Kings College London Enterprise Architecture Project
The primary aim of this project was to pilot an Enterprise Architecture approach to the research domain within Kings College London, and in particular to apply and evaluate the TOGAF Architecture Development Method.
Executive Summary
The Kings Colllege London Enterprise Architecture Project (KEAP) formed part of a larger project at King’s College London to develop a research infrastructure for the College. The aim of KEAP itself was to evaluate the utility of an Enterprise Architecture approach to this larger project, looking specifically at the research domain in the institution. To this end, the project team applied the TOGAF framework, and in particular the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM), to the domain.
The project team’s conclusions about TOGAF were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, we felt that it was too heavyweight, and at the same time too generic; on the other hand, if it was used in a lightweight fashion, it proved useful as a broad framework and vocabulary for representing our architectural work. Subsequent work with the Archimate standard was more promising, although more practical evaluation is required. Overall, however, we concluded that the Enterprise Architecture approach can be a fruitful one.
Recommendations
The project would make the following recommendations to JISC:
- There is a pressing need for some detailed worked examples and case studies for EA/TOGAF. The case studies from this programme are a start, but more detailed and longer-term studies (including a full set of outputs) would be very helpful. JISC could take the lead in assembling and making available such studies in some information repository, possibly in liaison with SURF in the Netherlands.
- One possible approach to (1) would be to include specifically EA models, such as Archimate models or documentation thereof, into the JISC Innovation Base or a similar knowledgebase.
- The one-year period of the projects in the JISC EA programme wasn’t a natural period for evaluating fully the application of EA approaches in projects that are essentially longer term. One way in which JISC could improve its support for EA in higher education, and indeed gather the sort of information described in (1), may be to set up a support project, perhaps along the lines of the JISC Repositories Support Project.
- Although there was a general movement towards the BizzDesign Architect tool, this was based partly (though not entirely) on the fact that BizzDesign staff had given detailed input to programme workshops. Given that it was difficult to carry a full comparative analysis of the available tools, it would be advantageous if JISC were to fund an objective, comparative analysis of EA tools against transparent and well-defined criteria.