This is a case study project delivered by students of Master in Information Assurance, Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, KUALA LUMPUR
Browse here https://online.fliphtml5.com/cgxgy/rkkd/
Enterprise Architecture Study for the Department of Social Security (UK) done by students of Master of Science (Business Intelligence and Analytics) Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Kuala Lumpur
The academic calendar will resume soon, but things are not as usual. Not face-to-face lecture yet, no meeting supervision unless its via virtual platform and many more. So what shall we do to ensure our academic activities and research will not get disrupted (or perhaps, its already was-during the MCO period…) but at least, we still need to go back on-track and resume our tasks.
A human being is the most adaptable species in this world, so I believe we can do this and faced this new ‘norm’ together
Interesting article https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/education-time-corona/what-will-life-be-post-covid-colleges-and-universities
It may take weeks, months or years, but one day we will all be back on campus. We will greet each other as we walk across the quad, go to department meetings, teach students, head into our labs and check out books from the library. And we will do these things without grabbing for our wipes and face masks — without wondering if we just made the mistake of our lives.
We will do these things again, but we will never return to the way things were. We will value our human contact more than we did before, acknowledging the gift of learning while being together, holding our dear ones close again with the knowledge that doing so is a privilege. But we have also been exposed to online interaction on a global scale, spending months and possibly longer engaging with each other online and doing collective work with remote tools. It is inevitable that we will incorporate some of the eye-opening new possibilities into our academic and extracurricular lives. Just as Sept. 11 forever changed air travel, so too has COVID-19 forever changed how we work, live and interact. Unlike Sept. 11’s impact on air travel, however, COVID-19’s impact might make education easier and better.
Many of us, for example, have been surprised by the effectiveness of telemedicine. We aren’t yet ready for videoconference open heart surgery over our phones, but telemedicine can ease the friction of going to the doctor and increase many patients’ chances of getting care when and where they need it. The ease of having a conversation with our doctors has surprised and delighted us — who wants to go back to hanging out in waiting rooms filled with coughing people and navigating forbidding medical centers after frustrating time lost in traffic?
Similarly, Zoom-enabled workouts and livestreamed yoga classes that we access with the click of a button make the idea of ever returning to hot, sweaty studios and big-box gyms seem ridiculous. In higher education, as in these other industries, we have also been introduced to the seductive ease of Zooming in a guest speaker to a class and FaceTiming with a student stuck on her homework. If telemedicine and virtual workouts will likely become more pervasive, what in the circadian rhythms of university life will also remain or become virtual? What have we learned that we don’t want to live without when life resumes post-COVID?
There is, of course, a common fear that new moves into online learning and online life will replace faculty and staff, making us irrelevant or at best secondary — that online is about loss, not gain. Similarly, students and their parents may assume that online is always “lesser” than face-to-face instruction — that it is a distant second best to sitting in ivy-covered lecture halls listening to the sage on the stage. And yet it may be worth considering whether the opposite might be true under certain circumstances: Might virtual education create opportunities for students to have greater global engagement and increased participation in class, even while creating new ways to accommodate emergency situations? In short, it might behoove us to consider how virtual capabilities might give us greater ability to shape our students’ learning experiences wherever they find themselves in the world.
The virtual lecture is already a decades-old phenomenon. Medical schools and engineering schools have long moved lectures online (and on videocassette before that). In so many cases, it makes much more sense to use faculty and student time together for active learning instead of passive consumption of material. As the old adage goes, “Everything after the third row is distance education.” Many faculty members and students are also discovering what others have known for a long time: that virtual office hours and virtual advising are more convenient for both teachers and learners.
But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Many students this summer will be doing virtual internships. In most cases, they are a second choice for students who would rather be in a lab or office or in the field. But with creative thinking, virtual internships can offer valuable experiences to students beyond summers and local semester-long internships. A U.S. business school student might do a virtual internship in Bangalore during the semester, or a student might virtually continue a summer internship after he is back in classes. Why relegate practical experiences to summers or a 20-mile radius from campus?
But what about the really difficult problems: Can there be virtual lab work, fieldwork, clinical training or studio art? We have seen many creative examples this semester. Professors have turned their home kitchens into laboratories and virtually included students in every step of experiments, allowing them to make mistakes even at the expense of countertops and sinks. Preparing for online summer courses, faculty are assembling kits of paints or circuit boards or lists of chemical compounds that can be sent to students who are learning at home.
