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 […]

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 […]

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 […]