AWG - Working Toward Architectural Principles for APU

The Data Must Flow

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:37:19 -0700

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.

First Draft of "IT Architecture Principles" Completed

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:57:58 -0700

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 Works Toward Overarching IT Architecture Principles

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 10:31:07 -0700

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.

Current IT Issues Report: IdM and Portfolio Management float to the surface

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:04:36 -0700

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:

AWG Reviews Supported Web Browsers

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 14:49:12 -0800

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

Connecting the Dots

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 18:54:44 -0700

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? ...

ECM or Something Simpler?

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 12:53:16 -0700

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....

IdM - Technological Implementation of Policy

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 12:36:56 -0800

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...

The Power of Who

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 10:12:21 -0800

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...

After 5 years, Firefox turns 1.0

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:26:53 -0800

Well its finally happened, Mozilla Firefox has hit 1.0! Its getting quite a bit of news coverage, so there is probably not a whole lot more to say here. I will say though, it has come a long way... far surpassing its heritage. If you have been along for the Web ride from early on, you will have realized that browsers started off as simple rather efficient tools, but quickly became bloated and yet lacked real innovation. Firefox 1.0 is lean and mean 4.7MB, and a completely different experience from the early Mozilla days, or even the repackaged Netscape 6/7 series. You may remember downloads of the later Netscape series as well surpassing 30MB. Until Firefox, Mozilla's browser code still had fragments of the original Netscape code which was open sourced in 1998...

Desktop Search from Google

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:49:56 -0700

Today, I was talking to a friend, and he told me about this new Beta utility from Google, and I thought, wow, these guys come up with new cool stuff everyday! This one is called Google Desktop at http://desktop.google.com. Basically, it indexes your whole computer including your files, email, web history (including secure web content), and makes them available in a snap through a "localhost" website on your machine. I haven't had it on my laptop for too long yet, so not everything is indexed, but from what I've seen so far, you can search for ANYTHING on your computer in snap ... (literally).

Reducing Complexity, the Discipline

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:01:44 -0800

A recent article in CIO Magazine, raises a valid point about the communicated purpose of Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Architecture can be an overwhelmingly complex undertaking if approached comprehensively from the top down. In order to avoid getting lost in the matrix of the Zachman Framework, EA should be attached to solving business problems, and according to GM CTO Tony Scott, business peers shouldn't even know its called "enterprise architecture".

The goal of EA is to Reduce Complexity, not increase it. EA is described simply as the mapping of business requirements and processes to IT systems which support them. But its not a technology platform, or a one time mapping. It is a discipline. We don't sell disciplines, we practice them.

The EA discipline is practiced when key problem areas, inefficient processes, legacy systems, those things which can no longer be directly connected with the business need are re-evaluated. The goal is to provide agility, reduce complexity, so that the organization can "change the business rules" when need dictates without reinventing the IT systems that support them.

Often IT is viewed as slowing down the advancement of the organization, rather than enabling it. Strategic alignment has been thwarted by the increasing complexity of ad hoc computing solutions. IT is too busy just keeping the plethora of individual PC's, components, and nich products running. It seems like products are always being added, never removed. Clearly re-alignment is necessary, discipline is the key.

Identity Management Roadmap

Mon, 02 May 2005 17:23:11 -0700

I have posted the Identity Management Roadmap, which is an attempt to break down the broader Identity Management initiative into projects which could be achieved if given appropriate focus and resources over the next year or so. These tasks represent our success in implementing more of the Identity Management Architecture in order to provide APU with complete identity lifecycle management. You'll notice that in order to be successful both business process and technical issues need to be addressed. The overlap of boxes represents the concurrent nature of the tasks, with progress being made on infrastructure while policy and workflow are being refined. This concurrence can be seen in NSF Middleware Initiatives's Enterprise Directory Implementation Roadmap. The breakdown is not only based on concurrence but also considers that each of these projects would be handled by slightly different teams with distributed project leadership. I think that this approach would be more successful than a single large monolithic multi-phased project. There will of course need to be coordination between projects, with overall leadership provided by an iniative sponsor. I would love feedback on this roadmap so that we can procede to write project requests for each of these areas. The future of IMT's ability to deliver transformational self-service as outlined in the IMT Strategic Priorities, is dependent on APU's facilities to manage identity.

Playing Catchup with Jabber Summer News

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:17:07 -0700

It appears as though more of the industry is waking up to Presence Being the Killer App. With Jabber Inc. being a leader in this space. Jabber, Inc., which develops real-time communication server platforms for developing IM and presence-enabled applications, is fashioning its XCP platform into an application server of sorts not only for presence, but also for messaging, routing and XML-application development. In September, it will release a publish-and-subscribe technology called Information Broker for pushing content out to users.

Interesting too, is the increase in adoption of Enterprise IM (EIM) and consequent integration of presence in business applications. A recent Osterman Research study shows 44% of companies use IM with business applications, up from 21% just three years ago. Furthermore, 34% of users have standardized on an internally run IM platform, up from 24% just two years ago.

Jabber Inc. is has announced new versions of its commercial Jabber server and client.

ETA Model Draft 0.5

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 16:53:09 -0800

I have updated the Enterprise Technical Architecture Model.

Most of the changes were related to clearing up the confusion as to what this model is not.

This model is not a complete list of vendor branded components that we will use to build every solution IMT delivers. It is a high level model that abstracts a desired agility in our systems and covers the delivery infrastructure for our applications. It emphasizes principles, open protocols, and web based delivery to enable transformational self-service. Each of these areas will eventually need detailed sub-architectures to better define solution patterns, combinations of components used in various scenarios. Different requirements need different solution patterns, and no single list of building blocks can ever be pre-established for every potential problem domain.