Face 2 Face Sessions

Joint ITANA AACRAO Student Lifecycle Summit

Face2Face 2010 Planning Begins

If we had a Face2Face, would you come? Would you present? Where you would like it to be? You'll get a chance to answer these and many other questions in an upcoming survey. We are starting the Face2Face planning by developing a set of questions for a survey of the members. Two working group calls are scheduled for the week of February 1, 2010. We will report out at the February 4th ITANA Conference Call.

• Question 1: What is our goal for having a face-to-face meeting? Networking? Producing one or more work products? Forming one or more subgroups tasked to produce some product?

• Related question: What would a successful face-to-face meeting look like? How many people would have attended? What would the interactions be like?

• Question 2: Do we want to pick some reasonable (where we define reasonable) set of topics for a face-to-face meeting? If so, what? Alternatively, do we want to poll the ITANA list for topics of interest, make a call for presentations?

• Question 3: How many days? 1? 1.5? 2? ...

• Question 4: Where and when? Should it be co-located with some other event a large number of us are likely to attend? Again, should we be polling the list for suggestions or just drawing on our considerable knowledge?

Face2Face Topic Mind Map

Face2Face Brainstorming Feb 18 2010

Face2Face 2010 Planning notes

Face2Face at EDUCAUSE 2009 (November 4)

We had 40+ and a full room at EDUCAUSE 2009 in Denver Colorado.

Draft Meeting Notes

Attendees List: will try to get a list of attendees from EDUCAUSE.

The session was presented and chaired by Jim Phelps. Over 40 attendees made it to the session, representing institutions from the USA, Canada, The Netherlands and The United Kingdom among others.

Agenda

Part 1. Introduction to ITANA (presentation)

Introduction Presentation

Part 2. Interaction

On your campus:
Jim Phelps led discussion in the session looking at current architectural issues being dealt with on the campuses represented at the meeting. A number of themes emerged with supporting anecdotal evidence.

Business Intelligence
Metrics and Indicators, e.g. Financial - reducing costs; metrics used in comparison with peers; metrics used in measures of efficiency.

Business Intelligence discussion - what does BU actually mean. Wikipedia / Gartner comment made as to what it is.
Metrics and indicators - used to gain competitive advantage
Finance <-- reducing costs metrics
Comparison (against peers)
Efficiency
ROI metrics –

Business Processes, Data Management and Architecture

Shifted in to discussion around process. Looking for correlations in the data.
Pointed out the definitions required to fulfil something like 'how many students do you have?' and discussed the difficulty in describing the entity 'student' as a fundamental problem.

Architecture Maturity

Back on problems – how people are engaging with an architectural appraoch vendor driven architecture / customer driven architecture / 'we bought this last week and want it live next week'
Boulder: looking at the best way to look at data architecture. What's the best way to do it for the campus? Budget was cut – question now is top-down the right approach, or can they do some sort of wikipedia approach? So the question is should you go about producing a data architecture.

Washington: one of the reasons they went to EA approach was in reducing print costs - assuming that they could reduce IT related costs from mainframe to switch to IT delivery report. Now basically pushing work out to the consumers of those reports and did not factor in costs/impact. Got push back - asked how they could put that push back to good use in a feedback - how to use in an initiative in something as big as replacing the financial system. How do you quantify the whole impact?

Shift in emphasis from IT to Enterprise Architecture.

Jim Phelps at UW-Madison and the members from University of Washington come from moving up from IT space to EA.

New Mexico reported that in their ERP project, a major positive from taking an architectural approach was achieved in just documenting the current state. Further discussion also pointed out the pitfalls of moving beyond 'just enough' documentation. Continuing to docment current state is also likely to provide diminishing returns if you go too far. The simple rule of thumb here is: "Just Enough. Just In Time."
Therefore there's a balance to be drawn between Rigour and Agility. Reference made to this view being proposed in the current incarnation of the Gartner EA model.

In addition, another comment made was that too producing too many artifacts leads to spending too much time just managing those artifacts. Architect job becomes more a curator role, which has questionable value.

Continuing in the EA as Strategy theme, the group started to discuss the linkages between:

Budget & Architecture & Change

The DoD were used an example of a monolithic approach to EA. The premise of the effort was that it was to be used to control costs by promoting reuse of existing technology, and needing to file for exceptions in the process. However, the monolithic approach has meant that the effort has been 'boiling the ocean' resulting a state where the approach is stifling and not sustainable.

The question was then raised as to what are the right tactics to reach high level goals.
South Carolina looking to lead change via opportunities from EA, as they are currently in the end point of the governance chain as a filter. i.e. by the time they get to hear about initiatives, they are already in-flight.

Washington seconded the point - their programme management / strategic planning are seperate to the development effort.
Where are people on the process? Following the elephant and cleaning up or leading?
Where are the linkages of EA - EA > PMO is one. Other touchpoints include purchasing, budget, etc.

Oren pointed out that the world is changing and moving to disaggregation of systems rather than monolithic systems. This has led to a shift in the definition of 'enterprise'. His suggestion was that there was now, more than ever, a need to undertake "getting out there with the constituents to have the discussion around what 'we' need to have things connected". South Carolina concurred with their own example where they are taking promotion and discussion of SOA to campus.

