Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

We discussed Who is Your Customer? in my previous post, now it is time to start to think about what services we deliver to our community. After running an exercise on identifying our customers and the categories they fit in, we started to work on the services we deliver to our University community.

The IT Infrastructure Library defines this as Service Catalogue Management with a definiton of:

The objective of the service catalogue management is to provide consistent information about all agreed services to all authorized persons.

ITIL describes two aspects of service catalogues – Business Service Catalogue and Technical Service Catalogue.

Business Service Catalogue : describes the details of a service especially the relationship with the business units and the business processes. The business service catalogue represents the customer view on the service catalogue.

Technical Service Catalogue : defines the relationships between the supported services, applications and technical components. The technical service catalogue underpins the business service catalogue, but is not part of the customer view.

We discussed the difference between Client Facing Services (business) and Technical Services. We will be focusing on Client Facing Services to help us build our first Client Service Catalogue.

So, what Service Categories do we provide? We broke the group into teams and asked them to follow these steps: Read more...

Brainstorm a list of services
Group the common services into service categories
Consider whether the service and service category is client facing or technical
Outcome: Service categories sorted into client facing and technical

Who is Your Customer? This may be easy for many businesses especially if they are selling consumer goods. If you ask any service organization at a University, the standard response is “Students are our main customers”. The rationale here is that without our students, we wouldn’t have a university. At a very high level this is true.

Does this really help a service organization like the IT Department? If we take this restricted view of customer, can we see the full “marketplace” we serve? Does this focus on one customer restrict definition and planning of service delivery?

If your organization or department provides IT Services to a university or other higher education institution, the answer to the question becomes much less clear. Several weeks ago, we ran a workshop with our Academic Computing Group and our IT Department staff at the American University of Sharjah. We tried to answer the question. We broke the larger group of about 35 people into four teams. Here was the process we tried:

Brainstorm a list of “who” you serve
Each group writes their list and we consolidate into a common list
Vote by show of hands to rank the list within your groups
Each person gets 1 vote for who they think is most important for the Top Rank
Each person gets 1 vote for who they think is most important for the Second Rank

Outcome: Ranked list of who we serve = a prioritized list of our customers Read more...

When I joined the IT Department at the American University of Sharjah as the Director, I was presented with an organizational structure challenge. I found out that I had 21 direct reports and that my department did not have a concept of operational management! I had just come from being the Manager, Business Application Services at the British Columbia Institute of Technology where I had 24 direct reports.

So you would think that less is slightly better right? Wrong.

When I moved to the Director role, my focus and responsibilities also changed. In my manager role, I had to focus on day to day operations and tactics. Occasionally, I got to work on strategic initiatives and plans. The Director of IT /CIO needs to let go of monitoring operational day to day activites and focus on tactical decision making and strategic planning. I knew I had to make a change to the structure and focus of my new team.

In an effort to implement structure and focus, I proposed the role of Team Leader to my Vice Chancellor and then introduced it to my team. I made the decision that I would appoint my Team Leaders as I needed to get a structure in place quickly. This is just one option for implementing this role. Some organizations allow the team to elect their own leader with or without management support. Now I have 7 direct reports which is much more manageable. Also, I have freed my time to focus on tactical and strategic issues allowing my Team Leaders to take leadership of day to day operations. Read more...

What are Your Services?

Who is Your Customer?

Implementing Organizational Structure and Focus