Education

We deliver structured training and education to our clients at their site. Each course is customized to the specific challenges and environment of each client. We can impact a wide range of audiences including the core EA team, IS staff, line executives, and the extended enterprise. Our topics can range from fundamental EA concepts to aligning business and IT strategy – from enhancing EA effectiveness to trends in business and technology innovation. Over the last 15 years we have delivered hundreds of EA workshops and seminars. We can deliver customized educational seminars in 1-, 2- and 3-day formats, for groups up to 40 participants.

EA Foundations Workshop

The primary objective of EA education is to orient an EA team and their leadership on the common language and ideas of EA while helping them to select, adapt, adopt and implement a sensible and consistent approach, one that will work for them.

Today’s enterprise architecture team has a much larger body of knowledge to draw from in the form of approaches, frameworks, deliverables, and tools/techniques to support their efforts.  While the information available to practitioners is wider and deeper, it comes at the cost of confusion and misdirected efforts as teams attempt to sort through it, electing to follow “one size fits all” methodologies or to experiment with the ideas of different team members, each pursuing their own interpretations of that material.

It is more important than ever that EA teams be unified through a common perspective on their mission and that they adopt consistent approaches and techniques.  EAdirections was founded on EA thought leadership.  Foundational to that is the recognition that the only “best” approach to EA is the one that makes sense for you, which always comes through the thoughtful blending of industry practices and an appropriate balance between strategic and applied EA.  It must be tuned to your requirements, culture and resources.  The latest update of our EA Foundations Workshop reflects this decidedly practical perspective.

This document outlines our approach to tuning and adapting our materials to your needs.

Workshop Approach

EAdirections tunes and optimizes our EA Foundations Workshop for each client in response to their unique combination of general objectives, skills and resources, culture, organizational capabilities, history, requirements for deliverables, and other specific needs.  We work closely with the Primary Client Contact to choose appropriate topics and workshop exercises to establish a solid foundation in core concepts/methods with an emphasis on learning practical approaches.

Goals:

  • Orient and ground attendees in core concepts, a common language, and key features of a practical and high-performance EA unit
  • Identify the building blocks of effective EA including theory, processes, people, deliverables, and operational and cultural approaches
  • Establish team roles/responsibilities and solidify working relationships
  • Identify candidate approaches and processes to be adopted by client organization
  • Identify and select the types of deliverables the EA team will/should produce
  • Establish communications strategies
  • Build a one-year improvement plan
  • Engage attendees in interactive sessions to stimulate their thinking and further solidify concepts

 Topic Catalog

  • The language or EA – core concepts
  • EA’s Role in IT/Business Alignment
  • Architecture perspectives – enterprise, business, information, data, technology, solutions, applications architectures – how they are related
  • Processes for Enterprise Architecture – Core Concepts
  • Process Integrations with Strategy, PMO, Portfolio Management, Service Management, Financial      Management, etc.
  • Business Operating Models
  • Capability modeling
  • EA and Solutions, Infrastructure/Domain, Applications architects – roles/responsibilities,      working together
  • EA Deliverables – Standards, patterns, roadmaps, other models
  • Applications Portfolio
  • Enterprise Governance Essentials
  • Industry Frameworks – what are they, where do they fit, how to use them
  • EA Tools – vendor landscape, approaches, acquisition, practical uses
  • Leadership and Cultural Change
  • Building and Operating an EA Team – People, Skills, Roles/Responsibilities, Balancing Work Activities
  • Aligning with Business Operating Models – Federated Architectures
  • EA Governance
  • Choosing and Tuning the EA Approach – Next Steps
  • EA Metrics
  • Engaging the Business
  • Others, as requested

Exercise Catalog

  •  Business Operating Models
  • Developing an EA Value Proposition – Selling EA
  • Creating and Socializing EA Principles
  • Structuring a Virtual Team
  • Managing/Creating EA Deliverables
  • EA Governance Processes
  • Business and Information Architecture
  • Asset Portfolio Concepts
  • Business and Technology Trends – Impact Analysis
  • Process Integration
  • Others, as requested

 Approach – Phases

  1. Pre-Meetings via teleconference to understand objectives, audience, select topics & exercises, establish agenda
  2. Set schedule, review logistics, send workshop materials
  3. Conduct workshop
  4. Post-Workshop Review teleconference