What with responding to the pandemic, moving to working from home, and in my case covering for a colleague, we’ve been even more lax than usual in blogging here.  So here’s a post with an update on the strategy documents that I posted about in the autumn.

https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/enterprisearchitecture/2019/09/09/why-strategy/

These strategies cover our central business systems, which fall under our “core systems” programme.  For the most part, they have a technical focus that applies across and beyond individual systems. For example, the application rationalisation strategy sets a goal for reducing the number of different systems that we have to maintain, and suggests an approach for preventing further proliferation of systems in the future.   Similarly, the data retention and archiving strategy applies to data held in any system.

As I mentioned in my previous post, a key part of creating strategies is the discussion and consultation that goes into them.  In a couple of weeks, we will be presenting several strategies to a special combined meeting of the college computing professionals’ advisory groups, which should give us some valuable feedback on how the strategies will impact the academic areas of the University.  We’ve already done this for a couple of them and the experience suggests that the consultation was both appreciated and valuable.  The main difficulty is finding enough time for everyone involved to be able to contribute!

There is far more to write about than I can fit in a single article.  Each strategy is worth a blog post (or even several) on its own.  So, for now, I’ll just list the topics of all the strategies that we’re currently working on.  If you have any queries about individual strategies, please let me know.

• Infrastructure strategies
  • Cloud Computing
  • Identity, Authentication, Authorisation
• Data strategies
  • Data Architecture
  • Data Retention and Archiving
  • Reporting & Analytics
• Application strategies
  • Application Integration
  • Application Rationalisation
  • Document Management
  • Relationship Management
• Vendor management strategies
  • IT Vendor Management
  • Software Testing & Acceptance

Core Systems Strategies / Enterprise Architecture by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0