Doing Enterprise Architecture
At the beginning of 2008, JISC funded a pilot project which set out to explore the applicability of Enterprise Architecture (EA), a strategic management technique for enabling large companies to adapt to change, to the higher education operational context. Although largely unknown in the education sector, EA has been widely adopted over the last 15 years in the commercial world and in public sector organisations. EA provides an evolving, dynamic way of describing and aligning the functional aspects of an organisation: its people, activities, tools, resources and data/information, so that they work more effectively together to achieve the organisation’s business goals.
Three universities – Cardiff, Liverpool John Moores and King’s College London – were the ‘early adopter’ organisations that were considered suitably ‘EA ready’ to undertake a 12-month evaluation of EA in the context of their own institution. In particular they ‘roadtested’ TOGAFTM, a non-proprietary framework for undertaking EA which has been developed by The Open Group. During the course of the project a small group of staff from each institution was exposed to the work of The Open Group, trained in the use of TOGAF and associated tools and techniques, and supported in the development of the first stages of an architecture for their institution. The pilot projects also shared emerging best practice with SURF, the Dutch equivalent of JISC. During the process they were asked to continually reflect on the process and hone the lessons learned as a way of providing feedback from the ‘bleeding edge’ to the wider community.
The overall purpose was to try and answer the question: Can EA be fruitfully used by higher or further education? This programme also marks a new phase of intra-JISC working: the longitudinal case studies produced by the pilot projects have been incorporated into this Early Adopter Study – the first in a new series of reports from TechWatch, JISC’s technology horizon scanning service. Where TechWatch’s existing remit is to anticipate and speculate, the study will demonstrate some of the technology-related futures work that JISC undertakes.
The aim of this is to encourage greater curiosity about futures thinking in order to stimulate more widespread action. As well as documenting the Enterprise Architecture pilot process, this study provides an introduction to the key concepts of EA and TOGAF.
Further TechWatch work in EA includes a high level synthesis and analysis of the programme’s work.
Download a copy of this report below, or order a hard copy by sending your name, job title and full postal address to
publications@jisc.ac.uk