WOU Enterprise Architecture Kick-Off
Current Context
Your instructor, Chris Brooks, is the CIO for Western Oregon University (not really, but he is for the purposes of this assignment). You are the chief architect for this project. We will use the EA3 framework and methodology (from the text). Do not be concerned (yet) with governance.
While there are a wide range of IT projects that are important to the university, I’ve been tasked by President Fuller to focus primarily on the student-centric IT systems and services that WOU provides to its students. I’m working to assemble a steering committee of people to help determine the priorities for this effort, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get started on some early activities to build out our EA and EA strategy. To that end, your first assignment is to document our current architecture.
Iteration 1 Assignment – Due noon on January 31
- Document the WOU mission statement and key objectives under the core themes for the university. Organize this in a way that will make it easy to reference these objectives – I recommend using a spreadsheet with unique IDs for each objective.
- We think of three primary lines of business for WOU: undergraduate education, graduate education, and research. Think of a good way to visualize these three LOBs, and call out that for this initial EA project we will only focus on the undergraduate education LOB.
- Please draft an initial communication plan. A good first step would be to document how this initial work you are focused on is due on Tuesday, Jan 31, at noon. You should also identify other suggested communication ideas.
- Finally, I want you to perform an inventory of the high-level IT systems and services that currently serve our undergraduate students. I’m new to the job so I don’t even have a great idea of the scope: I know we have Gmail, Moodle, the WOU Portal, and the online library tools. There’s probably quite a bit more! Create a graphical illustration that identifies this inventory of services – try to fit it on one page if possible! You might find that using a modeling tool like Visio or Archi will help. Please use a digital tool for this – I don’t want hand-drawn diagrams!
Additional guidance and requirements:
- You may work with others (such as your initial group) to put together the pieces above. For example, 6 of you brainstorming together the inventory of systems will yield better results than you doing this yourself!
- However, the work you submit must be your own independent work! No copy/paste, no sharing diagrams. One example workflow might be to sketch out a high level system model on a whiteboard, take a picture of it, then each individual go off on their own to turn this into a digital model.
- Submit a single PDF for the entire assignment.