It’s almost a truism that pretty much any system, strategy or plan can be improved by considering multiple points of view.   The more people who will use the system or be involved in the strategy, the more that wider consultation is likely to help. So consulting widely is generally a good thing – but it […]

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, […]

I always like to see what EA practices are doing at other universities, so I was interested to see that Columbia University’s EA team have a comprehensive web presence about their work.  Take a look!  Some of it is for Columbia staff only but quite a bit is public. https://confluence.columbia.edu/confluence/display/CUITEA/CUIT+Enterprise+Architecture+Home  

At a local meetup last week, Steven Bryen of Amazon gave a summary of the recent changes to the AWS cloud platform. This was a very useful reminder of what public cloud platforms offer us. Five or ten years ago, discussion about whether to move IT to the cloud was primarily about location – whether […]

Last week saw the first conference call for a new community of data governance professionals.  This is the brainchild of Sandra Cannon of the University of Rochester and Beth Prince-Bradbury of the Rochester Institute of Technology. As they work at neighbouring institutions,  Sandra and Beth found it interesting to compare notes about data governance in […]

Next year, students will have a better way to see their University finance information in the MyEd portal.  We’re taking advantage of the University’s “Core Systems” project, which will replace the Finance and HR system, to update the mechanism for connecting MyEd to the finance system. EA’s role in this is to help design how […]

In a complex, devolved, organisation like ours, data stewards can find it difficult to keep track of who is using their data.  Conversely, it can be difficult for people who need access to administrative data to find out how to request access. Bear in mind that we have to meet our moral and legal responsibilities […]

I’ve been spending a fair bit of my time recently writing or contributing to strategy documents. We have 12 of these in progress, covering topics such as Data Architecture; Identity, Authentication & Authorisation; Relationship Management; and Cloud. (I’m not writing all of these!). So, what is the point of these documents? One reason for writing […]

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a major exercise for all UK Universities. While most of the effort involves the collection and evaluation of research outputs, there are also some tasks required to register which academics were working for us and when. To produce this report, we collect information from our HR & Finance systems […]

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 […]