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There are several goals that we wish to achieve.  It would be good to identify campuses that have successful enterprise architecture programs and extract common best practices and set of references.  Another goal of this assessment is to allow each one of us to better guage where we are with respect to each other's maturity in the enterprise architecture efforts.  It would be useful to identify a spectrum of activities that may not be in line with best practices however, are still viewed as important benefits of  less mature EA programs.   As always, identifying success criteria is also a valuable outcome.

Sub-team members

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Content

Frameworks

1. Survey of Frameworks (what's out there: TOGAF, Zachman, DODAF etc)
2. Survey of users: Who is using what?
3. Maturity Model of usage ?
4. What does the light version of the framework look like?
5. What change in organizational maturity helped you move up the maturity scale?
6. Homegrown Frameworks as an example of what was important to the group
7. Successes or challenges
8. Candidates for best practices

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1. InfoSys Survey of TOGAF (80% using Visio, Excel, Powerpoint...)
2. Possible projects to look at:
   1. Chicago's I.T. Ecosystem Tool (Tom B)
   2. Essential Project http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/about
   3. UC Irvine's use of Protege (http://protege.stanford.edu/)
   4. Sparx Enterprise Architect (http://www.sparxsystems.com/)
      1. Integrates with
         1. Jama Contour (Req. Mgmt., http://www.jamasoftware.com/))
         2. Which integrates with Jira (Issue Tracking, http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/])
         3. All of which looks a lot like MagicDraw in terms of info capture & reporting, but includes integration w project management.

Repositories

1. Methodologies
2. Taxonomies/Ontologies
3. There application or use across the enterprise
4. Maintenance and management across lifecycle issues
5. Change management and Impact analysis

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Potential interview questions

The following questions assume we're talking to a group that's working with a defined framework (home grown or otherwise).

Background

1. Briefly, what is the history of your EA group, how does it fit into your IT organization or institution, and what are its activities?
2. What led to the adoption of a framework? Who initiated it? What were the drivers?
3. What did you and the other decision-makers involved mean by a framework?
4. What were the major benefits/results you were looking for?
5. What alternatives did you consider?

Framework

An EA framework can serve three important functions.  1) It is a statement of professional standards, explicitly defining for your institution the structure and practice of Enterprise Architecture; 2) It can be descriptive, providing a context for situating and relating information about our institution, particularly its goals and the information, processes and systems that support those goals; 3) It can be prescriptive, identifying gaps and laying out a roadmap for the delivery of new capabilities. 

1. What aspects of your practice are you supporting with your frameworks (e.g., information, business processes, system interdependencies, planning)
2. Is your framework external, home grown, or some combination?
3. If it is an external framework, what parts of the framework are you using, which parts did you set aside, and why?
4. What conceptual changes did you have to make to fit the original framework to your institution?
5. Have you found your framework to be flexible enough to incorporate the range of tasks/projects you were trying to cover?

Information collection

1. Do you use your framework to capture:
   1. Strategic goals, high level business model
   2. Business domains and their goals
   3. Business processes, roles, timelines
   4. Business policies and rules
   5. Business entities; a business oriented information model
   6. Logical data models
   7. Applications implementations, services, dependencies
   8. Physical infrastructure, data centers, servers
2. In practice what is the scope of what you capture:
   1. Breadth: Are you gathering information one project at a time; one domain at a time; systematically across the whole enterprise?
   2. Depth: Is there a standard or required level of detail, or is it ad hoc?
   3. Time: Are you mainly documenting the as-is state of the enterprise? Are you modeling to-be state(s)? Do you track history of changes?

Tools

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Modeling/Analysis methods

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Please list methods you use in your EA practice and their purpose

1. UML including its various flavors
2. Archimate
3. IDEF0
4. Primarily text documents and spreadsheets
5. other...

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Templates

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Please describe (or provide pointers to) templates that you have found particularly helpful for the various aspects of your practice

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Managing/Reposing EA information

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Please list the methods and tools you use to manage EA information

1. EA- or UML-specific repositories
2. Homegrown repository containing searchable and/or re-usable data
3. Wiki

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Presenting EA information

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Please list the methods and platforms you use to communicate EA activity and provide customers with the information that results from that activity.

1. Internally to fellow-architects
2. To project members
3. To planners and campus leaders
4. To the world

Users and usage

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1. Is it used by business analysts? What do they get out of it?
2. Is it used by managers? What do they get out of it?
3. Is it used by executives? What do they get out of it?
4. Is it used by end users? What do they get out of it? (e.g. data dictionary)

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1. Look up information on a topic (e.g. a domain, process, or service) and find cross-references or links to related information
2. Tie together documentation in a domain with a conceptual business model of the domain
3. Compare as-is and to-be states and expose gaps
4. Trace dependencies and expose downstream effects of proposed changes
5. Is it designed to support/fit gap analysis, to highlight problems, to identify potential projects?

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1. As part of project management, are projects required to identify their goals or impact by reference to the framework?
2. As part of change management, are proposed changes assessed by reference to the framework and/or are changes incorporated in the framework as updates?

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proposed EA framework interview questions have moved here.