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About ITANA

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. ITANA also acts to help architects build their peer-group and find a mentor or become a mentor.

To learn more about ITANA, see the Itana Charter. The ITANA Capability Map shows the capabilities that form the core services for ITANA.

ITANA is supported by EDUCAUSE and Internet2.

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Governance


What does "ITANA" Stand for?

"When ITANA was first formed in 2007, the focus was on IT Architecture in Academia (IT Architect iN Academia – ITANA).

In 2012, we expanded the focus to include Enterprise Architects and Business Architects in Academia. We didn’t change the name to EBITANA because it is hard to say and the name ITANA was well known. So ITANA moved from standing for something to being just a name. I guess I should change the spelling to Itana now but I kind of like it all caps ITANA."

— Jim Phelps, Founder and Chair


History of Itana

Itana was founded on March 2, 2007.  Itana is jointly supported by EDUCAUSE and Internet2.  Itana started as a peer group for IT Architects in Academia (thus ITANA).  Its focus was to grow the pool of IT Architects.  The early charter (version 1.0) did not include any type of governance beyond the chair.  At first, Jim Phelps ran the group as CG Leader and Chair.  As the group gained steam and matured, he decided that he needed to formalize the activities of Itana and broaden the scope.  

 

In 2011, the Itana Rebranding Team formed to think about how architecture practice had changed and how Itana should shift to align with this change. The first thing the team did, was develop a capability map for Itana.  This called out the major deliverables and goals and activities of Itana.  It gave us a framework to focus work and working groups.  

Version 2 of the Charter was adopted at this time.  It called out specifically the capabilities and how Itana’s efforts support them.  The name was changed from ITANA to Itana to represent the fact that the focus of Itana now included Enterprise, Business and Technical Architects.  (See Leadership Lessons from Capability Mapping for the Jim’s take on how this helped him as chair and CG leader.)

In late 2013, a team was pulled together again to establish governance for Itana.  Itana had grown and Jim wanted to share the workload as well as plan for succession.  We presented this new Governance Body and Charter to the general membership on January 30th, 2014.  About the same time we published Version 3 of the Charter, we established a set of Itana Procedures.  

This formalized how we work within the Steering Committee, how we charge Working Groups, etc.