share. Depending on who you ask we are either “all in this together”, or “increasingly competitive–it’s everyone for themselves” when it comes to looking at the long-term sustainability and cost structure to the higher education sector. Within IT, we are probably more prone to sharing ideas and solutions more openly than perhaps other business units within our own boundaries. This collaborative model does not always gets reflected in the persona of the universities we work for.

I think it’s pretty likely that if we are herded towards shared services for common infrastructure and MIS applications, flat we will hit the same problem around not sufficiently understanding the operating model of the universities we work for as we have seen with previous initiatives. The question then is, should the sector take charge of the situation and look to build designs for shared services itself? Or conversely, should we hope that you push towards centralised services is done methodically and thoroughly for us?

I think I know which one I would back.

Related posts:

1. JISC EA Resources
2. JISC Enterprise Architecture Pilot Project Case Study published
3. Inshoring Lean Enterprise Architecture Blog

Starting over on this means that I’ve been thinking about ‘principles’ again.  That is to say, the principles that often form part of an Enterprise Architecture approach.  Let me say right now, I don’t think that principles are unique to EA.  You don’t have to be actively taking an EA approach to have a bunch of principles that you stick to.  In some case, in fact, it probably makes more sense to have a bunch of simple principles, and stick to them, without having the additional fun of artifacts, building blocks and repositories where you’re really just starting out on the EA ‘Classic’ path.

There is a danger that principles become as passé and inert as Corporate Values sometimes find themselves.  Once the work has been done to complete the list, they often get put aside as a product rather than a set of activities or ethos.  Insofar as the ethos is concerned,

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

Groucho Marx

Related posts:

1. Aside: Enterprise Information Architecture
2. EA Pilot Programme Peer Review Meeting
3. Design lines for the near future

At the moment I’m thinking about design principles – in very broad terms – and came up with a couple of interesting presentations from Stephen Anderson and Corey Greeneltch.  One of the reasons for dipping my toes in the design pool is to think around the business change associated with ‘enterprise’ software and what the near future may hold for institutions looking to reduce their exposure to monolithic (and often quite poor) enterprise application stacks – particularly the ones that have been built up over time in the manner of dung beetle development.

Stephen’s first presentation is where I started, ‘Principles to Build By’

In addition, Stephen has another presentation entitled ‘The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions’ which resonated

p.s. I particularly like slide 2 in Corey’s presenation.

More on this anon.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft approach to Enterprise Architecture Toolkit
2. Aside: Enterprise Information Architecture
3. Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education