01.09.07

ERP

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:16 pm by yee

In doing some basic thinking about ERP at universities, I found the following references helpful:

university context

enterprise architecture and SOA: more reading

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:24 pm by yee

As I try to sort through the hype of SOA, I found the following articles useful reads over the holidays:

  • CIO Blogs - Is SOA Another Fake Path to IT Agility? . Yes, designing reusable services is not an easy process. I think that people need to learn how be discriminating "consumers" of services before they can become savvy "producers" Often they are trying to skip that first stage of learning.
  • CIO Blogs - The Starting Point for SOA . It seems to make sense that portals could be as a good starting point for SOA implementations. Portals are easy to understand. You can do SOA implementations in steps.

A very good overview piece on enterprise architecture is A New Blueprint For The Enterprise - Enterprise Architecture - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, an article on the connections among services and an event-driven model. I like the notion of an EA Zoning Board. The article is matched with a good piece on enterprise architects, who they are and do and what signs of good architects: WANTED: Enterprise Architects - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005

It's good to hear someone say that you can EA without an overarching business strategy: EA Without The Strategy - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005.

EA On The Cheap - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005 points out how to do things on the cheap — the most basic steps:

    Doing enterprise architecture on the cheap means you have to forgo much of the planning and governance and focus instead on services and reusable integration. That may still mean investing in some developers who know Web services and buying some middleware to provide the integration glue that Web services lacks, but the CFO will be able to hold onto those old mainframes while watching IT become more responsive and quicker to deliver new capabilities from them.

what architects look for in other architects

Some quotes from: Master Builders - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, in response to the question "What to look for in an architect?":

  • "Businesspeople tend to be extroverts, whereas 75 percent of IT people are introverts. You have to be able to relate to both."
  • "They need to have a passion for tying things together; they should be constantly thinking about the big picture."
  • "I would look for excitement and passion. If I ask them about a project they've worked on, I want them to say, 'Oh yeah, you should have seen what we did,' and then talk for the next 20 minutes. He didn't just do it; he lived it."
  • "You can't just talk a good game; you have to deliver. I would ask someone to give an example of a strategic project they've led that brought together business and IT. Get them to focus on the key attributes that made that project work. Also, they need to be able to speak strategically and know the right level of detail needed."

Notelets for 2007.01.05

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:54 pm by yee

CNI2006fall EDUCAUSE CONNECT has some good interviews to listen to get a feel for the national IT scene in higher education.

Mashups mix data into global service : Nature is a one-year old article on mashups in scientific computation:

    Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions. And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if researchers can be persuaded to share their data.

I got to remember to check in on the webcasts in early March for this fascinating conference on the future of libraries: De Lange Conference VI Emerging Libraries De Lange Conference Rice University.

Oren Sreebny's Weblog: (CSG 2007) Thursday workshop on collaboration tools:

    ….we have a tremendous proliferation of new species of software appearing almost on a daily basis and combining and evolving at a very rapid rate, making it very difficult to figure out which ones we should engage with at an enterprise level, or even how to construct a meaningful taxonomy of these applications.

Some recent observations:

  • There is an increasing disconnect between the IT capabilities available to individuals, especially cutting-edge innovative individuals (as well as "ordinary people") and what the institution is providing.
  • UCB IT needs to respond to both end-users and purveyors of enterprise computing hardware and services.
  • Many, many of the tools of Web 2.0 can be used to support/enhance teaching and research. Of course, it takes some learning, reflection, and experimentation to do so.
  • I'd like to learn more about Information Technology Infrastructure Library - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (ITIL).

Wondering what how to keep UC Berkeley competitive in an increasingly "flat world", I found the essay Berkeley and braving the new flat world by Richard Newton (who just passed away at the much too young age of 55) heartening:

    I believe we at Berkeley must simply double-down on our efforts to identify and bring the best and brightest here to Berkeley, as undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, visiting scholars and faculty, in a strategy I call “intellectual insourcing.” We must work harder than we ever have before to build upon and extend our regional lead as the most important cradle of discovery and innovation in the world by assembling a critical mass of talent right here in the Bay Area. Ultimately, I believe such a strategy is the most important way Berkeley Engineering can help create a sizeable “bump”—ideally a mountain—on this new flat world.