This is the home page for the ITANA group's discussion of enterprise architecture activity at various campuses and survey, as of 2010. Please feel free to add to the wiki!
Charge
Much activity has taken place in the last couple of years, as enterprise architecture efforts have evolved and matured at various campuses. The ITANA group felt it would be good to do an assessment of where things stand today. A common set of interview questions will be developed to do this assessment and several ITANA individuals will speak with key individuals at identified campuses and document the results.
Scope Statement
In the context of the interviews and assessment, it is important to use the same vocabulary. For the purposes of this effort, the following terms will apply:
Vocabulary
- Enterprise Architecture Definition
- What do we mean by EA Tools or Components? Examples.
- What are EA Repositories? Examples
- EA Maturity Level Rubric / Success Factors
Goals
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.
Content
Frameworks
- Survey of Frameworks (what's out there: TOGAF, Zachman, DODAF etc)
- Survey of users: Who is using what?
- Maturity Model of usage ?
- What does the light version of the framework look like?
- What change in organizational maturity helped you move up the maturity scale?
- Homegrown Frameworks as an example of what was important to the group
- Successes or challenges
- Candidates for best practices
EA Tools
- InfoSys Survey of TOGAF (80% using Visio, Excel, Powerpoint...)
Repositories
- Methodologies
- Taxonomies/Ontologies
- There application or use across the enterprise
- Maintenance and management across lifecycle issues
- Change management and Impact analysis
Tasks
- Scott Fullerton, Piet Niederhausen, Rich Stevenson, and Marina Arseniev to create a starting page for this assessment - by February 28th
- Create list of interview questions - by March 31st
- Identify campuses that are active with Enterprise Architecture activity to interview - by April 15th
- Conduct interviews of key individuals at each campus - by June 15th
- Summarize and publish findings of survey - by July 31st
- Have a Screen2Screen session to share results - by August 15th
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
- Briefly, what is the history of your EA group, how does it fit into your IT organization or institution, and what are its activities?
- What led to the adoption of a framework? Who initiated it? What were the drivers?
- What were the major benefits/results you were looking for?
- What alternatives did you consider?
Framework
- Is your framework external, home grown, or some combination?
- For your purposes, is the emphasis of the framework on:
- Providing structure for strategic planning
- Providing structure for governance (what kind of governance?)
- Providing structure for business process analysis and re-engineering
- Providing structure for design of applications, services, solutions
- Providing structure for operations, such as change management, application management, data center management
- Providing structure for information gathering and documentation
- Providing structure for accessing/finding information/documentation
- What conceptual changes did you have to make to fit the original framework to your institution?
Information collection
- Do you use your framework to capture:
- Strategic goals, high level business model
- Business domains and their goals
- Business processes, roles, timelines
- Business policies and rules
- Business entities; a business oriented information model
- Logical data models
- Master data
- Applications implementations, services, dependencies
- Physical infrastructure, data centers, servers
- In practice what is the scope of what you capture:
- Breadth: one project at a time; one domain at a time; whole organization?
- Depth: is there a standard level of detail, or is it ad hoc?
- Time: as-is state, to-be state(s), history
- To what degree is the information usable as a model, i.e.:
- Is it mainly documentation, leaving it to the reader to correlate information?
- Does it offer conceptual models to guide the use of the information?
- Is the information stored as data and metadata, such that a user can drill down/up/sideways, trace dependencies, etc.?
- Is it designed to support/fit gap analysis, to highlight problems, to identify potential projects?
- Have you adopted specific tools to help maintain the information for your framework? (e.g., document management, wiki, EA-specific repository)
Users and usage
- Who are the main consumers (in and out of IT) of the artifacts resulting from your framework?
- Is it used by business analysts? What do they get out of it?
- Is it used by managers? What do they get out of it?
- Is it used by executives? What do they get out of it?
- Is it used by end users? What do they get out of it? (e.g. data dictionary)
- Do you have processes that require users to use your framework? (e.g., project management or change management processes that require information in the framework to be updated)
- Is the framework used in IT strategic planning? In institutional strategic planning?
- Is the framework used to identify/prioritize/budget for essential projects?
- Is there training for users of the framework? What skill sets are involved in working with the framework?
Overview
Content Tools