Agenda

1. Roll Call (by timezone - East to West)

2. Scribe Shout-out

3. Agenda Bash

4. Itana Org Updates

1. Working Group Updates

2. Spring Face2Face 2016

5. Round Table - Discussion of architecture related challenges at your university

Attendees

From the Adobe Connect attendee list (may not include people who only called in):

Updates

• Beth Schaefer has agreed to join the ITANA Steering Committee -- welcome!

• Leo Fernig has withdrawn from the ITANA Steering Committee

• API working group continues to meet; see the ITANA mailing list

• Face2Face update:

• Looking for a few more participants

• For details see the Face2Face page here

Discussion

Open round table discussion:

• Louis King (Yale)

• Started new strategic thinking/planning processes

• Targeted to areas with an absence of strategic thinking, or a group that is coalescing and could benefit from report

• Adapted ideas from an existing leadership program

• Method includes:

• Scan of the environment -- factors including financial, demographic, customer needs, etc.

• Headline the desired future state; apply SMART criteria to it

• Gap analysis; assess the current state

• Develop strategies

• Very effective at bonding people who don’t work together currently by discussing future vision, before looking at current state (which tends to lead to “finger pointing”)

• Used on multiple initiatives with different scales and complexity

• Overall, this targets portions of the portfolio to jump start, compared with prior portfolio-wide strategy efforts that had lots of participation but didn’t result in much actionable work

• Created a facilitator guide; an article on this work is forthcoming

• Mike Janke (Minnesota)

• Working on starting an architecture practice, drawing from existing IT systems staff (from a central IT staff that serves 31 institutions across the state system)

• Bootstrapping is hard, and so is changing the organization

• One challenge is sorting out architecture from design; historically the same people did architecture, design, and some implementation -- and the phases are not distinct

• Not staffed for “heavy” architectural and design processes

• Parts of the organization are more or less receptive/asking for architecture

• The EA group can offer a range of views: from opinions to guidance to recommendations to requirements

• Discussion about how to give architecture “teeth” and limit exceptions:

• Mike: Issues are escalated to the leadership team reporting to the state CIO

• Louis: Issues are brought to a Technical Architecture Committee with university-wide representation that applies guiding principles

• Chris: Similar process

• Mike referred to: Stefan Bente, Collaborative Enterprise Architecture

• Want to be lean/agile, but also want to make sure recommendations are well researched, grounded, in standard formats, etc.

• Discussion about “changing the wheels on a moving car”:

• Mike: With ¾ of effort dedicated to maintaining existing solutions, few people can really envision a significantly different future state

• Important to show a future but be clear it will take a long time to get there and the path could change by the time we do

• J.J. Du Chateau (Wisconsin)

• Enabling a governance group to evaluate projects/initiative

• Using some ITANA architecture library techniques, specifically the Investment Value Matrix

• Main goal is to help see which of many options should be looked at most closely

• Hoping to also use something like brick diagrams to document the service portfolio

Whiteboard

Jim’s notes on the Adobe whiteboard:

• EA Best Practice - Focus on an area - don't try to boil the whole portfolio.  Better to have actionable EA in an area that is ripe for change and worth the strategic investment.

• EA Best Practice - Future State First.  Better to know where you are going and what the vision is rather than where you need to leave.  This is a good way to bring people together.  Starting with current state just inflames current politics and silos.  Many can find a common vision of the future who disagree on the current state.

• EA Best Practice - Your architecture processes should be only as heavy as is needed.   Don't add overhead and formality unless you have a strong reason to do so.  The goal is to deliver value not build bureaucracy

• EA Best Practice - Success will build influence.  Start with things you can accomplish and have success in to demonstrate the value of architecture.  People will come to you once you have demonstrated success.

• EA Best Practice - Build a community of contributors - this helps you get buy-in and leverage your limited architecture resources

Chat

From the Adobe chat window:

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