I ran across a phrase that reminded me of "the spice must flow" line that rings in the head of any fan of Dune.

enabling the flow of data in such a way as to make its location immaterial

What a great way to describe our recently proposed architecture principle relating to data:

Leveraged Data - Data is an enterprise asset that should be leveraged across the organization over time.

The Architecture Working Group has completed its first draft of Enterprise IT Architecture Principles.  The work took just over one month, and we really do feel that we have a good list of primary principles that can strategically guide future decisions.

The principles will now be reviewed by the Business Architecture Review Team, and then the IMT Cabinet.

AWG has set out to define a logically consistent and easy to understand set of principles that guide the engineering of APU's information systems and technology infrastructure.  By establishing overarching principles, IMT can better interpret the details of daily decisions in light of an overall strategy.

One thing that has become clear to AWG, is that we can't be everywhere at once.  We can't be on every project team and aren't always able to review project designs and outputs.  These activities keep us rather busy, and movement toward a formalized written Enteprise Technology Architecture has been slower than expected.  We have determined that most beneficial output that we can achieve in short order, are "Architecture Principles" which can be applied across the design decision activities within IMT.

We will do this by considering industry direction, and nailing down the Big Rules that are consistent with our strategy. These should be broad enough to apply to a range of technologies, and stated in clear enough business terms that they can be communicated effectively to both management and user communities.  What we should end up with is something similar to the Seven Pillars of Architecture.

 
The seventh annual Educause Current IT Issues Survey Report highlights two areas which I have been following.  First, Security & Identity Management (IdM) rose to the top, displacing IT Funding as the most strategic issue needing to be resolved for future success.  Second, Portfolio Development & Management was a new category this year and immediately received attention, appearing among the top-ten issues expected to become more significant in the coming year.  Other issues I have been tracking of late were also covered, including ERP, Academic Alignment, and Web Services (SOA). 

Here are some of the highlights from the report, with additional resources referenced at the end.  Overall, this report is a treasure trove of Higher Education IT strategic thinking:

IMT's list of supported browsers has not changed in several years. We have been supporting Netscape since its inception, and Internet Explorer since it rose to popularity. Much has changed in the operating system and web browser market, and its time to re-evaluate which browsers we should support.

IMT's Architecture Working Group (AWG) was asked to conduct a review and make a recommendation. In order to attempt a comprehensive and objective review, we developed standard Browser Evaluation Criteria which can be used for current and future evaluations.  We then conducted reviews of all current and candidate browsers in Fall 2005, and produced a recommendation.

The recommendation is being reviewed  by IMT Cabinet.  If approved, it will then go to UIMC for review.

Executive Summary (pdf) |  Read the Full Report online  | Printable Version

As the infrastructure maintenance and PC support operations mature, an IT department must continue to innovate. Its value proposition is the packaging and distribution of meaningful services aligned with the business needs. It includes partnering and consulting with customer groups in innovative spaces like collabortion, web publishing, and self-service. A higher level information creation and distribution channel needs to be created to support rapid assembly of reusable components. If given tools, advanced user groups should be able to build communities which can meet their own lightweight application needs, filling gaps that a centralized transaction system is not meant to.

Will IT Departments Still Exist in 2010? ...

In The Continuing Disappearance of Document Management, James Till, vice president of Marketing for Xythos Software Inc., describes how the advent of Open Standards such as HTTP, SSL and WebDAV have shaken up the traditional Document Management Industry, as well as call to question complicated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite approaches to handling content within your organization.

I too have been stepping back from previous declarations of ECM as the solution, only because the implication is that an ECM strategy equals and ECM product. This is not always the case. In the emerging agile architecture environment, simple solutions that act as a bridges between personal productivity software running on desktops and distributed storage and workflow might fit the bill....

Identity and Access Management: Technological Implementation of Policy (PDF), provides another great overview of the identity management opportunity. One of the things I appreciated the most about this paper is the clarity of the business case based on "other than IT" perspectives. Besides the amazingly effective Ann West, nsf middleware and nmi-edit outreach coordinator, the article was written by Jeff von Munkwits-Smith, the University Registrar at the University of Connecticut.

A functional definition - Identity and Access Management:

• Integrates all the pertinent information about people from multiple authoritative source systems, reconciles the accounts, and joins identities together under one campus unique identity.
• Processes and transforms information about people including their affiliations with the institution, resource access etc. and pushes out and stores the information where it can be of use to applications.
• Acts as a focus for implementation of policy concerning visibility and privacy of identity information and entitlement policies across the systems.

Some more take-away notes and highlights below...

Clever slogan in the title of a recent article, Authentication - The Power of Who from Campus-Technology Magazine.

Identity Management is all about an organization knowing who its constituents are. I thought the article was a bit random, and incorrectly labeled as all about "athentication" since authorization and provisioning topics are covered. However, it is a good overview of several of the approaches that schools are taking to meet the opportunity. So from a case study perspective its worth a read...