Again, in most cases virtual is less than doing the same thing in person. But online experiences can help students achieve things that would otherwise be impossible on campus, and they can help them accommodate financial, medical and other hardships. A student studying abroad in Moscow may be able to fulfill a university requirement by simultaneously taking one course online at her home institution. An undergraduate might take a semester off to care for a family member without losing the momentum toward a degree. An anthropology course might have students doing fieldwork on multiple continents while virtually inhabiting the same classroom weekly.
Prognosticators often invoke virtual and augmented reality as panaceas that will perfectly recreate real experiences. Perhaps one day they will. Rather than trying to recreate our in-person experiences online, however, we should be thinking about what we can do online that enables forms of learning that expand the limits of what we can do on campus.
These are big changes, and they will require work, creativity and resources from faculty and administrators. But they are also great opportunities. It is important to remember that universities are always changing. As Cathy Davidson reminds us in her book The New Education, so many of elements of the university that we think of as foundational — majors and minors, degree requirements and grades, electives and graduate schools — all have their origins in Harvard president Charles Eliot’s radical late-19th-century reforms. And technologies as innocuous today as the blackboard caused riots when they were first introduced. Blackboards, in particular, seemed to be harbingers of an increasingly industrialized classroom.
Over time, reforms like these have made university education more inclusive, diverse and global. When we return to classrooms and campuses, we will fall back into familiar patterns. But we should also preserve some of the virtual solutions that saved us during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As shared in https://www.leanix.net/en/blog/enterprise-architecture-in-2020-what-you-need-to-know
Yesterday’s Enterprise Architecture is no longer enough for competitive digital businesses. Digital transformation enabled by cloud technology has emphatically disrupted what our profession does—or, at least, what we’ve spent the past decade thinking it did—and requires us to again explore and adopt new methodologies and tools to manage IT.
But not every company is abandoning on-premises IT in favour of those cloud-hosted. In fact, according to findings from 451 Research, 62% of surveyed organizations integrate on-premises systems and off-premises cloud/hosted resources.
Compare this with a finding from LeanIX’s own 2019 EA Insights Report wherein 59% of respondents listed cloud architecture as a contributor to IT complexity. It makes sense why our own Gartner Magic Quadrant-listed platform now offers a suite to oversee applications and IT components from across multiple cloud environments.
Yet while LeanIX has kept pace with the technology’s ascent, enterprise architects must continue deciding for themselves how to perform IT management in all environments (on-premises, cloud, and hybrid) until an overarching governance standard emerges. And, if they haven’t thought about what’s to come in the new year, they’ll need to pay attention to what I think are the top five trends in 2020 and see how they may impact EA in the future.
1. Empowering customers
Consider this take-away from the IDC FutureScape: Worldwide CIO Agenda 2020 Predictions: “By 2024, 80% of digitally advanced organizations will replace the walled garden, IT-as-an-enabler model with a self-service model.” It’s a trend that’s well underway, but if technology procurement keeps growing decentralized to limit bottlenecks and better enable individual business units and teams, the implications will be directly felt by IT compliance officers and enterprise architects tasked with standards governance. EAs will be empowered to do what they need to do on their own terms using a self-service model and, more importantly, should expect this capability from their providers. It’s about making sure vendors are a customer-centric organization.
2. Migrating to the cloud
Enterprise architects will face a number of challenges when it comes to the cloud. Whether an organization who moves from an on-premises model to a single or multi-cloud approach, EAs need to consider what this means architecturally and operationally. They also need to be aware of the shift towards going cloud-native and stay abreast of what it means to live in a world that supports a microservices architecture and containers like Kubernetes. EAs need to understand how the architecture comes into play as they migrate to the cloud, otherwise, they could suffer from going over their budget and potentially introduce security vulnerabilities.
As cloud migration transforms the way an EA supports this new architecture in the organization, they must employ the best data-driven and dedicated tools to accurately (and collaboratively) source which applications in their portfolio need to either be replicated identically in the cloud (i.e., the “lift and shift” method), adjusted only slightly (e.g., Microsoft SQL to Azure SQL), or fundamentally restructured. Upon transferring these applications to external hosts, tools such as LeanIX Cloud Intelligence offer IT and business stakeholders a platform for co-operatively optimizing cloud spend and performing real-time vulnerability detection.
