Speaker

  • Piet Niederhausen

Materials

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_LPwx1QBxnBJ7b-gBm5J8hrYp5_WgJxsr19JRi03Ch0/edit#slide=id.geff9087203_0_54

Context

  • UW is vast and is hugely distributed
  • Decision-making in an environment of this kind is sometimes challenging
  • This all makes the practice of EA challenging too

Notes

  • Early 2023 the EA practice at UW was characterized as ad hoc
  • Organizational Readiness for EA showed opportunities around sponsorship, engagement, maturity, and urgency
  • Considered EA at the UW in the mold of Gartner's "Internal Management Consultancy"

Changes in IT

  • Restructuring in central IT started in 2022, taking effect in October 2023
  • New IT leadership: CIO, CTO, CISO, and more!
  • Workday ERP brought 150+ people into central IT
  • IT governance has been completely overhauled, expanded, and promises to be more directive
  • All-new strategic planning approach being established with significant implications for how things get funded.
  • New Strategy and Business Operations division that no longer has an Enterprise Architecture team.
    • Some of the responsibilities of the new Strategic Alignment (SA) team matches work previously done by the EA team.
  • The SA team
    • supports the management of the service and project portfolios
    • supports the full lifecycle of services and projects 
    • identifies measures for the value of services
  • UW has a "why" for EA that reads "Enterprise Architecture helps stakeholders maximize the architectural value of their services, solutions, data, processes, or organizations on behalf of the UW in an environment of constant change." = and there was some useful discussion about the "architectural" tag on the value statement — noting that as the EA practice at UW continues to move "up the stack" towards the Strategy to Portfolio (S2P) Value Stream (in IT4IT terms).
  • Louis King noted that "value" seems to be the hottest term around at the moment, and that it is meaningless without a workable definition... and from an architecture perspective is this about maximizing the value of-the-whole and maximizing the value of the collective?

Is there a team at your institution with defined responsibility for Enterprise Architecture?

  • At Yale, it is rarely the EA team that plugs holes; this is how the EA team has scoped its work


If so, how long has Enterprise Architecture existed in basically the same organizational structure?

  • Jerry: leadership is still trying to figure out what to do with EA
  • 50% are less than two years old:

What changes had the biggest, most recent impact on the organization of Enterprise Architecture responsibilities?

  • It's the new CIO! = though half also signalled "increased recognition of the need for enterprise architecture", which is positive:
  • Work of EA often needs to be aligned with strategic initiatives of the CIO

Chat transcript

jeff kennedy: ¿ Where have responsibilities the EA@UW team had previously for important custodianship over activities and guardrails for things like the API approach fallen = have they come with you into the new higher-up-the-value-stream context? --- ah, is that "A = Reference Architectures"?
 
Rupert Berk: @jeff We're in the process of defining custodianship over reference architectures with this proposal for a more formal structure.

Further Information

Resources

ZOOM

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