Version 2.0, Adopted December 8, 2011

Background

Enterprise, Business and Technical Architecture has grown in importance as complexity has increased. Universities facing pressures to eliminate wasteful duplication and to ensure sound stewardship of resources are looking to standardize and streamline delivery of processes. Solutions are now orchestrated across technical silos and business units. They are highly integrated to carry out complex business processes. Security risks are compounded and distributed with every file transfer and every integration point. The cost and complexity of maintaining, upgrading and integrating systems has risen. The need for enterprise-wide principles, business process driven designs and holistic requirements is driving the need for architected solutions. The need to implement new strategic initiatives quickly is driving the need for a well architected organization.

Mission

ITANA is focused on developing the skills, tools and a suite of resources to assist institutions with their enterprise, business and technical architectural needs. ITANA serves higher education while drawing from other architecture groups (The Open Group, Microsoft, etc.) and vendors as needed.

Goals

(See the ITANA Capability Map)

There are four strategic goals for ITANA:

Practice Development

  • Provide a space for new architects to get their feet wet, ask questions, get help and guidance.
  • Share the workload on large projects among several institutions and, by doing so, deliver a more universal solution.
  • Develop common artifacts and practices that are useful to many institutions rather than hidden away in a single institution.
  • Share representative architectures and approaches to common problems for others to learn from and build upon.

Knowledge Transfer

  • Aid in knowledge transfer to build architects who are well founded in their skills.
  • Provide a pool of expertise from a range of institutions and areas of interest for other projects that are looking for participation and input.
  • Build a repository of artifacts that is available to architects across academia.

Community Building

  • Provide a point of contact for other groups regarding the practice of architecture and act as a conduit for collaboration on architectural efforts with vendors.
  • Link architects to their peers, mentors and partners at their own institutions as well as across higher education.
  • Bring architects together virtually via conference calls, webinars, social media and for Face2Face meetings.

Outreach

  • Increase the awareness of the role of Enterprise, Business and Technical Architects in the enterprise and their value to the organization.
  • Act as a liaison to other groups of interest such as other architecture groups, middleware groups and software projects.

Activities

Meetings

  • Provide and support a variety of meetings including conference calls, longer and more focused Screen2Screen webinars and Face2Face meetings.

Instruction

  • Provide educational opportunities via on-line learning or Face2Face meetings.
  • Create a series of on-line tutorials focused on best practices in architecture.

Publications

  • Produce a variety of published artifacts ranging from wiki pages and a web posting and more formal publications.
  • Publish artifacts focused on the development of “common practice” include: frameworks, base requirement documents, common artifacts and best practices.
  • Support of professional development by sharing: lessons-learned, success and failure stories, reviews and assessments of various software packages.

Collaboration Spaces and Social Networking

  • Create spaces for collaboration between architects including a wiki, websitand web presence in many social networks.
  • Drive outreach within Higher Education – this includes activities explaining the role of architects in higher education, how various institutions have implemented architecture and lessons learned.
  • Provide broader outreach and education outside of Higher Education – this includes outreach to enterprise, business and technical architects outside of higher education and product architects for vendors who serve higher education.
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