When someone is setting up an enterprise architecture practice, one piece of advice that is often given is to look for quick wins in order to demonstrate the value of the investment in EA.  This makes sense.  Indeed, I gave that advice in a webinar earlier this month. That said, anyone familiar with architecture knows […]

The UCISA Enterprise Architecture group has started a series of meetings to share best practice, with the long-term aim of establishing a “new to EA” training resource.  The first round of these “Architecture Exchange” meetings was last week, and future sessions will run monthly starting in May. I was glad to contribute to one of […]

Our data warehouse is a record of data over time.   It allows us to answer two types of question about the past: What do we know now about a time in the past? What did we know then? It’s the second of these that is a bit tricky.  As with the study of history, what […]

The UCISA Enterprise Architecture Group have announced the release of version 3 of the Higher Education Reference Models (HERM).   These models are developed and curated by a working group of the Enterprise Architecture Community of Practice within the Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT), with contributions and support from the UK, Europe […]

At the start of a new year, it’s traditional to set out some goals for the year ahead.  Apart from blogging more often, my main goal for the year is to further improve links between the Enterprise Architecture team (that’s us), the Digital Strategy team, and the Strategic Change team. The aim of enterprise architecture […]

Our colleagues in the Strategic Reporting team are creating some great dashboards about the university’s staff population, based on the work we’ve done with them to provide data via the data warehouse.  These dashboards have been favourably received by several executive-level boards.  It’s good to see the investment in the data warehouse showing its value. […]

The University is currently planning a comprehensive review of our curriculum.  The Curriculum Transformation project is reviewing the shape, design, and delivery of the curriculum, with the aim of making it easier for students to tailor and complete their degree, and of reducing the workload for teaching staff.  That project is engaging academic staff and […]

I’m really pleased that we have reached a hugely significant milestone in our devlopment of a fully-fledged, cross-domain, strategic business intelligence (BI) capability.   Enterprise Architecture have been working closely with the University’s Strategic Reporting team, and we both have new staff starting on open-ended contracts in our respective BI teams.  We are supporting reports for […]

Late last year, we went live with a feed of HR data from our central systems to a local system in the University’s School of Informatics.  This is now being duplicated for the School of Biological Sciences, and feeds to other schools are planned. These data feeds are needed because the old source of this […]

This month has seen slow ans steady progress on several fronts.  We don’t have a big shiny reveal to boast about, just incremental work. Much of my attention has been on staffing changes, as the funding for the data warehouse team is shifting from fixed-term to open-ended contracts.  This means that some members of staff […]