Plymouth University adopts a more collaborative, agile approach to Enterprise Architecture, working with stakeholders to effectively align corporate and IT strategies and to manage process, information and technology change.

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Collaborative
and Agile
Enterprise
Architecture
at Plymouth
University

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About Plymouth University
Plymouth University is the 15th largest University
in the UK with over 27,000 students and almost
3,000 employees. It was recently ranked 37th in
the Times Higher Education World University
Rankings 2015 of institutions under 50 years old. A
new Corso customer, Plymouth recently selected
Corso’s Agile Enterprise Architecture solution to
support a collaborative approach to IT strategy
planning and architecture decision-making.

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EA at Plymouth University
Craig Douglas, Enterprise
Architect at Plymouth University,
spoke about their current
initiatives and selecting a new
tool. Craig leads the EA function,
working with stakeholders
across the organization to align
corporate and IT strategies, and
facilitate effective change for the
University and its underlying
processes, information and
technology assets.

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EA is a relatively new function at the university?
"Yes, EA is relatively new to Plymouth University
and new to most of the Higher Education sector in
the UK. It was introduced by the Head of Strategy
and Architecture, Adrian Hollister, with the aim of
creating a window into a sustainable IT future. This
included governance frameworks, security, and
documentation of the as-is and to-be. Adrian
formed the Enterprise Architecture Practice of
Excellence and invited people throughout the
University to take part and have their say."

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What role does enterprise architecture play at Plymouth
University?
“For us, it’s about taking the sound ideas of the
business and looking at how we can best deliver
them through technology. It’s no longer technology
for technology’s sake, we’re focused on adding
value, improving efficiency, increasing
performance, and making best use of existing
capabilities to deliver what the business is asking
for.”

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What challenges do you face in EA today?
“We need to ensure we fully understand what we
have in terms of technology and capabilities, and
we need to constantly evolve on what we have and
innovate. It’s important that we can understand
where everything fits together with a complete
view of all relationships and interdependencies.
Once we have this, we can confidently produce
diagrams and analysis to share our architecture
honestly with the wider University and possibly
beyond. It’s important to me to share our
architecture with the widest group of stakeholders
as possible.”

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What prompted you to look for a new enterprise
architecture solution?
“We’ve been running the enterprise architecture
practice for about two years now and have a team
of six architects. We had been using an open
source EA tool but every week the management
team would make requests and we would struggle
to provide the answers they needed. So we began
to look for a more collaborative platform that could
help us produce all the required diagrams, reports
and analytics with greater agility. We tried a few
products and spoke with several different software
vendors and ultimately opted for Corso.”

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Why did you select Corso's Agile Enterprise Architecture
platform?
“Corso ticks all the boxes for being SaaS, multi-
platform, collaborative, and flexible in that the
underlying metamodel can be customized. It
allows us to tailor our reporting capabilities and
work with all stakeholders on architecture
diagrams. Previously, I had to manually re-create a
lot of diagrams produced by my colleagues which
wasn't ideal. Being able to work on a tablet is a
real bonus too when it comes to mobility and
sharing our architecture. Overall it ticked more
boxes than the other tools and it’s very
competitively priced.”

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What’s next for enterprise architecture at Plymouth
University?
“I’m excited about getting to grips with the platform
and getting results from it. Overall we’ll be focused
on working much more collaboratively in enterprise
architecture. We will be utilising the tool to push
towards a complete understanding of our current
capabilities and inform future projects like data
centre, disaster recover options alongside many
other high profiles opportunities. We’ll focus on
using the diagrams and analytics to manipulate the
metadata to get the end results.”

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For more info…
Visit the Plymouth University IT
Strategy & Architecture blog at:
http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/strategya
ndarchitecture
This post was originally published at:
http://www.corso3.com/blog/ea/colla
borative-agile-enterprise-
architecture-at-plymouth-unversity