The goal is to try and come to a consensus of the levels
JJ - his approach / lenses come from ITSM / ITL service characteristics
Piet - not sure about the levels (based on notes from first meeting). Were the levels supposed to reflect the organization or the practice of EA itself?
Louis - The most mature level is where the EA program is tightly integrated with the organization's processes.
Dan - depending on the organization the scope of the EA program will be different (for example, if EA is part of central IT vs if EA is outside of IT and has broader impact to the university)
Louis - Believes that the EA maturity should be related to the integration of EA to the integration as a whole vs just central IT
Jim - It might be better to separate the EA maturity level from the reach of EA practice.
JJ - the scope EA and its maturity should be separate from each other
Dan - the scope vs EA maturity levels should be orthogonal from each other.
Piet - agrees with Louis in that EA should have a broad range / scope across the larger organization (the whole university)
Louis - the goal of EA should be to have a large impact to the organization as a whole.
Levels
Louis - take on the exercise was more about the practice of EA and its reach vs JJ and Dan's approach were more about the practice level itself
Dan - we can think of the levels as a way to assess an institution's EA practice and how to evaluate how to move to the next level of EA maturity (guidance on the path)
JJ - some institutions may choose to only go to a certain level of maturity for some characteristics.
Louis - depending on the industry or organization (politic situation) some characteristics / things may never work for an organization
Characteristics
JJ - should we be using an existing model?
Louis - the existing models & language is not accessible to higher ed? The existing documentation is not always great. The value is in keeping things simpler for higher ed. Maybe a simple page that can easily outline the levels compared to 35+ pages that the other models use to describe.
Piet - at the end we should measure how accessible the model is to higher ed. What if we could keep up the basic maturity grid very simple.
José - higher ed has special needs & considerations: research vs academia; centralized vs de-centralized IT
Louis - there should be a practice guide document that acts as a companion to the maturity levels. That document would answer the question: how did we get there?
Dan - sometimes we need to push back in the organization and show the trade-offs of moving to greater maturity levels. The model shouldn't be too opaque or hard to understand between the various levels.
Piet - the overview grid should show the big value proposition that EA provides. Somebody at the executive level should be able to consume the document and understand the value of the various stages of maturity.
Attributes
We're going based on the Piet's approaches since they are more general rather than being too fine grained
We need a straw man list so that we can have a starting point
JJ - we should also include / mention the deliveries as one of the attributes
Piet & Dan - it would be helpful to specify what tools & methods to use to work on deliverables
Action items
Louis - will work on a draft document to gather a list of Attributes for the Maturity Level and Practice Guide.
All - review the document that Louis creates and see if there are things that we see missing or want to suggest