Education | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Full Disclosure, A Favourited Tweet Does Not Mean I Read It … Yet

Jan 202012

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Twitter.

Twitter provides the medium for my tailored news source (I find out about world events on Twitter faster than any of the regular news outlets), my 24×7 global support base (see my post The Evolution of My Global Network) and my notetaker (this attempt failed as it was too verbose for a Twitter feed). Finally, Twitter is a deep mine of refined precious metal harvested by the brilliant people I follow. Here are a few examples of posts I wrote because of Twitter:

All of these posts were triggered by a tweet that I read or a tweet to me about a topic that made me think and then share something with all of you. Powerful stuff for me and hopefully for you too!

I have been getting @replies and mentions for favouriting certain tweets. Twitter recently enabled a notification to the original tweeter if someone favourites a tweet they posted.

In the interest of full transparency to those who thank me, I have a confession. Just because I favourited your tweet does not always mean that I have read the link in your tweet.

I have taken to spending 15 minutes each morning scanning my Twitter feed (mostly to see what went on in the world while I was asleep in Vancouver) and look for interesting tweets (usually ones with links to articles). I favourite them (my Twitter bookmarking method) so that I can look at them at a later date. I do most of this scanning on my Blackberry Mobile Twitter app.

One ask I would have is if you have a website, think about huge shift to the mobile world and enable a mobile theme please! I would be more inclined to browse to the link and read it if the content presented was for a mobile experience (especially now that I am getting middle aged eyes!).

So, it is really me who needs to thank all of you for sharing all the great content. Keep tweeting and sharing because I for one, am listening and learning from you! Thank you!

Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education – Yes!

education, enterprise architecture, higher education 2 Responses »

Jan 152012

Adrian Grigoriu wrote an article in eBizq titled Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education in Nov 2011 – http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ea_matters/2011/11/enterprise-architecture-and-higher-education.php. I have been meaning to write a supportive post to Adrian and finally have time. In a nutshell, I agree and Adrian’s makes 3 excellent points for why Enterprise Architecture should be taught. Adrian’s short article is worth the read and there is an extensive discussion on LinkedIn about this topic here.

What EA could bring to the MBA:

1. EA may offer generic models or typical architectures for the enterprise. EA comes with the Capability map concept which unfortunately is not standardised or mature enough to be employed yet.

2. May provide the framework that links and integrates all the tiers of the Enterprise together: business process, technology and organization. That is a “true” EA framework. Currently there are a few meta-models that are an expression of the framework rather than the framework itself.

3. Last but not least, EA would provide the method of implementing the target enterprise state in alignment to strategy. Existing EA methods propose various processes to do exactly that.

Over the past month, I had the opportunity to build a new one week module on Enterprise Architecture for a 13 week Technology Management course. The course is targeted at business management students and I ran into exactly what Adrian pointed out:

The EA concept should be taught in any business study. Unfortunately the body of knowledge is too fragmented and incomplete right now to arm the student with a method that delivers results.

I reached out to my Enterprise Architect community on Twitter. My request for guidance started a great Twitter conversation with Nick Malik, Richard Veryard, Martin Howitt and Aleks Buterman about the approach to constructing the module and the elements that should be included. Many thanks to these esteemed Enterprise Architects. I continue to marvel that I am able to connect with all of you with the power of technology and Twitter in particular.

Here are a few choice tweets:

@richardveryard : @leodesousa @nickmalik Do you want your students to passively consume #entarch services or to collaborate effectively with #entarch experts?

@richardveryard : @nickmalik ‘s solution to @leodesousa ‘s requirement assumes the goal is to appreciate the difference between #entarch and its absence.

@nickmalik : @richardveryard @leodesousa Yes, as foundation. Build understanding as first step to empower collaboration between biz and #entarch

@aleksb6 : @leodesousa @richardveryard @nickmalik I’m trying to cope with the idea that #value of a #planned approach needs to be explained. #entarch

@richardveryard : @leodesousa @nickmalik my idea of a learning objective is that the students learn to do something, not that they are persuaded of something. Read more...

Thinking about Your Career Path

education, leadership, management No Responses »

Jun 152011

I have the privilege of leading a great group of IT professionals at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Part of my role is to help my team members think about and plan for their careers. I wrote about an approach using Personal Learning Plans that contributes to my thinking about this topic. I also added my thoughts to something Chris Lockhart (@chrisonea) wrote called The Right Stuff in a post called Building on the Right Stuff.

I had two sessions over the past weeks helping intermediate systems analysts think about where they should focus their efforts in their learning plans and about their future career paths. I introduced both people to our thinking about the types of people that are needed in every organization (in our case in IT organizations).

We started by talking about some of these continuum that influence careers:

Individual vs Team
Follower vs Leader
Technical vs Functional
Departmental vs Enterprise
Specialist vs Generalist

I firmly believe you need to know yourself before you can determine the paths you will take. I suggested to both team members to take the Myers-Briggs tests to get a clearer sense of themselves. Taking this approach also allows us to have a common vocabulary when talking about personality attributes. Take a look at my blog post Being a Teacher Works for Me. I suggest you take the test and see if it matches your perception of yourself. I will write another post that builds on the next step of our discussion by looking at what attributes we should work on.