Assignment 2: Case Analysis (15%)

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate your understanding of enterprise architecture in delivering enterprise infrastructure solutions. The assignment requires you to engage your team, explain how enterprise architecture is instrumental to the case, and identify building blocks for consideration of enterprise architecture planning.

How to Proceed

Part A (25-50 words)

1. Connect with your assigned group members to schedule an initial conversation that establishes the distribution of work for group members.
2. Review the case and discuss your understanding of the use case with your team members.
3. Provide a group analysis report of 500 words of the use case, which includes the following:
   1. identification of the key business and technical challenge;
   2. statement of the problem;
   3. description of how enterprise architecture can address the stated problem;
   4. list of architectural building blocks in consideration for enterprise architecture planning;
   5. list of solution building blocks in consideration for enterprise architecture planning; and
   6. assumptions made of the case that influenced your report.

Please submit your Assignment 2 Case Analysis to the Assignment 2 dropbox on UM Learn.

Case Study

Enterprise Architecture Planning for Adebayo University, UK

Note: This use case is a fictitious case, but based on true realities of public universities in West Midlands, United Kingdom

The current Brexit situation demands that the education sector reappraise their vision and strategy in light of looming challenges. Adebayo University is a post-graduate university established in 1946, a year after the Second World War. The university has grown through consolidations of previously independent colleges. The university has five sites in the United Kingdom, spread across the geographical zones central, north, east, west, and south. The amalgamation of different schools over the years resulted in the management of complex legacy platforms having a diverse ecosystem of smaller applications built on multiple platforms, architectures, and technologies. Also, as a result of amalgamating previously autonomous schools, Adebayo University has grappled with the challenge of merging data and records of different attributes into one system without impacting school sessions.

Dr. Trish Brown is the new Vice-Chancellor (VC), with a strong focus on improving the effectiveness and efficiency across all the sites and systems. Current IT spending is over $13.5M in a year, and the VC has tasked the IT department to review and revamp the IT system, for IT initiatives that will half the yearly investment and also elevate the level of service. The key drivers for this change are to:

• rationalize system interfaces by closing gaps and improving interoperability across all sites and systems;
• simplify students learning journeys and improve learning engagement by improving the students learning management platform;
• investigate possible IT governance requirements to support systems projects relating to teaching and research;
• ultimately improve graduate employability, institutional sustainability, and student tracking and retention; and
• address issues of double or duplicate IT spending, by consolidating and integrating technology platforms for delivering digital strategy for e-learning.

The IT department recognizes the increasing need to address the current IT challenges in its service delivery and to provide cost-effective services to the institution, especially in the current financial climate, as the government reduced funding and international enrolment decline. Enterprise architecture (EA) function exists, but lacks appropriate levels of governance and the authority to enforce. The lack of authority and decision making power in the enterprise architecture function led to strained business and IT relationships, increases in costs of providing insufficient IT services, and an unbalanced IT delivery model. Some of the key considerations are cloud solutions for file repository, archiving, real-time data and collaboration tools. There have been talks with these vendors: Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce.

The motivation for the work on Enterprise Architecture (EA) is to develop an architectural vision, which can be shared across different teams and business areas to improve both strategic alignment and operational efficiency. By developing a shared architecture, the aim is to enable interoperability between systems and the sharing of resources and to improve the learning experience. The IT department is considering adopting TOGAF EA framework, but lacks appropriate levels of governance and the authority to enforce EA function. The lack of authority and decision making power in enterprise architecture function has consistently led to strained business and IT relationships, increases in costs of providing insufficient IT services, and an unbalanced IT delivery model.

As per the new directive from the VC, the IT department is looking for a good choice of components that can lead to improvements in legacy system integration, as well as interoperability and flexibility in the creation of new systems and applications. In preliminary requirement gathering sessions, taking into consideration business, technical, security, risk, and regulatory compliance requirements, it appears they will need a new web and mobile application for the learning platform, online student library, CRM application, PCs for academics staff with Office 365 functionality, and new IT security solutions. The program costs are foreseen to be capital intensive in the first three years of implementation, but are projected to bring cost savings within the range of the strategic plan.