DRAFT Minutes, ITANA Conference Call
July 27, 2007
**Attendees**
Jim Phelps, University of Wisconsin-Madison (chair)
Chris Phillips, University of Maryland-Baltimore
Steve Kellogg, Penn State
Scott Smith, Penn State
Jim Leous, Penn State
Renee Martin, North Carolina A&T
Keith Hazelton, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Tom Barton, University of Chicago
Eric Nichols, State of Wisconsin
Jim Hooper, St. Louis University
Kevin Ballard, St. Louis University
Brendan Bellina, University of Southern California
Hébert Díaz-Flores, University of California-Berkeley
Steve Mullins, University of Alaska
Paul Hill, MIT
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)
**Action Items**
[AI] Keith will let Mellon Foundation officials know of interest in their new initiative and will gather additional information from the Foundation and report back to the group.
[AI] Jim Hooperwill provide the principles/standards, as well as the organizational chart, related to their ARB and Architecture Council, on the ITANA wiki.
[AI] Hébert Díaz-Floreswill post documents to the wiki concerning reorganization of Enterprise Architecture at UC-Berkeley.
[AI] All Please post any set of principles or governance structures, or related documents, to the ITANA wiki.
[AI] Jim Hooper will share information on SLU's broadbanding effort, particularly as it relates to architects. He will also share an assessment form used to document what people do in their jobs.
**Agenda, July 27, 2007**
There will be an ITANA constituent group meeting at the Educause meeting in Seattle. The session is Thursday, October 25. The announcement is on the Educause site: http://educause.edu/e07
It is also posted on the ITANA wiki. Several members of the working group plan to be there.
**Mellon Foundation**
Keith Hazelton reported on a new initiative from the Mellon Foundation that may relate to ITANA. Specifically, one of the foundation's interest areas includes the application of technology to forms of scholarly communications in order to improve quality, lower costs, speed up work, open new perspectives, or make work possible that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. The complete announcement is here:
http://www.mellon.org/grant_programs/programs/scholarlycommunications.
One example of potential ITANA involvement may be interoperability - for example, images scanned at one institution may not be easily available to scholars at another. Another may be agreeing on standards and/or developing common workbenches of tools. The Mellon Foundation plans on drafting a short invitation to try and attract information architects to review funded projects and look for such collaborative opportunities. This invitation will be distributed to the ITANA list when available.
Some working group members expressed an interest in such projects, but pointed out that there may become problems of priorities - people needing to focus on their institutions' needs first. There is, however, interest in pursuing this. [AI] Keith will let foundation officials that there is interest and will gather additional information.
**St. Louis Univ. Architecture Review Board**
Jim Hooper from St. Louis University discussed efforts to form an architecture review board (ARB). Conceptually, the ARB would have membership from various campus constituencies and would be responsible for determining whether proposed initiatives or projects fit with the university's existing information architecture. The project emerged from an upgrade to the Banner system. Jim reported that Banner was first perceived as an IT project but, with the upgrade, there has been a conscious effort to take a much broader view and look at businesses processes and enterprise-wide considerations.
This relates to previous ITANA discussions about engaging campus constituencies and the carrots that institutions can offer to encourage participation.
At St. Louis, the ARB is enterprise-wide. The focus now is on determining the scope of the ARB - what sorts of projects will the ARB review. At the start, this will include everything related to Banner. Also, if programs interface with the data centers and the ERP (Banner), the ARB will also come into play.
One key at St. Louis has been to work at getting IT processes and architectures in shape, which helps demonstrate credibility to the rest of campus. The ARB is part of the formal process for the development of new projects. The ARB receives notification at the beginning of the project and decides whether to assign an architect to the project. Then in the design phase, there is a formal architecture review. At that point, the ARB decides whether to issue a build permit. There is then a final review after the project is complete.
St. Louis U. has developed a set of principles that guides this process. These standards were developed by the Architecture Council, of which the ARB is a part. The Council consists of architects responsible for different domains (desktop standards, network, security, telecom, academic systems and others) and other stakeholders. [AI] Jim Hooper will provide the principles/standards, as well as the organizational chart, to the list. Overall, the EA department continues to mature, using some information developed at MIT and value chain materials developed at the University of Kansas and gathered at theEducause Southwest conference.
[AI] All -- Please post any set of principles or governance structures, or related documents, to the ITANA wiki.
[AI] Hébert Díaz-Floreswill post documents to the wiki concerning reorganization of Enterprise Architecture at UC-Berkeley.
**Taxonomy of Pain**
Hebert mentioned that the Berkeley campus is going through remapping of titles for staff. For the first time, the title of "IT Architect" will exist and job descriptions will include a reference to the need to coordinate/adhere to enterprise standards. This might provide some incentive to look at things enterprise-wide, rather than have narrow programming/analyst job descriptions.
St. Louis University has done something similar (called "broadbanding"), narrowing all titles to four, with each title having four levels.
Jim Phelps mentioned that titles are part of the solution, but the other half is related to performance reviews. He mentioned that Stanford has started doing performance reviews that take into account not just what someone does, but how they do it. For example, did the person act collaboratively, with good communication skills?
St. Louis, as part its title review, developed a competency framework. As you move up to the top level, level 4, the expectations get higher and higher. The Bredemeyer web site has a competency framework on its web site, as well. See http://www.bredemeyer.com/papers.htm. [AI] Jim Hooper will share information on SLU's broadbanding effort, particularly as it relates to architects. He will also share an assessment form used to document what people do in their jobs.
Jim Phelps reviewed that the last two calls have identified three carrots for project managers:
**Published Standards and Behavior**
There was a general discussion about how campuses handle political issues - say that someone brings in a vendor as a mandate and the vendor's system is 50 percent outside of standards.
St. Louis University's ARB system accommodates such circumstances, but just does so in terms of documentation. The ARB would document who made the decision and that the system is outside of standards. Wisconsin's approach is to acknowledge that there are sometimes budget and time constraints, but that, once the system is up, begin a conversation about how IT and the department can get things more aligned with university standards. If it involves a database, for example, IT will try to work with the department to begin migration to the standard database.
Tom Barton reviewed information about the attachments he provided to the list via email. The information suggests a broad viewpoint of systems, such as how a student information system works - what does it depend on and what depends on it? What are its main components and how do they interconnect. This helps in the decision-making process, as information architects understand how their decisions affect the student information system, for example, and how decisions about the student system affect others.
**Next Call is August 10, 2007**