3. Architecture planning
EAs have a tough job when it comes to planning their infrastructure. The challenges they face with technologies that will impact how they design their architecture could have either positive or severe consequences if not done properly. There is a need to understand how technologies will impact their business and operating models.
For example, serverless computing topped Gartner’s 2019 list of trends impacting infrastructure and operations, and despite guaranteeing better resource allocation and agile product deployment, its potential is entirely contingent on how well enterprise-side application owners secure their code and manage data transits.
And while EAs need to strategically plan their infrastructure, they also need to execute upon the design with team members who offer new skill sets such as those who can take a data-driven and modelling approach.
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4. IT complexity drives platform adoption
IT complexity is an unmistakable—and, arguably, inevitable—feature of enterprises surpassing billions in revenue. With IT portfolios regularly consisting of 1,000+ applications, 500+ processes, and 2,500+ technologies underpinning specific business capabilities, mapping entities in large-scale organizations is difficult enough without the added chaos of cloud computing. But just as visibility and governance in cloud IT environments are impossible without an automated solution, so too is orchestrating cloud-readiness evaluations.
In fact, enterprise architects realize their CIOs want to streamline their application portfolio and move to major SaaS platforms such as Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, NetSuite, UiPath, Office 365, and others, to scale their business, A complex application portfolio with hundreds of applications and thousands of interfaces makes that a risky task. There’s a need to reduce the IT complexity to ensure they can successfully introduce these platforms.
5. Consumer privacy and data security
Tantamount to all of all the above is the everlasting need for enterprise architects and CIOs to align business and IT strategies with evolving consumer privacy and data security regulations. In 2019, we saw more than 3,800 publicly available cases of data breaches, and with the expected arrivals of the European Union’s ePrivacy Regulation (applicable to nearly every EU business engaged in electronic communications) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (giving every California resident more access rights to their personal data and ways to restrict its distribution), the legal risks of what enterprises can do with emerging and legacy technologies will require more and more support from professional services.
https://www.cio.com/article/3526445/top-enterprise-architecture-tools.html
Enterprise architecture (EA) tools help organizations align business objectives with IT goals and infrastructure. These tools help manage information related to EA while helping companies plan roadmaps for digital transformation. They offer collaboration, reports, testing, simulations and more to help organizations create and implement models for better business and IT processes, development and architecture.The following 13 enterprise architecture tools are among the most popular currently available on the market. They provide a mix of visualization, collaboration, and project management features in support of a wide range of enterprise architecture frameworks.
Read on to learn more about these top EA tools and whether they provide the right fit for your organization.
This is the post since 2012, 8 years have passed, now let us reassess does these prediction comes to a reality
Predictions: Enterprise Architecture in 2020
Many of the existing functions that EA performs today will be here however I think that there will be a pruning of the functions that don’t sense and additions to what does. The core charter will stay the same.
Orthogonal Drivers and IT Environmental Aspects
In a recent post titled The Evolution of Today’s CIO I discuss that IT and the CIO’s role is evolving to be more and more business-centric. There is quite a bit of evidence here. Below is a chart that shows the CEO and CIO aligning priorities over the next 3 to 5 years.
While CIO’s are expected to uphold operational and technical excellence the data not only from IBM but from many others shows that the CIO is getting the unique opportunity to step into the business realm as well. Now that technology is so ubiquitous coupled with such deep business impact CIO’s are essential to business units.
As the CIO matures and becomes more business-centric who will they turn to in their organization? The Enterprise Architecture function of course. This is the only function that has the charter of being at a business level and aspires to grow more and more into this area. This is emphasized by the desire of very many EA functions to move out of IT entirely so they can easily be business focused.
If this is the trend, EA is essential for the CIO and the CIO is essential for the EA group. Whether it be staying within the IT or being a strong supporter that remains to be seen.
Macro themes for EA in 2020
Predictions for 2020
I believe the following will be the key changes to EA in 2020:
Clear Purpose
Thus far, EA has been a collection of many things without a perfectly clear, consistent & universally accepted purpose, definition and set of outcomes. You may ask, why is this important? It’s so important for so many reasons.
