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Q&A

What is your name and title?

Jim Phelps, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Strategy.

I have been at UW for 3 1/2 years now.

How did your architecture practice get started?

The EA practice was started here before I was hired.  A group of interested people (mostly central IT but with some campus partners) came together and established the EASG (Enterprise Architecture Steering Group).  As a group, the wrote principles and did a couple of EA whitepapers.  They then made the recommendation that UW-IT (the central IT group) should hire an EA.

The practice here started as a grassroots effort inside of UW-IT

What is the focus of your practice – e.g., enterprise, business, technical, solution, data architecture?

We have an Enterprise Business Architect, we had an Enterprise Information Architect and we have an Enterprise Solution Architect.

Our focus is mostly on the business and solution architecture for the center IT unit.  We are working on Strategy Management for UW-IT, refactoring and improving our investment/service management business processes along with solutions for shared DevOps tools and monitoring among other things.

How big is your practice and where is it located in the organization?

We were 4 FTE until very recently.  We are now 3 FTE located in the central IT unit.  I report to an AVP who reports to the VP-IT/CIO.

What is your practice model for working with related teams – e.g., federated architecture practice?

We are building a federated architecture practice.  We have run several courses teaching campus members things like capability mapping, business process mapping, brick diagrams.  We have a Community of Practice where my team brings together 30ish people to work on topics and learn about best practices.

My vision is that we have a well linked distributed EA function where there are architects in place in various groups and domains who contribute to the overall architecture best practices, artifacts, etc. (see Spreading EA Skills Across the Organization and the CEB articles linked in the sidebar)

How would you describe the maturity of your architecture practice in terms of:

What are major trends you see in your practice and your enterprise?

 

How does your team manage its work internally and on projects?

 

What are your major challenges?

 

What projects have been your major focus lately?

 

UW's EA practice is working towards a federated model of EA.

Business Architecture is a core practice within our EA group.

We see the needs for new skills across the organization.

We manage our work using Scrum/Agile

Our major focus has been building a Strategy Management practice

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