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 […]

I’m currently experimenting with various types of modelling diagrams, with a goal of finding which work best for us.  But what do I mean by “best”, and who do I mean by “us”? The original profession of architects, i.e. the people who design buildings, have been creating 3-D models for centuries.   Minu shows some examples […]

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 […]

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 […]