Case Studies

Descriptions of ongoing Enterprise Architecture programs in your university. How, Who, What, and any impacts the program has had/is having on your IT environment. Descriptions of specific projects that have been significantly impacted (positively) by the Enterprise Architecture program.

NOTE - THE VIDEO WORK WAS ABANDONED

Below are Case Studies on Enterprise Architecture / I.T. Architecture at various institutions.

Questions for the Video Interviews

About You and Your Institution
  1. What is your name and Title
  2. Tell us about your institution - how many students, public or private, do you have professional schools or a med school, do you have a large research focus?
  3. Tell me about your current architecture group - what is it called? where does it report?
How did your Architecture Group get started
  1. When was your group formed?
  2. What were the drivers behind the formation of your architecture group?
  3. Who was pushing for it?
  4. What did they hope to gain from having an Architecture practice in your organization?
  5. Where did it report when it was first formed? Has that changed?
  6. How were the goals of the architecture group communicated to the organization when it was formed? What was said about why you were creating an architecture group?
Tell us about the current practice on your campus?
  1. How would you define your architectural practice - Infrastructure Architecture, Information Technology Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, etc.
  2. Describe the keys activities of your group?
  3. How do you get the word out to the enterprise about your skills and your goals?
  4. Do you have a web site, wiki or other types of communication tools that you use to get the word out?
    1. If so, are they public? Would you share the links to the resources?
  5. Who do you work with? What departments on campus? What level of the organization do you engage with?
  6. What projects do you engage with (All Projects, Select Projects Across the Campus, Select Projects within a given department, etc.)
  7. Do you have a formal governance role or is it more advisory? If you do, tell us about that governance role.
  8. How do you engage with projects? Do you make recommendations? Do you add requirements? Do you act as a review board and project gate?
  9. What tools or techniques do you think work the best on your campus and why?
  10. Anything that didn't work that you were surprised at? Why didn't it work?
What maturity level do you think you practice at?
  1. Do you have wide buy-in to the goals of the architecture group?
  2. Does campus at large see value in following an architectural approach? Has that changed in the past few years? If so, how has it changed and why? What were the drivers for that change?
  3. Do you have a formal, well-defined enterprise architecture or architectural plan that is widely adopted or accepted?
    1. If so, how did you get there? What was the process used to define and adopt the architecture? What barriers did you have to overcome? What helped you along the way?
    2. If not, is this on your roadmap for the near future? What stands in the way? What is helping you move this forward?
  4. Do you have other comments about the maturity of architecture as it is practiced on your campus?
  5. Are their tools that you use in your practice that you find useful (e.g. Enterprise Architecture tools, communicaion tools, planning tools or artifacts)?
What about the organizational model that you use for your architecture group?
  1. You've talked about where you report and what it is called.
  2. How large is the group?
  3. Do you have specialists in the group or do the architects act on any project? Has this changed?
  4. Do you have architects out in functional areas like in the Registrar's Office, in HR, etc. (more of a federated architecture model)?
  5. Do you have architects at various technical levels in the organization (network, application architects, database architects)?
    1. If so, do you bring them together to work on larger architectural issues in a formal way?
Other organizational aspects
  1. What other centers of excellence or other governance groups do you have that relate to how you do architecture?
    1. Business Process analysis groups
    2. Portfolio Management groups
    3. Project Management groups
    4. others?
  2. Does architecture affect the budget and planning process? If so, how? Is the connection formalized or more informal?
Wish List
  1. If you could hire an expert to help out with your architecture practice, who would you hire (role not the individual)?
  2. If you could have one campus-wide mind-shift, what would it be?
  3. If you could implement one enterprise-wide practice, what would you implement first?
Any other comments?
  1. On your organization?
  2. On you group?
  3. On your practice?

NOTE: BELOW ARE THE OLD QUESTIONS PRIOR TO THE REWRITE ABOVE.

I left them on the page for reference.

Add your Case Study to this page as a child* or an attachment.

Start your title "Case Study: institutions name" without the quotes.

Here are questions that you should think about when you write your case study.

Getting Started
  1. How long ago was your group formed?
  2. What were the drivers that caused the group to be created?
  3. What impacts did re-organizations or big ERPs have on the way Architecture engages?
Organization
  1. What do you call your Architecture group? Is it Enterprise Architecture or something else?
  2. What level is it practiced in the institution - at the executive level or just in IT?
  3. Does your model have subject matter experts spread across the organization or just a central group?
    1. Federated architecture model as an example?
    2. See the Facets document for other Architecture Organization models
Doing Architecture
  1. How do you engage with projects and people (what is your engagement model)?
    1. See the Facets document for Architecture engagement models
  2. Did you provide some kind of training to enterprise on what is the Architecture group you are creating?
    1. Did you do one-on-one meetings to explain the role of architecture?
    2. Did you hope they would learn by osmosis and example?
  3. How did you communicating the role of Architecture to campus at large before you implemented it?
  4. How about after you implemented it? Has this changed over the years?
  5. Tools that you use to manage this stuff
Other expertise
  1. Do you use business systems analysts to model the business processes and formalize the business process? This has a lot to do with technical requirements. This is not strategic or priority setting.
  2. What other centers of excellence or governance groups do you have that relate to how you do architecture?
    1. Business Process analysis groups
    2. Portfolio Management groups
    3. Project Management groups
    4. others?
Other facets of strategic planning and management
  1. Service Level Management - how does that fit in? How do you set service levels from maintenance of the infrastructure to end-user services like enrollment?
  2. How does budget and funding fit with architecture processes?
Bio/Demo info
  1. Basic bio/demo description of your campus (Name, # of students, public/private, professional schools, medical school, business model (multi-campus, federated, etc), etc)
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