Draft Minutes: ITANA call of 31-Jan-2013

Attending
Jim Phelps, University of Wisconsin - Madison (chair)
Mojgan Amini, UCSD
Marina Arseniev, UC Irvine
Kasia Azzara, Columbia
Joel Banez, Westmont College
Glenn Donaldson, Ohio State University
Chris Eagle, University of Michigan
Pieter Enslin, NWU South Africa
Paul Erickson, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Alex Eschenbaum, UCAR, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Leo Fernig, University of British Columbia
Scott Fullerton, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Paul Hobson, University of British Columbia
Jeffrey Shokler, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Emily Eisbruch, Internet2 (scribe)

DISCUSSION

Current Activities Check-In

Box Screen to Screen

Almost 50 people joined the Screen2Screen discussing Box.com on Wednesday, Jan 31.

https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/itana/Box.com+Screen2Screen+Questions

Thank you to Chris and Glenn and others for their work on planning this.

Some key points:
-Some campuses use Shib to provide users access to Box
-Leveraging groups to provide access to Box is not simple at this point. Box team is aware of this request for group handling
-Box gives each user 50 gig of storage, most do not use anywhere near that much
-Deprovisioing is still manual, but Box is working on this process

Comments:
-Screen2Screen was highly informative and interesting, Learned a lot.
-Good to know our campus is not unique in some of the challenges we've encountered

-Jim: AndrewK promised to share the best way to provide feedback to the Advisory board regarding feature requests, etc.

-May have a follow-up session on Box. Will ask on the list if there is interest in about 6 months

Learning Reference Architecture

https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/itana/Learning+Working+Group

-This group is having regular meetings on Mondays
-Rich Stevenson is putting together an EDUCASE presentation
-Work is ongoing on a core diagram

Starting EA Solution Path / Maturity Model

-Colleen Nagy will lead this group, which will examine how to start as an architect
-May develop a maturity model
-First meeting is scheduled for Wed. Feb. 6
-Colleen recently shared these pertinent links with the list: http://blogs.forrester.com/tim_degennaro/13-01-23-lack_of_ea_career_path_hinders_hiring_certification_and_development_choices http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-916750

SOA Working Group https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/itana/SOA+Working+Group
-This group will submit the article to ECAR the by Feb 1 deadline.
-Leo will circulate the article as submitted to the SOA working group members

Face2Face & (un)Conference at EDUCAUSE 2013 in Anaheim

http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2013
-This planning group is just spinning up and will have its first meeting soon.
-The Face2Face will be at EDUCAUSE 2013 as a full-day pre-conference seminar again.
-Separately, there will also be an ITANA (un)Conference 2013 at EDUCAUSE.

ITANA Wiki Content Management
-Looking for help with content management for the ITANA wiki.
-This involves figuring out what needs to go where on the wiki
-Contact Jim Phelps if you can assist with this important task

Framework for Architecture Discussions and Engagements

There was brainstorming & discussion about this framework, presented by Jim:

FRAMEWORK: Matrix to look at our projects and think about how we communicate with campus.
-The Y-Axis is "Business Value".
-Near zero is "hard to demonstrate business value" and at the top is "easy to demonstrate business value."
-The X-Axis is "Architectural Maturity".
-Near zero is "many architectural tradeoffs, hinders architecture maturity" and at the far end is "drive architecture maturity".
-Brainstorm about the "factors" that define both axis.
-Break down Business Value into three broad categories:
-Business Effectiveness
-Fiscal Efficiency
-Increased Agility
Each of these categories has a set of "factors" that describe them.
Brainstorming today is around those factors and how I (we, people) could maybe use this tool."

What contributes to Business Effectiveness?
-High Architecture Sex Appeal (ASA) vs low ASA <grin>

-Perhaps another vector in that second process could be scope/impact?

-Operationla Efficiency --> Reallocation or reduction of staff use for particular functions.

-Business effectiveness: Adoptability

-Clearly defined KPI's - Effective collaboration with peer institutions

-Could fall in Business effectiveness or Fiscall Efficiency

-Knowing enterprise-wide stragetic plan, able to adapt to future needs

-Business Effectiveness - > Reducing Complexity?

-ease of access to intellegince for decisoon making

-Anticipation of changing business needs and IT solutions that keep up (maybe this is agility?)

-Alignment with Business Goals

-competitiveness in marketplace

-Business effectivess = increased capabilties for faculty

-Impact on constituents (faculty/staff/students...)

-Bus Eff: align with strategic goals (like KPIs), increases satisfaction, greater accuracy, better aligns organizations with enterprise goals

-streamlining business process

-ease of creating business partnerships

-regulatory compliance

-Flexibility to adapt to & meet new needs

-establishing service model (everything as a user service)

-re-enginerring processes

ITEMS (BOXES) ON JIM'S DIAGRAM:

Focus on Strategy
Clear & Consistent Governance
Effective Data Driven Decisions
Optimized Processes
User/Usability Focused
Exploiting Opportunities
Finding New Revenue

What contributes to Fiscal Efficiency?

-Fiscal: reduced inefficiencies (including redundancy), decreased unit cost

-appropriate outsourcing

-Increased Agility: strongly associated with enterprise maturity. Responsive governance and policy, Business units, and it systems are well defined components that can be easily re-purposed.

  • +1 to functional (internal) partnerships... or at least having IT involved at the right step in the process

-Along with "leveraging existing" I'd like to propose collective negotiation & partnerships... such as Net+ or CIC

-would a "tactical", "strategic" factor be useful?

ITEMS (BOXES) BOXES ON JIM'S DIAGRAM:

Clear Policies and Authority
Streamlined Workflows
Reducing Redundancies
Rationalized Service & Project Portfolios
Well Executed Projects
Leveraging Existing

What contributes to Agility?

-A lot of "agility" is about minimizing investment in a service... staff time, integration work, servers, network... etc. Ideally, making services as easy to adopt (and turn off again) as installing an app on your phone.

-are you planning on quantifying the value business value? for exampe, it may be easy to demonstrate that a project reduced complexity, but it may be very hard to show that there's any actual value gained from that reductioncw

-not quantifying on a specific value (this is a 93 vs. that one is a 37)

-Where KPIs can be applied, we can demonstrate value, but they can't be applied to all things and won't be generally until a goal gets well defined

ITEMS (BOXES) BOXES ON JIM'S DIAGRAM:

Reduced Complexity
Configuration not Code
Adaptable Infrastructure
Re-Usable Services
Clear Decision Making
Agile Resource Alignment
Well-known and Clear Dependencies
===

Clearly some of the categories are overlapping, it's like a Venn diagram.

The group agreed that this brainstorming was helpful.

May discuss Architectural Maturity on Next call as we discussed Business Value today.

Leo may do such an exercise at half-day workshop at UBC to help bring greater clarity around priorities.

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Next Call: Thursday, Feb. 14 at 2pm ET

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