Recently we’ve been working with our Production Management team to improve the way we track which technologies need to be upgraded or retired. All the technologies we use to keep the University’s IT systems running come with an “end of life” date, i.e. a date after which the supplier will no longer support them.  This […]

A capability model is basically a list of the activities that an organisation does.  For example, a typical University does the following: Teaching and Learning Research Commercial Activity Strategy & Governance Support Services Within each of these, we can identify sub-categories. E.g. Teaching and Learning will include Curriculum Management, Student Attraction and Recruitment,  Teaching Delivery, […]

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been helping the Student Administration & Support programme by creating a diagram that shows how all the projects they have planned will fit together into a coherent applications architecture. The result is this rather colourful picture below.  Each colour refers to a different project.   The challenge was […]

We are completing the implementation of the Talend data integration tool.  In the first instance, we are using this to bring data from the Estates system into the University’s data warehouse.  It gives developers a graphical view of how the data flows from one system to the other, which greatly reduces the time taken to […]

Just as an architect defines the overall design of a building and the components that it can be built from, Enterprise Architecture (EA) designs the overall framework for the University’s Information Technology (IT) and the services that IT provides. EA is not just technology: it includes data, software, hardware, user experience, and also business organisation […]