>… the creation of user groups… are the human equivalent of a technology integration strategy.

In Service Oriented Architecture, I.T. Portfolio Management and Model Driven Architecture; Center’s of Excellent (CoE) are a key part of the infrastructure. A key to the CoE is that it has broad representation and derives its expertise from both technical and business experts. A key outcome of forming CoEs is that you begin to form integration points between the PEOPLE in various parts of the enterprise. The CoE should bring in end-users and business experts and connect them with the correct technical experts.

DoIT (the Division of Information Technology at UW-Madison) spends 62% of our budget on interfaces and integration according to our Deputy CIO who handles finances. I wonder what part of our budget is spent on integration and interfacing the people within the enterprise?

One of the key things that I.T. Architecture does is to help form these integration and interfaces. We try to gather input from across the enterprise. We form groups with representatives from business, end-user and technical areas to formulate road-maps and gather requirements.

I guess this quote made me realize the importance of this activity and the importance of the various Centers of Excellence that we are working towards.

On one side of the discussion where issues about what is lost if you bring the social software inside of the firewall. Bob Morgan of University of Washington pointed out that you need critical mass for much of the magic of social software to work. You need many people participating with overlapping interests to form virtual communities. You multiple people to tag the same object to build a meaningful folksonomy. Would you reach critical mass if the population was limited to the enterprise or do you need to be sharing in the wide world for the magic to occur?

An example that I used was Chemical Engineering students using social software out in the world might discover other students at another university. The two groups might work together and learn more both about their projects that the world at large. These forces tend say that we should just use the world-at-large suite of tools.

On the other side is the fact that these systems are out of the control of the university but may be considered by some (especially parents of students) to be under the control of the university. I mentioned a case of an instructor who is using a Wiki on their personal web site for instructional purposes. Students need to go to this site. They may need to participate. This leads to institutional business being conducted at a site that is completely out of the control and governance of the institution. It also leads to institutional information – course content and possibly student performance data (e.g. test data, quizzes and homework data) – being de facto outsourced to an untrusted partner. Who knows what the ISP will do with this information?

The hot discussions around MySpace, Facebook et al show the depth of concern about student privacy and safety and the concerns about the belief that these third party sites are somehow blessed by the University.

Adding to the complexity of these issues is the fact that it is so easy to set-up and use a lot of the Web2.0 / Social Software tools that are out there. You can get a blog set up and running in a couple of minutes. My personal blog is run on Dreamhost. They have one click installs for a variety of software. It would be easy for me to set up blogs, wikis, bulletin boards and galleries for a class. It would take about 15 minutes – tops.

Going back to the earlier example of the faculty member and their wiki – they used their personal web site because their institution doesn’t have any support or offerings for doing wikis in house. Any barriers that the institution erects (including charges) will lead to outsourced solutions. In house solutions may not work as well as the wide world solutions but the institution is mandated to protect student privacy and security. The institution is also legally bound to keep records of performance and it has an interest in keeping an archive of instructional materials.

Is there a balance where students participate in the wide world of social software in a safe and educational way?

At the highest level, they would:

* Define I.T. Architecture and Enterprise Architecture within Academia (and government) which does have a different flavor than in business
* Define the role(s) of the I.T. Architect and Enterprise Architect

The next level down:

* Talk about the processes that are used, what works, what doesn’t work
* Define various artifacts that we all could use in our jobs (frameworks, etc)

At the lowest level:

* They might work on a common Framework, suite of models or roles and functions for a given area (like I.T. Portfolio or Integration Competency Centers).

I have been contacted several times recently from people at Universities who are looking to become an I.T. Architect or who have recently been anointed I.T. Architect. Others have asked that I speak about what we do and our role in the enterprise.

Universities are interested in developing a core Architecture group and they will need a group of peers from which to draw expertise and to send new Architects to learn the ropes.

The next question, is how to start? Is there a national meeting which would be a logical and easy place to attach ourselves? Should we have a dedicated set of meetings to get started? Who would fund the meetings (pay for rooms, et al)? Who should organize them?

The links that I used for the demo are below.

Channels are things like email, chat, VoIP, video conferencing and telephony. The problem with Channels is that we have to be protocol centric. We have to think – I want to communicate with Keith. Let see if the Chat protocol will work (e.g. is he on-line in chat?) if not I’ll send an email but maybe I’ll call too. I want to be person centric: I want to communicate with Keith.

In my ideal scenario, I would select Keith as a contact and I would then see communication options TEXT, VOICE, VIDEO. I could then select that I want to do VOICE. I would pick up my headset and my computer would establish a connection. On Keith’s end, he would choose to have VOICE channeled to Skype or iChatAV or to his cell phone or home phone number. He might even have a priority list (if Skype is running, use Skype otherwise send to Cell Phone). He might send VOICE directly to an MP3 (to voicemail) that he can listen to later.

On the TEXT side, I would select TEXT and either be connected to IM or asked to form an email depending on KEITH’s availability setting in IM.

The IM logs should flow into a repository that is similar to my (if not the same as my) email repository.

There are times when I would like to pick the protocol, when I would send and email even though Keith is on IM.

On the receiver end, I would need better presence management. I would need a unified presence control – a central place where I could manage the flow of information into my channels. I would have to swap managing protocols for managing presence.

Calendar applications should provide a configurable feed for this data that could easily be picked up by another person or by a blog plugin to do what Ben has done with slick scripts.

Oracle Calendar allows for searching of resources and people but you have to anchor the search with the correct starting characters. Example: I can search for the DoIT ARCH LCD PROJECTOR with DoIT ARCH and find the item but not with ARCH LCD PROJECTOR.

Name aliases: Oracle Calendar doesn’t understand (in LDAP lookups as we have it configured at least) that Jim might equal James.

Also, I want to be able to bind email to a calendar event. I have an email request to present at a given time and place. I want to be able to attach that email to the event.

Finally, I should be able to attach, flag, tag events which I do not control but have been invited too. I should be able to add my own notes for myself, my own details, etc. even though I do not control the invite.

(1) When I create an appointment I should be able to mark the Time Zone for the appointment. I should also be able to make appointments that are Time Zone neutral – not tied to a Time Zone.
(2) My clients (Palm and Desktop and Web) should all understand Time Zones and should be able to shift the alarms to compensate for my changes in Time Zone.

How would I use this? Well…

- If I get an invite to join a conference call at 11AM EST, I could just enter that time without adjusting for my local time zone. Same with UTC time.
- If I changed time zones (say fly from Madison to San Francisco), my alarms would change to be appropriate. As it is now, if I fly to California, I need to keep track of the fact that the 10AM meeting is really a 10AM Central time so I need to set an alarm 2 hours earlier.
- But I can’t do a global change because some things might be dinners in California so they need to stay on Pacific time.

We have these bright machines that understand our location and time zones. This is the perfect task to offload to these systems. It is simple and fussy and requires sifting through events and applying rules. Perfect work for a computer.

I think this is pretty cool stuff. Especially when tied with the PocketMod idea. PocketMod’s are small booklets you make from a single 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper.

So the questions are: could we I alter the goals of Printable CEO to represent I.T. Architecture goals instead? How do we give points to those goals? How would we categorize and measure our tasks? Need to put some thought in on this.