2009 July | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Educause 2008 – interview about BCIT EA (podcast)

conference, enterprise architecture, higher education No Responses »

Jul 292009

At the Educause 2008 conference (October 2008), in addition to co-leading a pre-conference course on EA, I was interviewed about BCIT’s Enterprise Architecture development and practice. In the podcast, I summarize how we got started, our EA journey and some tips on what things worked for us.

Here is a link to a series of interviews conducted at the conference: http://www.educause.edu/blog/23266

My interview was published yesterday and here is the link to the podcast (14 mins 3 secs):

http://www.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/E08PodcastAnInterviewwithLeode/176291

Enjoy and as always, your comments and feedback are very welcome.

Technology Governance in a Simple Model

enterprise architecture, higher education, it governance No Responses »

Jul 282009

I talked about a governance model that has evolved over the past 5 years in our organization in many previous posts. I realize now that I have not actually explained the model, so here we go!

When we received approval to proceed with a strategic initiative to leverage technology to support teaching, learning, research and the business of BCIT, our VP Chris Golding came up with a simple governance model to guide technology adoption.

The model has 3 axes – Funding, Support and Impact. The scale for the axes range from centralized to decentralized. Let me give you some definitions before we look at the model. I am sure there are many other scales we could describe for this model but there is an elegance in these 3 simple descriptors.

Funding – describes where the funding is coming from on a continum of centralized (we are a centralized IT organization) to decentralized.

Support- describes where the support comes from on a continuum of centralized to decentralized (where in the Institute do the people who support the technology work).

Control - describes where impact or risk is managed from on a continuum of centralized to decentralized (where in the Institute does the responsibility and accountability reside).

Now that we have the axes described, it’s time to think about how they combine to form governance categories. In our original model, we described four categories for technology governance:

Enterprise – centrally funded, centrally supported and centrally controlled

Departmental – departmentally funded, departmentally supported and departmentally controlled

Innovative - project funded, departmentally supported and departmentally controlled

Opportunistic – externally funded, departmentally supported and departmentally controlled

Here is the model:

Over the past 2 years as the Manager, Business Application Services group, most of my time has been spent in the ‘pure” Enterprise space with projects in our ERP, portal, learning management and email systems. My team also participated in projects in the intersection of the Enterprise and Departmental space. We work with other areas of BCIT in shared service model. This is where integrating ITSM (particularly ITIL for us) with our EA practice. Developing Service Catalogues, Service Standards and Service Level Agreements are key to successfully deliver shared services. With emphasis on collaboration across the Institute, we need to define the intersection space with a name …

Shared - departmentally or enterprise funded, shared support and shared control

The updated model now looks like this:

I hope you find some value with our model. Please let me know your thoughts and any suggestions for improvement.

EA Communication Plan Development

education, enterprise architecture 24 Responses »

Jul 202009

Serge Thorn wrote an excellent post called “Development of an Enterprise Architecture Communication Plan“. I really enjoyed the read and completely agree that communication is a key success factor for the success of any enterprise architecture practice.

In the post, Serge set the stage by making a case for why a communication plan is key:

“Communication significantly impacts how IT is perceived by the organization, and therefore it plays a crucial role in the successful positioning of IT as an internal partner.”

“Effective communication is part of the overall plan for management of an Enterprise Architecture Program.”

Next, Serge lays out the key steps in developing an EA Communication Plan with supporting artefacts:

Stakeholder General Communication
General Information Needs
General Communication Tools
Communication Matrix
Communication Planning
Implementation Steps

Building on Serge’s post, let’s explore how we create communication plans in IT Services at BCIT. My colleague, Dave Cresswell developed a template for project communication plans that we use for communication planning for large projects and our ongoing strategic practices like enterprise architecture, project/program management and business analysis. I will explore the steps to creating the plan next.

The communication plan template considers the following categories:

Audience
Communication Channel
Message Type
Time (calendar)

Think about the audience for your communication plan first; some examples are:

Executive/Project Sponsors
Institutional Leadership and Management
Project Team
Institutional Stakeholders – students, faculty, staff, alumni, employers
Industry Peer Organizations

Now list the message types like:

general communication
project status reporting and completion
milestone achieved announcement
request for information
service standards
policies
procedures

Third, list the communication channels. Here are some examples:

email – announcements
meetings – 1 on 1 conversations, department & information
presentations
reports/white papers / publications
website
workshops – focus groups

Time is the last category and the most intuitive tool is to simply use a calendar. You need to decide if this is an ongoing communication plan or one built for a project with a start and an end.

Now that you have populated items into each category, its time to match them up to form the plan. Let’s use a simple example for project status reporting. Read more...

Match communication channels to message types. An example would be (message type) Project Status reporting could be delivered via (communication channels) email and websites.
Next match message types to audiences. An example would be Project Status reporting should be delivered to (audience) the Executive/Project Sponsor and the Project Team via email and to stakeholders via a website.