Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Business Analytics Anyone?

enterprise architecture, higher education, strategic planning No Responses »

Jan 112012

Today, I participated in a focus group to help start up the BCIT School of Business Business Analytics Centre of Excellence. The room was full of Business Intelligence/Analytics/Insight leaders from around Vancouver. We were brought together by Ed Bosman and Karen Plesner both instructors in the BCIT School of Business. Karen facilitated a two hour discussion on a series of topics. The group provided advice on the skills expected of graduates in the various business analytic roles – consumers, artisans/analysts and systems technicians. The other major focus was on what a “centre of excellence” for business analytics should provide and deliver to industry.

We were provided with a definition of Business Analytics as the seed for the discussion:

Business Analytics: the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning (Davenport and Harris, 2007)

This definition generated a very good discussion and the consensus was that this definition was too narrow. It failed to address real-time analytics for operational performance management and web analytics for customer behaviour management.

We had a good discussion about master data management and data standards. One of the great quotes of the day came from an panel member. He was referring to a discussion about how confident and accurate your numbers need to be. I really like this pragmatic approach.

Business Analytics augments your gut

The another panel member introduced the group to a model used by Davenport and Harris. Here is what it looks like:

Davenport and Harris Model	Information	Insight
Past
Present
Future

The model is a measure of where business analytics efforts are focused. This would be a good model for us to look at the maturity of our Business Intelligence/Analytics practices.

This table contains the lists of topics and themes I noted during our focus group. There are many topics and themes below that will warrant future blog posts.

Trends	Tools	BI/BA Type	Audience
Web Analytics	Excel	Operational “Real time”	Consumers
Mobile	Access	Tactical “Just in Time”	Artisans
Bring Your Own Device	Qlikview	Strategic “Points in Time”	Analysts
Security	Tableau	Compliance	Authors
Privacy	SAP	Predictive	Systems Technicians
Predictive	IBM Cognos
MDM	MS Analysis Services
Big Data	SAS
Information Overload	SPSS

I am looking forward to the next steps in the process and hope to contribute to the effort.

Davenport, Thomas H.; Harris, Jeanne G. (2007). Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. Harvard Business School Press

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.

Evolving IT Change Management into an Enterprise Service

itsm, management No Responses »

Dec 152011

In 2004, we began down the road of adopting the IT Infrastructure Library framework. We began implementing our ITIL processes with Incident Management and Service Desk. We quickly followed with creating a Service Catalogue. The next major process was Change Management. A group of key people were assigned to become our IT Change Advisory Board (CAB). The membership of the CAB was solely IT Services technical staff and managers at the start.

The IT Services CAB had representation from all our teams: Service Desk, Desktops, Satellite Campuses, Applications, Web Services, Servers, Storage and Network teams.

Over the years, we have worked to establish the credibility of the CAB and the value that it brings to our organization. I am the current Change Manager and take every opportunity to talk about our Change Management Process to stakeholders in our community.

We have slowly grown our IT CAB into an enterprise CAB. We now have membership from our Learning and Teaching Centre, our Library, our Facilities Management group and now from our Broadcast Engineers (from our School of Business – Broadcast programs). As more and more groups ask to join, we get better communication about enterprise wide and campus wide (we have 5 campuses) changes.

The end result of this maturing process is that we can better manage changes initiated by service departments. reduce risk and maintain highly available, quality services to our students and our stakeholder community.

Here are some links to information about our change management process:

IT Services Scheduled Downtime http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/downtime.shtml

IT Services Maintenance Announcements http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/maintenance/