Mission Statement

Establish Enterprise Architecture as a practice in order to collaborate across University information technology units to drive shared solutions.

Enterprise Architecture Defined

The purpose of enterprise architecture is to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the business strategy. [The Open Group Architecture Framework, Version 9.1. ISBN 9789087536794]

The Enterprise Architecture consists of four key layers and is driven by the needs of the organization, not the IT department:

• The Business Architecture defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes.

• The Data Architecture describes the structure of an organization's logical and physical data assets and data management resources.

• The Application Architecture provides a blueprint for the individual applications to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization.

• The Technology Architecture describes the logical software and hardware capabilities that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services. This includes IT infrastructure, middleware, networks, communications, processing, standards, etc.

Objectives

They key objectives of the ITLC EA Working Group are to:

Share Best Practices, Data and Services across University IT.

• University IT is our term for the federation of IT service providers at Columbia University. Columbia operates under a Coordination [low standardization, high integration. See Chapter 2 of Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Harvard Business School Press. 2006. ISBN 9781422148174] business model, sharing some customers, and services while having independent business units (schools, divisions, departments). The primary objective of the EA Working Group is to share knowledge, practices, data and services (where applicable) that meet the collective business needs of our individual and shared constituencies at Columbia.

Identify Business Stakeholders and Communicate Value of EA.

The value of EA to Columbia IT is to transition ourselves from having technology being “the tail that wags the dog” to instead understanding the specific goals of our shared and federated units to fulfill the University’s mission to produce, disseminate and preserve knowledge, and to guide how those goals are supported by information technology.

Develop Shared Enterprise Architecture Capability for University IT.

Enterprise Architecture is a formal practice and approach to developing, communicating and delivering business goals and, in the case of this Working Group, how those goals can be supported by IT. This work will involve joint learning and sharing a standard methodology [TOGAF: The Open Group Architecture Framework. http://www3.opengroup.org/subjectareas/enterprise/togaf] including training for key staff in the practice of EA and how it coordinates with ITIL Service Strategy and Design processes.

Partner in Evaluation and Contracting for Cloud Services.

A more concrete goal of the Working Group is to ensure that cloud services appropriately support the Enterprise Architecture (which recognizes the Coordination model of our group through Segment Architectures) and work jointly to assess security of, evaluate functionality and fit, contract for, and implement one or more Cloud Services.

Partner in Evaluation and Contracting for Strategic Technology Solutions

Insure that non-cloud products appropriately support the Enterprise Architecture and work jointly to assess security of, evaluate functionality and fit, contract for, and implement said solutions.

Scope

All Columbia University IT organizations.