2007 November | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

EA’s, what would you say if you had a chance to talk to a group of BA’s?

Nov 292007

I have the honour to speak to the International Institute of Business Analysis (Vancouver, BC, Canada Chapter) tomorrow at a Lunch and Learn session.

I will be speaking about how we built a Strategic Practice group that uses EA as the framework to guide other practices like Security, Program Management and of course Business Analysis. I will use the EA Model, I talked about in an older post to position how EA and BA fit for our organization.

Since we are still early in our development of these horizontal methodologies, I will be talking about how BAs’ requirements gathering become the source for our solutions architecture work. Over time, I hope we can grow our Business Analysis practice into a Business Architecture practice.

So if you had a chance to talk to a captive audience of BA’s, what would you say?

Meet the Architects …

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Nov 252007

Found this funny video by skyscrapr.net on youtube. It is a cartoon video and presents the basics of architecture – Enterprise, Solutions and Infrastructure; in a fun way, using the city planning metaphor. I showed it to my wife and now she gets what I do!!

Meet the Architects

Solutions Architecture … what does it look like?

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Nov 232007

I am in the process of creating a new role for our Institute called a Solutions Architect. In the past few years, we have put together a strong Business Analysis practice to gather requirements at the front end and a solid Project Management practice to deliver at the back end. What has been missing is the middle … solutions architecture.

I tried to take my Enterprise Architect job description and morph it but am not satisfied. So I did what everyone else does … Google for some help. Here are some great posts I found.

Karthik Vijayakumar posted a great diagram of where solutions architects fit. This is a great picture of how the various architectures fit together. EA has overall governance while SA delivers in a narrow band of architecture – over and over with each project.

Adrian Campbell built on Karthik’s post and spoke about how Enterprise Architects work in the top 2 rows of the Zachman Framework (broad and shallow) and the Solutions architects work in the bottom 3 rows (narrow and deep).

If anyone wants to share their job descriptions for a solutions architect, I would be very grateful. Also I will post the job desc that I come up with for your consideration.

Thanks Karthik and Adrian!