Enterprise Architecture Pilot
Resources and links
The above two reports from TechWatch are the first in a new series of Early Adopters Studies:
Industry frameworks
Origins
Enterprise Architecture had been at the edges of JISC projects until 2006, when the then government Office of the e-Envoy identified EA as a key route to improving public services and reducing cost. following the experience of major departments like the Home Office and Ministry of Defence. JISC saw the opportunity to evaluate EA as part of its innovation and change agenda and funded a pilot project to this end.
Pilot Projects
In 2008 four institutions; Cardiff, Liverpool John Moores, Kings College London and Roehampton were funded to explore the potential in the EA approach and related industry frameworks, learning to 'do EA' on real projects. You can read about their experience in two reports by JISC Techwatch, Doing Enterprise Architecture: Enabling the agile institution and Unleashing EA: Institutional Architectures and the value of joined up thinking. As well as containing detailed case studies, Doing Enterprise Architecture contains an excellent introduction to Enterprise Architecture itself, industry frameworks such as TOGAF™ and Zachman, The Open Group and its Architecture Forum and to modelling and the emerging Archimate® open standard. Unleashing EA reflects on the experience and identifies the major issues and challenges institutions face when confronting change and looks at how EA can help. If you read nothing else - read these two!
Change not technology!
There striking conclusion from the pilot is that Enterprise Architecture is about enabling change, not about technology and must be viewed and presented that way. It is not something organisations do in its own right, but as a way of managing and enabling major change where ICT is involved. In the words of one of our thought leaders, you don't 'do' an EA project. You 'do Enterprise Architecture and it is as much a way of thinking, a journey through change, as an end result. And if there is an end result, an enterprise architecture; it always starts with organisation and business processes, before information, application and infrastructure
In the last six months of the pilot project we held several well attended workshops and presentations, with The Open Group and SURF communities in Munich, at the UCISA and JISC annual conferences. These pointed clearly to a demand to build on the pilot project with a wider group as well as highlighting the priorities for further work, broadly speaking on gathering Information, Knowledge and Wisdom, using Frameworks, Techniques and Tools; and developing Skills, Training and Guidancefor a professional community of enterprise architects in higher and further education.
It is this demand and this agenda that the EA Practice Group is designed to serve.
