The growing interdependency of our systems is driving us from a simple environment towards a highly complex environment. This is leading to a strategy of choosing from many good solutions where no perfect solution is obtainable. Enterprise Architecture (and the other architecture practices) can help sort those good solutions and help make sure the choice you make is along the path to desired future state.

My presentation on SOA in the Enterprise – Maturity is Key has been posted in a couple of places.
First, on the EDUCAUSE site:
EDUCAUSE – Enterprise 2009 Site
and at Slideshare.net:
Soa Maturity is the Key
View more presentations from jimphelps.

 
 
I’ve been working with our CIO on the I.T. strategic planning initiative.  At the same time, I’ve been working with the Technical Directors and Operational Directors on planning at the technology level.  They have been creating a map of what technologies are used to support our services.  I’ve had my head in the blue sky [...]

 
Brick diagrams are a strategic planning tool that I mentioned in passing in my ITANA talk at EDUCAUSE.  Since then, I’ve had several people ask for more information.  So here it is… more information.
 
Brick Diagrams are used by NIH in their Enterprise Architecture planning process.  You can see the NIH brick diagrams and their taxonomy [...]

Just had a hallway (okay, exhibit floor conversation) with Tom Black of Stanford University.  They have ideas on embedded enrollment functions in several places: inside their LMS, available via iPhone applications and elsewhere.  They would expose those enrollment functions as services then write to those services.  Interesting.  We also talked about orchestrating a flow, click [...]

Robert Handler of Gartner is presenting.
This is one of seven Key Initiatives for Enterprise Architecture.
“Failure to… change the behavior of others leads to failure itself”.  You must understand the people aspects and you must sell EA to succeed.
They had 600+ clients take a maturity survey to see where they are at in the area of [...]

Merri Beth Lavagnino – Privacy and Policy
Policy and privacy are really consideration of the human aspects and impacts of technology.  Policies are: strategic direction and operating philosophy (which are usually informal and cultural), Public and Institutional policies (these are both documented and usually legal documents).
Institutional policy – a statement that reflect the philosophies and [...]

Dave Gimpl:  Computing as a Service
Infrastructure for vaporware.  They are working on the infrastructure that enables cloud-computing.
Challenges in the data center:  rising costs of the operations, the explosion of data, the difficulty of deploying new application and services, the difficulty in managing complex virtual machine systems.  When you map the business processes, they map [...]

R.L. Bob doing the introduction: 
Advanced CAMP could mean to some people the advanced topics beyond just the basics.  Bob likes to think of it as the Advance Camp out in the wilderness where you are more likely to get caught in a blizzard, get shot and generally face the wilderness.
The theme that came out [...]

Indiana University
Completed a 10 year Strategic Plan which worked because they connected money to it.  You couldn’t get funding unless you showed how your project connected to one of the 71 strategic initiatives.  Completed a 10 year tactical Telecom Plan.  Instead of replacing 1/4 of the switches every year for four years, they [...]