Here's my notes to the ITANA Face-to-Face Tools of the Trade Session convened by Tom Barton (U Chicago). I really liked what each of the panelists had to say. This was an extremely useful conference and I'm glad I got to go.
University of California, Davis
Curtis Bray -- UC, Davis
Administrative IT Systems Architecture 5-year plan
A. plan the "big rocks"
B. plan connective tissue
C. Look at campus wide needs
D. Allow independent development to fill gaps but take every measure to harvest most community value for it.
IT Investment Principals
1. leverage IT investment for max return
2. transparent, clear, communicate widely
3. add to campus community common arch components and favoring shared systems.
Set up administrative IT systems coordinating council
consists for domain "conveners" for each of 8 domains
focus on domains vs. applications. [I loved this idea! -- Jim]
Curtis provided a link to UC, Davis's IT roadmap.
St. Louis University
St. Louis U -- Jim Hooper, Enterprise Architect
PIM - Product Item Master (PIM)
List of internal (to IT) standards
Enterprise perspective
not limit of allowed
... but limit of what is supported
precursor to stacks, architectures.
Use PIM to try to manage product lifecycle.
The codes are:
blue -- being researched
green -- current, deploy at will
yellow -- supported but not to be deployed
red -- phased out, not to be deployed anywhere
Governance of the PIM
* The Council
* Arch Review Board
* EA team
* The ARBAF ("ARBARF") -- arch review board action form
* Purchasing implements
Q. How are conflicts resolved?
A. Every project has an "Architecture Buddy" to try to facilitate smooth sailing, although we've had to facilitate.
SLU has a broadband architecture 19/105 of IT people are architects.
University of Chicago
Tom Barton, UChicago, IT Ecosystem
Fewer people know how it works.
People are expert on things very local to them.
what it does:
* record and viz depend
* capture slice of what experts have in head
* stich together patches
* spawn interesting conversations
what it's good for:
* help managers determine who to talk with
* connects work to big pircute
* help tackle specifc problems
* pictures that show "it's really complicated"
Graphs relations between elements (hardware, databases, people/groups, networks)
Tools captures things better than white board. Easier to share.
A colleague of Tom pointed out that this is populated by Tom sitting down and talking to people. Some people care more about detail than others.
Q: one instances of this database?
We can do some filtering analysis to look at dependencies. Look at critical dependencies. We can look for highest count (SAN here, but LDAP, load balancer, and AD stuff is pretty high)
An example which the tool pointed out was: a Printer (actually print shop that does some admin printing) can hold up a job(s). It can take down alumni systems, hr systems. If they can't finish a print job, they stop and report unsuccessful. The tool pointed out this dependency and many systems got rid of it.
Tom's whole presentation is very good.
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