Last week saw the first conference call for a new community of data governance professionals.  This is the brainchild of Sandra Cannon of the University of Rochester and Beth Prince-Bradbury of the Rochester Institute of Technology. As they work at neighbouring institutions,  Sandra and Beth found it interesting to compare notes about data governance in […]

Next year, students will have a better way to see their University finance information in the MyEd portal.  We’re taking advantage of the University’s “Core Systems” project, which will replace the Finance and HR system, to update the mechanism for connecting MyEd to the finance system. EA’s role in this is to help design how […]

In a complex, devolved, organisation like ours, data stewards can find it difficult to keep track of who is using their data.  Conversely, it can be difficult for people who need access to administrative data to find out how to request access. Bear in mind that we have to meet our moral and legal responsibilities […]

I’ve been spending a fair bit of my time recently writing or contributing to strategy documents. We have 12 of these in progress, covering topics such as Data Architecture; Identity, Authentication & Authorisation; Relationship Management; and Cloud. (I’m not writing all of these!). So, what is the point of these documents? One reason for writing […]

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a major exercise for all UK Universities. While most of the effort involves the collection and evaluation of research outputs, there are also some tasks required to register which academics were working for us and when. To produce this report, we collect information from our HR & Finance systems […]

Graham Snow and David Gee of the University of Hertfordshire have been building a rather cool system that automatically records the IT applications and servers they run, along with the relationships between them.  Recently, they presented a webinar about their work to the UCISA EA community. They can use this so show graphs of which […]

Two very different events last week both raised two important points, from different angles: relationships matter, and assessing value in a University is difficult The two excellent keynote presentations at the University’s second learning & teaching conference addressed these topics head on.  Peter Felton spoke about how we should encourage more interactions between staff & […]

We have a new website!  In this website, we aim to explain to members of University staff what we do and how we can help people with their projects and services.  In addition, the website has subsections about University data, Application integration, and relationship management (CRM), as well as information about how to join our […]

Following a pilot ingest of organisational hierarchy data, we are now loading fresh building space and building maintenance data in the new Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), and presenting it in a range of 22 reports. Once the testing phase is over, the reports will be available in BI suite. The data is extracted from the […]

There are only three of us in the Enterprise Architecture section, yet we manage to help a wide range of activities.  I was reminded this week of just how much good we do, when I ran the annual development reviews for my two architects  – Wilbert the Data Architect and Jason the CRM Architect.  I’m […]