A few of the key reasons below:
I am starting to see a lot of changes in the industry to solidify this more. We see examples of this every day with universities support, firmer standards, maturing enterprise architecture functions and a wealth of support from practitioners in communities like LinkedIn and others alike. To credit the discipline a little bit, for such a robust and complex as EA it is no doubt why it has taken so long.
At the current rate of change in EA by 202o the EA industry should have a clear and generally accepted answer on the purpose of EA. Whether that is fully adopted in EA organizations around the world is a different story altogether. Many other considerations are at play there.
For organizations today, it is essential to get to the root of the purpose of your EA function. Begin to think about why your EA function exists and what value does it bring to the company. Getting to the root of why is essential to be purpose-driven.
Understand & Operationalize EA Business
Today when I ask, “describes the business of EA?” I often receive puzzling looks and brief answers on charters and such. What is troubling is that we expect to partner with the business but we don’t act the business. Often times we have our own language for things that have existed in the business for a very long time. This doesn’t help our cause.
By 2020 the industry should have matured much in this area with a revised focus on business acumen versus purely on technical architecture.
We are already starting to see operational and services excellence in EA teams. I believe this trend will continue. As we begin to interact more and more directly with the business they are going to want predictable and repeatable results. To do this, service enablement is needed to have clear SLAs and OLAs. Below is an example of a service model that I had created a few years back.
In the example above, the business or customer is able to request services from the EA team. This sets precise expectations on what they will get and more importantly what they will not get. With this comes metrics that can measure success or failure easily.
With this new focus and purpose, how EA operates will be different with a defined an Enterprise Architecture Operating and Service model that will aid in repeatable and predictable results for its customers.
EA Activities
With a business-centric EA organization the first priority should be to focus on value management. EA’s in 2020 will think first about what value is to be derived from a potential solution to a problem. Value can be many things, it just depends on what it means to the specific customer. It could mean:
By focusing on portfolios of capabilities the EA’s will be able to manage value in a quantitative and qualitative way. This will also aid the EA on focusing on what investments are important at any given time to allow for maximum returns for the business.
Instead of starting bottom-up, the standard mode of operation will be top-down. Similar to what you see in popular frameworks like TOGAF.
This isn’t to say that the EA will perform all of these aspects of architecture but rather a model to follow.
TOP-DOWN PROVEN TO BE MORE SUCCESSFUL BASED ON MY CASE STUDIES
EA Competencies
EA’s are being asked not only to align but to partner with the business. To do this they need the competencies and skills to be able to act and speak accordingly with the business. This space is advancing year over year.
I have built out a framework on how to separate competencies from other aspects. This is in the context of certifications. Below is a way to think about the separation of the different certification aspects.
Below is a description of each aspect:
Certifications
Today there is a focus on specific architecture or EA certifications. Year after year I am finding that Enterprise Architecture certifications are becoming more important to architects. Back in 2007, I remember reading an article from Gene Leganza called, “Is EA Certification Important?”. In that article, he stated that 65% of the people he had surveyed stated that EA certification is not important but he also noted that a significant minority stated they were including EA certification criteria in their hiring processes.
I believe this has changed quite a bit.
We continue to see the very positive trends in terms of investment in EA skills throughout the industry and the world. Below is a snapshot of some of the trends in a presentation I gave on certifications internally at Microsoft.
YES, TOGAF IS STILL THE LEADER IN 2020
But there is one small wrinkle in this. The hypothetical question I ask is, “Does the business value your EA certification? Does that EA certification alone instil confidence in the business leaders?” To some degree. I would assert that alone it doesn’t because it doesn’t cover all the concerns of the business but does cover all the concerns of an EA.
Why do I say this? The reason for this is that the business expects you to have those certifications because you are an EA. That part is a given. However, if you want to be a true partner, they expect you to operate like the business and truly empathize with the business. Use their methods, models and tools. If that is the case, complement your EA certification with an MBA or equivalent is in order.
Lead through Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Today we have some challenges here. Connecting with the business to facilitate, aid or participate in the decision-making process is often a tricky task. It requires trust and credibility. While some EA’s are very good at this, there may be some opportunity to get better at this. Culturally architects of all breeds tend to some common traits:
NOT REALLY EQ-BUT BUSINESS INSIGHTS
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