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The ITANA frameworks group plans to interview architects at selected institutions about their use of EA frameworks and framework-related tools. The following interview questions are proposed.
Background
- Briefly, what is the history of your EA group, how does it fit into your IT organization or institution, and what are its main activities?
- What led you to the adoption of an EA framework? Who initiated it? What were the drivers?
- What did the decision-makers involved mean by an EA framework?
- What were the major benefits/results you were looking for?
- What EA frameworks did you consider as alternatives?
About the framework
- Is your framework external, home grown, or some combination?
- If it is an external framework, what parts of the framework are you using, which parts did you set aside, and why?
- How have you changed the framework you started with, in response to what challenges?
An EA framework can serve three important functions:
- It is a statement of professional standards, explicitly defining for your institution the structure and practice of Enterprise Architecture;
- It can be descriptive, providing a context for situating and relating information about your institution, particularly its goals and the information, processes and systems that support those goals;
- It can be prescriptive, identifying gaps and laying out a roadmap for the delivery of new capabilities.
Framework as EA practice
- What aspects of your EA practice are you supporting with your framework? For example, information gathering; business processes analysis; system interdependencies; planning; project management.
- Does your EA framework include an Architecture Review Board? If so:
- Describe board membership. What members are inside or outside IT?
- At what points in your EA process does your board provide reviews?
- How are reviews conducted? What is in scope for review, what are the inputs and outputs?
- How are exceptions/waivers considered and granted?
- Are there other processes that require users to refer to your framework? For example:
- As part of project management, are projects required to identify their goals or impact by reference to the framework?
- As part of change management, are proposed changes assessed by reference to the framework and/or are changes incorporated in the framework as updates?
- 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
- Applications implementations, services, dependencies
- Physical infrastructure, data centers, servers
- Technical and integration standards
- In practice what is the scope of what you capture:
- Breadth: Are you gathering information one project at a time; one domain at a time; systematically across the whole enterprise?
- Depth: Is there a standard or required level of detail, or is it ad hoc?
- 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?
- What categories or metadata have helped you the most in organizing the information in your framework?
Framework as roadmap
- Does the framework guide IT strategic planning? Does it guide institutional strategic planning?
- Is the framework used to identify, prioritize, and budget essential projects?
- What projects, or changes to projects, have resulted from the guidance provided by the framework?
Modeling/analysis methods
- Please list methods you use in your EA practice and their purpose
- UML including its various flavors
- Archimate
- IDEF0
- Primarily text documents and spreadsheets
- Other ...
Templates
- Please describe (or provide pointers to) templates that you have found particularly helpful for the various aspects of your practice.
- Please list the methods and tools you use to manage EA information
- EA- or UML-specific repositories
- Homegrown repository containing searchable and/or re-usable data
- Wiki
- Other ...
- Who are the main consumers (in and out of IT) of the artifacts resulting from your framework?
- Please list the methods and platforms you use to communicate EA activity and provide customers with the information that results from that activity.
- Internally to fellow-architects
- To project members
- To planners and campus leaders
- To the world
- What are some of the use cases your presentation of information is designed to support:
- Look up information on a topic (e.g. a domain, process, or service) and find cross-references or links to related information
- Tie together documentation in a domain with a conceptual business model of the domain
- Compare as-is and to-be states and expose gaps
- Trace dependencies and expose downstream effects of proposed changes
- Is it designed to support/fit gap analysis, to highlight problems, to identify potential projects?
- Is there training for users of the framework? What skill sets are involved in working with the framework?