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 did you and the other decision-makers involved mean by a framework?
- What were the major benefits/results you were looking for?
- 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.
- What aspects of your practice are you supporting with your frameworks (e.g., information, business processes, system interdependencies, planning)?
- What categories for organizing information are most helpful?
- 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?
- What conceptual changes did you have to make to fit the original framework to your institution?
- Have you found your framework to be flexible enough to incorporate the range of tasks/projects you were trying to cover?
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
- 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?
Tools
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
Managing/Reposing EA information
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
Presenting EA information
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
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)
- What are some of the use cases your framework 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?
- Are there processes that require users to use 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?
- 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?
Architecture Review Boards
- Does your EA framework include an ARB? 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?
Overview
Content Tools