A dynamic organization, formed from a diverse range of specialist institutions, had a long history of excellent teaching, learning and research, and was founded in the technical and reformas e interiorismo valencia trade education of the late 19th Century. The University had special arrangements with more than 80 universities and colleges in over 25 countries.

It had approximately 20,500 students, 3,240 staff, and an annual turnover in the region of £132.5 million. Over the period of 10 years or so, it had garnered it's business value offerings to it's students and staff with various supporting IT systems. It had internally led to a disparate array of data information sources ranging across: Access, MS Excel, Oracle, Informix, SQL Server, etc.

Business Needs

Some of the key business challenges that the University was facing included:

· Need to rapidly provide new business capabilities to faculties and students with quality data

· To measure whether are they meeting industry standards and processes defined

· Scale up existing investment done in Applications and Systems

· Implement SOA and enterprise service bus to help deliver management vision

· Automate integration/ interfaces and help reduce manual dependencies

· Identify the gap between current architecture and desired solution

· Balance people, processes, technology to design the right architecture

· Identify architectural and process opportunity to maximize the existing IT investment.

Solution

The assessment includes an analysis of the underlying business drivers and objectives and overall context of business need that has been established for the client's enterprise wide solution. When business needs have been defined, the assessment process examines the approach to capturing business requirements, their completeness, the priorities of the requirements, and alignment of the strategy and deliverables to the needs.

The team conducted a high level assessment of the existing client architecture, management and processes. The scope of this was to assess:

Current Enterprise architecture implemented by client and key components of architecture.

Help translate strategic business goals to IT goals, post to interviewing various stakeholders

Review existing architecture and process workflows based on industry best practices

Examine application/ data management policies and procedures

Recommendation of high-level architecture & strategy to support information needs

Help identify data quality issues & recommendation on improving data quality through the data travel path

Functional interchange of data across business area boundaries

Identify areas of improvement recommendations for short and long-term goals

Cost/value improvement opportunities

Approach for Assessment:

The team met business, subject matter experts and IT groups to get better understanding of various requirements that enterprise and IT had.

The understanding indicated that client needed to focus on standardizing the enterprise wide processes around enterprise architecture, data management, data governance, and SOA. This assessment provided client with a clear roadmap for defining comprehensive enterprise architecture for them and to build robust architecture scalable for the future growth.