Keith and I, the two IT Architects at UW-Madison, are getting ready for a planning session for our work. We are also getting ready to hire a third IT Architect. This has started me thinking about the big picture of “what we do”. I came up with the following chart last night while thinking about this work.

As I see it, IT Architecture has 6 broad realms of work (here at UW-Madison): Identity Management, Content Management, Communication and Collaboration, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Data Architecture and Enterprise Application Ecosystem. There are three aspects to each realm: The Issues that are related to the realm, the Technology portion of the solution and the Human portion of the solution.

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### Identity Management ###

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#### Issues: ####

• Who is authenticating?
• What role(s) do they have?
• What services do they get?
• What information do the service providers get to see?

#### Technology: ####

• University Directory Services (UDS),
• PASE (Role management system),
• various Authentication solutions (WebISO, Shibboleth, PKI)

#### Human: ####

• Policy, Training and Change Management (P,T&CM)
• Virtual Organizations

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### Content Management ###

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#### Issues: ####

• Where should information be stored?
• How long should we keep it?
• What are the archive, backup, roll-forward (of document formats) rules?
• Who owns the data, controls the data?
• Who gets to see the data? How are the permissions created, managed, enforced?

#### Technology: ####

• Repositories,
• Interfaces to other systems,
• Permission management systems

#### Human: ####

• Policy, Training and Change Management (P,T&CM)
• Data Management Schemes
• Archive, backup, roll-forward rules
• Taxonomy (?)

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### Communication and Collaboration ###

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#### Issues: ####

• What are we (as an organization, group, team, individual) working on?
• Who is doing what?
• What are our information assets (chunks of knowledge)?
• What do we know as an organization, team, group or individual?
• What decisions where made based on what information?
• What have we learned as an organization, group, team or individual?

#### Technology: ####

• Channels (email, chat, video conferences, etc),
• Workspaces (Blog, Wikis, Group Calendar Servers, etc)

#### Human: ####

• Policy, Training and Change Management (P,T&CM)
• Etiquette
• Social Aspects – Social networks.
• Folksonomy and Taxonomy (?)

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### Service Oriented Architecture ###

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#### Issues: ####

• How do we integrate our business systems?
• How do we reduce the cost of maintaining integration points?
• How do we limit the impact of changes in one business application on the enterprise as a whole?
• How do we standardize our integration work across the enterprise?
• How do we stage ourselves to advantage of changes in the enterprise application world at large?

#### Technology: ####

• Service Registry,
• Middleware – Message Oriented Middleware, Service Security, etc,
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

#### Human: ####

• Policy, Training and Change Management (P,T&CM)
• Schemas
• Governance
• Taxonomy (?)

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### Enterprise Data Architecture ###

—–

#### Issues: ####

• What data are “entperise data”?
• Which source is the “enterprise source” or the appropriate source of record?
• How do we limit duplication of data?
• How do we protect privacy and security of data?
• Who is the custodian for a given set of data?
• How do we deliver data such that currency, availability, security and format requirements are met?
• How do we standardize / rationalize the way that we manage and deliver data?

#### Technology: ####

• Integrated Data Service,
• Middleware – Message Oriented Middleware, Service Security, etc,
• Web Services

#### Human: ####

• Policy, Training and Change Management (P,T&CM)
• Schemas
• Governance
• Taxonomy (?)

—–

### Enterprise Application Ecosystem ###

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#### Issues: ####

• What does our Enterprise Application Ecosystem look like and what should it look like.
• What should we look for when buying/building a new enterprise application?
• How do we reduce the cost of maintaining enterprise applications?
• How do we limit the negative impact of changes in the enterprise application on the enterprise as a whole?
• How do we standardize our enterprise application management schemes to reduce cost and improve the ecosystem?
• How do we stage ourselves to advantage of changes in the enterprise application world at large?

#### Technology: ####

• Everything listed above (Identity Management, Content Management, etc),
• Modelling processes and software

#### Human: ####

• Policy, Training and Change Management (P,T&CM)
• Planning
• Governance