Conference | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education – some global resources

conference, enterprise architecture, higher education, it governance No Responses »

Dec 182011

Last week, John Gotze (@gotze) sent me a call to action by tweeting:

Finnish universities adopt #entarch, and look for international inspiration and collaboration. Who’s doing EA for universities? @leodesousa?

My first reply to John was the Twitter handles of practicing Enterprise Architects in higher education as well as the Educause group ITANA. Educause also has a reference section for Enterprise Architecture. http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/EnterpriseArchitecture/17214

@gotze there is an @educause group called #itana chaired by @jimphelps. Some others @pauldhobson @EAinHE @ricphillips many others and me @leodesousa

This got me thinking that a quick post with some links to enterprise architecture resources in higher education might be worthwhile. So here goes in no particular order:

In Australia and New Zealand, The Council of Australian University Directors of IT sponsored the annual Enterprise Architecture Symposium. I had the privilege to be one of the guest keynote speakers at the inaugural conference organized by my friend and colleague David Bedwell at Charles Sturt University in November 2006. David’s leadership and vision has resulted in the conference becoming a “must attend” annual event. I presented at the second and third conferences via Skype video conference and was curious where the group has gone since I last participated.

Summary of CAUDIT EA Symposium Links – with presentations resources

2006 – Charles Sturt University - http://www.csu.edu.au/special/eac/index.htm
2007 – University of Canberra - http://www.canberra.edu.au/ea-symposium/program-overview/preliminary
2008 – La Trobe University - http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ea2008/
2009 – The University of Auckland - https://wiki.auckland.ac.nz/display/ea2009/CAUDIT+Enterprise+Architecture+in+Higher+Education+Symposium+2009
2010 – Monash University – link no longer avaiable
2011 – The University of Western Australia - http://www.is.uwa.edu.au/news-and-events/ea2011

In the US, Marina Arseniev from the University of California, Irvine has a very mature EA practice and her work definitely should be considered. https://apps.adcom.uci.edu/EnterpriseArch/index.html. Brian Cameron, at Penn State has founded and leads the Center for Enterprise Architecture. MIT has an outstanding site that also proved very valuable to helping me along in developing our EA practice http://web.mit.edu/itag/eag/.

In the UK, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has conducted pilot projects and published papers that are very worthwhile reading and provide insights on ways to adopt EA into higher education.

From Canada, there is my blog Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education that I have been writing since 2007.

I am sure I missed many excellent sources of EA practices in our higher education and apologize in advance to my colleagues. Hopefully, this gives you a good start.

SGHE Summit 2010 – Conference Overview

conference, higher education, strategic planning 1 Response »

Apr 272010

I attended the SunGard Higher Education Executive Summit and Summit conferences in early April 2009. This was the first time I attended Executive Summit and I found it to be highly valuable. There were about 250 senior Higher Education leaders from around the world in attendance. We were presented with roadmaps and strategic directions by senior SunGard HE leadership.

It has been one year since Ron Lang started as CEO and the transformation and direction of the company has moved to be more proactive and value focused. This is great for us as SGHE clients. There are many more changes coming and I am confident we have a good partner in SGHE.

Below are links to my notes from the Summit presentations that I attended:

There were plenty of sessions and no one person can cover them all. I am fortunate to have met key people in SGHE and just as importantly, connecting and reconnecting with my higher education peers and colleagues.

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview

conference, enterprise architecture 1 Response »

Apr 272010

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview – Bob Rullo (@bobrullo)

* power in Moscone West went out just as Bob started his talk. He did a great job working through his presentation with no slides! Great job, Bob!

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview

- needs Oracle 11gR1 database, Oracle Weblogics App Server, Java 6, Grails 1.1
- moving from Banner INB forms to new Horizon (Aurora UI) architecture
- need to migrate CRUD and transaction validation, field level validation (UI centric validation)

Grails Architecture
- a controller handles requests and talks to services to provide a response (data back to the user)
- blocks and fields map to the domain model like a row in a relational table
- field level validation moves to the view as do the canvases and windows – AJAX based

- leveraging automation techniques – by gathering metadata in the Banner Db and create a domain object
- can generate 80 to 90% of the domain models with these tools

- services are also being generated as well as the UI – where are fields located and how do we navigate between them

- we will be allowed access to these automation tools for our custom code and modifications
- look at providing us preview releases to get familiar on how things work and provide feedback to SGHE

- test early and often approach – huge increase in unit tests 100 to over 1000 = better quality
- our people need to learn GRAILS, java, groovy skills as well as spring and hibernate, still using PL/SQL apis
** SGHE please provide us a VM spec for a sample sandbox application

Resource Oriented Architecture – RESTful architecture allows us to extend our Open Digital Campus

More sessions …IT Lounge on Tuesday at 4pm