10 Steps to Improving Organisational Efficiency

The real purpose of this infoKit is to provide a suite of resources that can support whole institutional management teams in their strategic planning. It is to be hoped that, having worked through these resources, management teams will see the value of enterprise architecture (EA) as the key approach enabling organisational effectiveness. We recognise this will be a big step for many institutions and that many will prefer to start in a small way in order to prove the value of the approach. We also recognise that awareness of, and interest in, the approaches discussed here may start with the IT community before spreading to other parts of the institution. For these reasons we also offer this 10 point plan as a way of making progress in key areas whilst stopping short of full adoption of an EA approach:

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Review a copy of your college or university's strategic plan. If you are not directly part of the senior management team then engage with people at this level in order to ensure you understand the main goals for the coming year as seen by your Principal or Vice-Chancellor.
Create a basic view of the functions carried out by the institution (the JISC infoNet Business Classification Scheme may help with this). Think of these functions as 'services' provided to stakeholders rather than as particular systems and processes.
Create a basic view of your IT Architecture showing the applications and services, the interfaces between them and the data transferred.
Identify any 'bloated' or redundant applications that consume resource far in excess of their actual value to the organisation and plan to phase them out. In time you will look at the business processes that drive this.
Use the IT architecture conclusions as a starting point for discussions involving management, teaching and administrative colleagues about architecture at enterprise level. Look at your main business processes, the weaknesses or 'pain points' in them and where they interact. See how this relates to your conclusions on IT architecture. Use this debate to build a roadmap of integrated process and ICT change.
Identify the likely lifespan and replacement cycle for existing applications.
Consider how a service-oriented approach (SOA) to your data layer could streamline the architecture and reduce the need for interfaces/data retyping. Plan to turn the 'spaghetti' into a 'lasagne'.
Consider where approaches such as Shared Services, Open Source products, Cloud applications or SaaS could add value or reduce costs.
Produce a 'Roadmap' of how you hope to develop the 'Enterprise Architecture' in conjunction with business colleagues. Relate this to the key business goals of the institution and review your Roadmap regularly in the light of any changes to the institution's strategic goals.
Talk regularly to others in your institution about this and connect with people in other institutions who are doing similar things. A useful way to do this is to keep an eye on developments coming out of JISC Innovation Programmes and find out about the communities that engage with such programmes.