ITANA Meeting Minutes - March 3, 2011

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Attending
Jim Phelps, University of Wisconsin-Madison (chair)
Scott Fullerton - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Piet Niederhausen, Georgetown University
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Rich Stevenson, University of Maryland
Ron Theilan, University of Chicago
Ann Kitalong-Will, Internet2 (scribe)

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Action Items

(AI) - Jim - will put up the slides from the last S2S conference call.

(AI) - Piet - will post the questions for the Enterprise Workflow survey for review.

(AI) - Jim - will organize an agenda committee for the Educause F2F.

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Forrester Report Out (Jim)

Overall, it was a good meeting. One panelist on the opening keynote discussed how they support CIOs and EAs. He discussed 3 paths:

1) Rises in practice and importance, picking up the role of business architecture, matures and becomes a driver who owns the planning from strategy on down through technology.

2) EA becomes marginalized. In this model, EA becomes marginalized, business gets their own business architects who lead a lot of the business decisions. EAs get last pass on strategy and planning by looking at the impact on IT side and how do we carry it out

Business empowerment trend seems to be driving this trend.

3) EA crash and burn - IT is seen as not responsive to business needs. Business side adopts off-the-shelf solutions w/o consulting IT, and don’t see the need for EAs in business.

The panelist asked 2 questions:

• Over the past 20 years, which IT roles have been less successful than architecture. EAs the best and brightest, why aren’t we able to define our roles better? why does EA have such low success rate?
• Over the last 20 years, which IT roles have innovated successfully? Does the EA have to be a distinct role?

Open discussion / some points to consider:

• Maybe the things EAs work on are disciplines that everybody should have as part of their IT job. A really good architect eventually makes everyone think architecturally. EA is really about influence, thought-processes and creativity vs. toolkits, etc.

• Innovation, in terms of technical innovation, seems irrelevant. Is innovation a measure of effectiveness? The implication here is that innovation is a measure of effectiveness. As individuals we’re adaptave, as a discipline, EAs are changing scope of engagement from IT to enterprise. Ability to adapt seems to be a better way to measure effectiveness rather than innovation.

• Efficacy as an EA is more about engaging more with end-users and campus campus business partners: adapting engagement model. Enterprise Architecture is often misunderstood by campus business partners.

• It’s important to remember that partners don’t come to you because you’re a business architect, they come to you because they know you and trust you. It’s more about the relationship than your technical knowledge.

• Budgets are an issue: abrupt budget reductions, the concern here is that architects will be seen as extraneous in new economic challenges.

• How does EA add value? Perhaps by enhancing maturity.

• How do you quantify the value of what EA can do?
  • efficiencies.
  • reduce cost to university
  • risk management
  • audit

• Potential partners EAs can work with - internal audit, executives, etc. For example, the EA could act as a liaison with executives and general council dealing with compliance, etc.

• If what EAs do has real value, then it will take place somewhere in the organization, whether in IT or whether by EA, it will get done somewhere Efficiency studies: it's easy from a distance to say EAs don't seem to obviously contribute to the supply chain, therefore it’s an unnecessary cost. Universities particularly are adaptive, even w/o the architects, there will still be architecture happening. But the benefits of a dedicated EA will be lost. It may be a situation where you don’t know what the benefits are until they’re gone

• How do you measure the benefits of what you do? Have you built the relationships with leadership so tey think your valuable just because
  you’re you? Universities are adaptive, and can build processes around individuals.

• The difference between Enterprise and Business Architects is that Business Architects want the high-level sketch; they don’t care about
  the detailed map just want to know high-value areas to invest. The EA can add a technical understanding to the architecting.

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Educause F2F

Ron - WSO2 interest? rapidly deploying web svcs. primary committers for apache access2 project. Is access really appropriate for web
services?

Details for the ITANA sessions:

• Day-long F2F prior to Educause. We need a head-count prior to the meeting.
• 1-hour constituent group meeting during the conference to use for report-out and outreach.

The question was asked: Does the F2F require conference registration? or can we just come to the F2F?

(AI) - Jim - will organize an agenda committee for the Educause F2F.

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Next Call - Thursday, March 17, 2011
2:00 p.m. (EST) / 1:00 p.m. (CST) / noon (MST) / 11:00 a.m. (PST)