I was chatting with a colleague about the new EDUCAUSE slogan, “Uncommon Thinking for the Common Good” when I realized that the saying encapsulates one way to think of my work as an I.T. Architect. “Uncommon Thinking for the Common Good” is what I try to foster in the teams that I work with. … Continue reading
Chris Holsman wrote an article on I.T. Leadership traits for our internal newsletter. One part struck me as a lesson that has been hard for me to learn… A third leadership trait I’ve cultivated is to fish where the fish are, not where they aren’t. This seems obvious but I find it astonishing how many … Continue reading
Our last CIO, Annie Stunden, used to talk about “what keeps her up at night”. These were the big intractable things or the big high-risk, highly visible projects she was working on. For me, it’s agility. How does an enterprise that prides itself on tradition and autonomy of everyone at every level become agile – … Continue reading
I have been talking with peers, pushing ideas around and working with various groups for a while and it seems that the work is finally paying off. ITANA.ORG (http://www.itana.org) is a peer group for I.T. Architects in Academia. We will share ideas, tricks and tools; work on common deliverables and working group projects; spread the … Continue reading
I was struck by a line out of a Burton Group document that I’m reading. >… 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 … Continue reading
I have discussed with several people the need for a group of peers that would meet regularly. This group of peers (GOP – nah, already in use) would focus on the practice on the I.T. Architecture in Academia At the highest level, they would: * Define I.T. Architecture and Enterprise Architecture within Academia (and government) … Continue reading
On Monday (April 3, 2006), I was at University of Minnesota presenting on four topics. Below are links to the slides as PDFs: UW-Madison’s SOA Migration Strategy – what is it and how do we get one Folksonomy and Web 2.0 IT Architecture – What is it and why 3 isn’t enough Identity Management Nouns … Continue reading
A graduate student at Stanford – Mike Tung – put together a suite of scripts and tools to generate College rankings based on Google searches. He didn’t want to pay for the USNews’ Annual America’s Best Colleges report. Though his work is quite technical, I imagine that it will be simplified into a web app … Continue reading
There are three forces that we can bring to bear to push change to a Service Oriented Architecture. (1) Architectural Purity >This is the force of arguing that it is the right thing to do. You can state a lot of reasons why it is the right thing to do like: composite applications, workflow, ROI, … Continue reading
I have been espousing the idea that various conferences could choose a tag up front then implore their attendees to use that tag for their blog entries about the conference. This is a simple way to enable information aggregation from a virtual organization. EDUCAUSE has just announced a tag for their upcoming conference. It looks … Continue reading
