June 2007

I've noticed that Google has been delivering a lot of hits to this blog. Welcome to all of you who've landed here looking for information about Enterprise Architecture!

I wish I could say we were an authoritative source on EA, but we are learning. As you may have surmised, we are a small "EA" Shop at a Midwestern University. None of us are experienced EAs, but we have been exposed to some really great concepts through the Bredemeyer EA workshop referenced earlier in the blog.

We're starting small, and are currently assisting the ITS division at SLU with some documentation and process issues. We euphemistically have called this our "getting IT's house in order" phase. One of the key pieces we did off the bat was to form an Architecture Council, which I chair. This is comprised of 19 domain or "functional" architects from throughout ITS. We use this forum as an information-exchange opportunity, fostering "architecture think" over "project think" or any other kind of "think." This is a challenge as "architecture" as a practice is fairly new here.

The council has made some strides in documenting our de facto technical standards in a document that we call the Product Item Master, or "PIM." This document is a work in progress of course and exists as a multi-tabbed Excel spreadsheet. The primary purpose of the PIM is to give us a basis for managing the "lifecycle" of our technical products, which hasn't always been done very effectively here.

The council has also proposed several "variability reduction" proposals. Only a few have been fleshed out, but all will be formed into a business case document that will be presented to our CIO. One in particular represents the consolidation and management of 10+ undermanaged MS-SQL servers in our environment.

Again, this isn't EA in the truest sense, but I do feel we are setting a business context and building relationships with business decision makers here that will be needed if we ever do "real EA."

If any of you are just starting out in EA, please leave your comments and experiences.

More next time on our forming "Architecture Review Board" or ARB!

jh