At the beginning of 2008, JISC funded a pilot project which set out to explore the applicability of Enterprise Architecture (EA), a strategic management technique for enabling large companies to adapt to change, to the higher education operational context. Although largely unknown in the education sector, EA has been widely adopted over the last 15 years in the commercial world and in public sector organisations. EA provides an evolving, dynamic way of describing and aligning the functional aspects of an organisation: its people, activities, tools, resources and data/information, so that they work more effectively together to achieve the organisation’s business goals. Three universities – Cardiff, Liverpool John Moores and King’s College London – were the early adopter organisations that were considered suitably ‘EA ready’ to undertake a 12-month evaluation of EA in the context of their own institution. In particular they road-tested TOGAF, a non-proprietary framework for undertaking EA which has been developed by The Open Group. During the course of the project a small group of staff from each institution was exposed to the work of The Open Group, trained in the use of TOGAF and associated tools and techniques, and supported in the development of the first stages of an architecture for their institution.
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http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/services/techwatch/reports/earlyadopters.aspx
Date added: 03/23/2009
Enterprise Architecture