Architecting EA – EA Practice 2.0
In 2019, the EA team focused on building the EA practice maturity. We called this effort EA Practice 2.0. Much of what you see on this site came out of this effort, along with our quarterly planning process, the new EA Consulting Service, the new EA Charge, and the EA Board. We started by laying out all of the things that we wanted to improve over the course of the year. We then aligned these deliverables to the Itana EA Maturity Model for Higher Education. Each item was scored as a gap (shown in red), needing to be updated (yellow) and good/done (green). At the start of each quarter, we identified goals and then set aside time to work on EA Practice 2.0 each sprint.
What is still left undone? A lot of work around Delivery of Enterprise Architecture to campus partners. One part is focused on building out training in EA practices and methods. This is an important “force multiplier” for the EA team as well as an opportunity to provide professional development, coaching and mentoring to others who are interested in architectural practices.
The second part is focused around reference architectures. We want to revisit the EA Principles and update them via a set of crowdsourcing sessions. Along with updated principles, we would develop a new Scorecard to help people assess their current state or plans to see where they might need to re-architect. A critical part of the success of these two efforts is connecting the Principles and Scorecard to what we call a “SME Map”. The SME Map would connect people, who have questions about a principle or who had a low score in the scorecard, to the right group or person to talk to for help and more information.
Finally, there are new Guardrails being developed for UWFT. These need a place to live and process / governance to maintain them. The Guardrails tie to the Principles and to Implementation Guides. All of this needs a home, clear training and outreach, and management to make it useful. The goal is to make the guardrails useful not only UWFT but for campus as a whole.
A lot was accomplished in 2019. We turned a lot of items green and published a lot of V1 versions of different artifacts. I hope to accomplish as much in 2020.