One observation made was that the discussion primarily, and perhaps unsurprisingly, tended towards discussion of IT Architecture ahead of a broader view of Enterprise Architecture. SURF recognised that their own approach is always to move from the business first. This is also the conclusion of the UK constituents and it is postulated that this is perhaps as much a maturity in IT Architecture modeling as a fundamental approach to EA.

This observation led to discussion of govenrnane models people have in place for EA. An aside to 'Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution' by Ross, Weill and Roberston was made in this context, as many in the room have found the book to be a useful reflection point for governance issues.

Jim Phelps, looking at 'EA as Strategy' adoption, highlighted a dffference between failed strategy of commercial entity vs university - where they just come back next year and do it again. One private university countered the point saying that they are publically traded and absolutely have to get te strategy right year-on-year.

Session Closing comments.

Past Face2Face Work

Face2Face 2009 Survey

ITANA Face2Face Spring 2009 This meeting was canceled. The agenda will form the basis of longer webinar / working calls.

Agenda for Thursday Webinar/Working Calls

Enterprise Authorization - Marina Arseniev, Chair

• Truly enterprise-wide authorization solutions present challenges from the technology perspective and even more challenges from the business and cultural requirements perspective. Questions about scope, granularity, roles, delegation, and data integration with vendor and other software continue to be posed in many institutions where authorization solutions have difficulty meeting campus needs. Specific common problems and case studies, such as campus-wide access audits, are the focus of this session. We will share real-world experiences, identify common requirements and discuss solutions (successful or possibly not) to better understand common challenges.
  • This session will discuss why enterprise authorization is so elusive for so many of our institutions; it will be a forum to share successes and failures. The goal is to define what specific actionable steps or decisions architects across our campuses might be able to make that bring vision and clarity back to their organizations.
    *Enterprise Authorization Working Group

• Working group time to push the topic forward and define future activities (if any) that ITANA should take on.

5/10 Feed Back Session

• Give a short, 5 minute, presentation and get 10 minutes of feedback from the attendees. Do you have something you are working on? Want to get a quick check on your roadmap? Need to get past a sticking point?

Kuali on Campus - David Walker, Chair

• Over the past few years, the Kuali Foundation has become a major force in the creation of community source administrative software for use in higher education. Work is in progress on a growing list of applications, including Kuali Financial System, Kuali Student, and Kuali Coeus (research administration). These applications are being designed to utilize a common middleware layer, Kuali Rice, which provides a service bus, workflow, access to identity management, notification, and presentation services. This session will provide a brief introduction to Kuali Rice, followed by a discussion of the issues surrounding the use of Rice as an enterprise middleware infrastructure, supporting applications beyond those developed by the Kuali Foundation.
  • University of California: Assessment of Kuali Rice for Single and Multiple Campus Applications

• Working group time to push the topic forward and define future activities (if any) that ITANA should take on.

5/10 Feed Back Session

• Give a short, 5 minute, presentation and get 10 minutes of feedback from the attendees. Do you have something you are working on? Want to get a quick check on your roadmap? Need to get past a sticking point?

SOA and Interoperability - Tom Dopirak, Chair

• This session will study the use of SOA and Federation practices and technologies in the context of a particular "sourcing " problem in higher education. This session looks at the potential of a single institution hosting undergraduate email for multiple institutions rather than using a commercial provider such as Google. The session is not concerned with aspects of economics or differences in policies but rather how existing practices in federation and SOA might apply to a problem that spans the higher education community. Possible deliverables include a list of services that need to be provided by each participating institution, a list of services that might be provided by other parties such as InCommon , a list of proven technologies that would apply to this problem and the kind of governance that would be necessary for higher education to operate such a service.

• Working group time to push the topic forward and define future activities (if any) that ITANA should take on.

5/10 Feed Back Session

• Give a short, 5 minute, presentation and get 10 minutes of feedback from the attendees. Do you have something you are working on? Want to get a quick check on your roadmap? Need to get past a sticking point?

Hot Topics

Enterprise Batch Feed Management
Uses of the Zachman Framework - other frameworks
Performance w/ Web Services
Enterprise Business Objects & Master Data Management
Getting coherence in meeting security objectives
Using Outside Consultants on Architectural issues
Injecting Requirements into the RFP Process

Report Out from Working Groups

Straw-man Agenda with timings

Past Face 2 Face Meetings:

• EDUCAUSE 2008 - Look for the ITANA Discussion Group on Thursday afternoon *
• Face2Face 2008 - Thanks for great meeting. Agenda and notes are posted here: Face2Face 2008
• EDUCAUSE 2007 - October in Seattle. Note: we now have a date and time for our meeting: October, 25 2007 4:55PM to 6:10PM
• Face-to-face meeting at Columbia University in New York, NY on May 22nd, 2007.

Past Face2Face Meetings

• EDUCAUSE 2007 Constituent Group meeting in Seattle, WA
• Spring 2007 Face2Face at Columbia University, NY