Rabbit in the headlights?

Before the start of the conference (this afternoon) JISC and Surf organised a workshop on Enterprise Architecture (EA) in Higher Education (HE). The title of the workshop is 'doing EA. The dutch delegation participated in this workshop by giving two presentations as Case Studies in the morning. One from Richard Valkering on the road to EA at the University of Amsterdam and another by Pepe Wildeman on Governance and the role of the Architect. These contributions to the workshop, but also the presentations of three english cases, gave interesting insites in current practices of EA within HE.

Some of the interesting parts I found were:

- an organisation must be ready for EA, before they start. We also discussed a maturity model (simple version: explorer, adopter, implementer, achiever, practitioner)
- involving the business by starting with specific problems. Also called 'starting with a burning platform'. Also refered to as using the incremental approach, building up the big picture through individual projects.
- governance is about organising demand and supply
- take notice of the way we talk ('talk english). Avoid using 'architecture'-language
- If you don’t want to go anywhere, you don’t need a vehicle. And If you don’t know where you’re going, a vehicle won’t help (vehicle: governance and EA)
- we tend to respond as a ‘rabbit in headlights’ – we are not mature enough to make the right choices in these times of rapid changes

Later on this week I will come back on some of these points.

During the workshop the tweeds were 'flying around'. Maybe this will be the start for me to start twittering as well, who knows. I will keep you informed.