ITANA Minutes, October 29, 2009

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Attending

Jim Phelps, University of Wisconsin-Madison (chair)
Marina Arseniev, University of California Irvine
David Bantz, University of Alaska
Tom Barton, University of Chicago
Karen Hanson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Keith Hazelton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jim Leous, Penn State University
RL "Bob" Morgan, University of Washington
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Mark Poepping, Carnegie Mellon University
Oren Sreebny, University of Washington
Rich Stevenson, UMUC
Ron Thelin, University of Chicago
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)

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EDUCAUSE CG Meeting

The ITANA Constituent Group meeting at EDUCAUSE will take place on Thursday, Nov. 5, at 12:45 p.m. Jim Phelps will also be Twittering from EDUCAUSE.

Jim Phelps mentioned that EDUCAUSE staff asked him for "lessons learned" about ITANA's use of Adobe Connect for Screen2Screen sessions. His feedback was that it is important to educate people on having the choice of using the phone bridge and/or the chat function for comments and questions. Also, that having a separate online facilitator - someone other than the speaker and the ITANA chair - is important for ensuring that online questions get to the speaker and for taking care of the technical and logistical issues with the software.

Jim welcomes any other comments from Adobe Connect participants; he will forward them to EDUCAUSE.

Jim Leous said that Penn State has used Adobe Connect a number of times. His experience has been that 1) putting up a talking head is not productive and 2) it is better to provide the participants with the slide deck and desktop screen share.

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Enterprise Architecture and Student Services

Karen Hanson, associate registrar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined the call to find out about enterprise architecture practices and adoption and how other campuses have used EA to support the student services area.

At Wisconsin, Jim Phelps (enterprise architect) has spent considerable time in the registrar's office space and has participated in some of their management meetings to discuss needs, ideas and concepts. The registrar is taking a fresh look at applications used for such things as degree audits, purchasing systems, what is available through PeopleSoft, and other areas of the student information system. They involved Jim to help with the decision-making process and with the coordination of systems and services.

At the University of Washington, Oren reported a slow roll-out of a web services architecture for enterprise systems - originally conceptualized for student data. Washington is a Kuali student partner, with the registrar and IT working together to look at Kuali (it is not implemented yet, but may be used to replace older home-grown systems). One of the main concepts of web services is that, as core systems are swapped out, the interfaces won't have to change. Washington consulted with the Burton Group about three years ago to begin this process and, on campus, the computer sciences department turned out to be key (they had some proposed uses for student data).

UC Irvine has a network architecture team and is going through an effort to consolidate the IT effort for administrative departments and applications. They are hoping to gather a centralized list of needs and priorities to feed into process, budgeting and staffing decisions. It happens that, as part of this process early on, IT has been working with the registrar and financial aid.

At the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), the approach is to roll-out EA from the grassroots, rather than from the top down. UMUC is using an EA approach in IT - with certain capabilities and processes - and uses that success as a sales message to the campus.

Penn State has developed an overarching identity and access management effort as the lynchpin for EA. Renee Shuey is leading the effort to get the information in place and get the schemas right. She has developed a student life cycle advisory council that looks at anything that touches students. This effort also focuses on getting the right information into the person registry - specific to administrative applications - as well as considering levels of assurance and federating when appropriate.

Carnegie Mellon has an existing connection between the registrar and IT - the registrar's office has been accustomed to going to IT for help with applications. There has also been interaction in terms of student billing and related services. IT focuses on using a process for any application with which they are involved, as opposed to developing a lot of ad hoc processes.

The University of Alaska system has one person registry, but each campus has its own registrar. The system uses the person registry to populate the central LDAP directory for authentication and directory services.

Tom Barton suggested an approach that focuses on the problems that need to be solved. For example, the University of Washington is trying to get control over the number and quality of interfaces on its big systems, and determining how to make upgrades easier and cheaper. What is Wisconsin looking for?

Karen reported that Wisconsin has a variety of systems that the registrar's office interacts with. They are looking for systematic ways to make decisions about selecting and implementing new systems, as well as which systems to decommission. The concept it to develop a diagram of the core processes and systems involving the registrar's office, then overlaying that with similar diagrams from financial aid, admissions, and other student services areas to see the overlap and connection points.

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Joint Meeting - Architects and Student Services?

Jim Phelps proposed consideration of a meeting involving enterprise architects and registrars - perhaps in association with AACRAO Tech or another existing meeting. This might provide a way to consider and discuss the value of investing in EA, how it related to the student life cycle, and to understand the constraints that exist on both sides.

RL "Bob" Morgan reported that such an approach has resulted in good engagement between those involved with identity management and the registrar community. This engagement has produced some good results and ongoing program.

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Other Items

ITANA will reopen the survey on EA maturity.

The next call will be a Screen2Screen with a Burton Group analyst on the topic of enterprise workflow.
Future Enterprise Workflow items:
1. Discussion of the UK Local e-Gov Workflow work - Paul Hobson
2. IBM Websphere Workflow Stack - Paul Hobson
3. Oracle Workflow - Keith Hazelton
4. Role Engineering and Enterprise Workflow
5. Keith and Tom D. will discuss roadmapping enterprise workflow and Keith will make notes on the wiki.
6. Roll-up work into some type of deliverable

Future agenda topics
• Enterprise portals - Jim Phelps and Oren will discuss at EDUCAUSE
• EA frameworks - who is using what - will come out in the revisit of EA maturity model
• Enterprise directories - Tom Dopirak - still a future item
• S2S - SOA - still an item of interest.
• Joint discussion with JISC - Jim P. will flesh out at EDUCAUSE

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Next call: Thursday, November 12, 2009, 2 p.m. EST

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