In the first week of September 2008 the CET-EA, with assistance from UP France, arranged the first ever cross country training within Devoteam Consulting. The subject matter was Enterprise Architecture, and the course itself led to a certification in TOGAF (see text in bold under). The 12 participants, who were all well experienced enterprise architects, were from Denmark, Norway and France.
TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) is a comprehensive architecture framework and methodology which enables the design, evaluation and implementation of the right architecture for an enterprise.
It is important for Devoteam that we now have reinforced our knowledge on TOGAF. Devoteam has been a Silver member of The Open Group since 2006 and we now have 20 TOGAF certified consultants across the group. With about 8500 certified in the whole world, Devoteam, as a result, is put among the top consulting firms within the Enterprise Architecture field.
In addition to 4 day certification, the CET-EA also arranged an additional day where the participants from the various countries could share experiences, cases and know-how on the EA topic. The exchanges were fruitful and have shown different ways to deal with Enterprise Architecture; all the way from the Business layer to the Technical layer.
This training has strengthened our conviction about the usefulness of Enterprise Architecture not only as a discipline, but also as a vector of growth for related projects.
A case of using TOGAF
The following article describes how one of the architects, the CETEA’s very own Tore Notland, used his knowledge of TOGAF in an assignment for a large Norwegian hospital.
The customer
Ullevaal University Hospital is the biggest hospital in Norway, and in fact one of the biggest in Northern Europe. At the moment it has more than 8.600 employees. 940 of them are doctors and 2400 nurses. With a total of 1.200 beds Ullevaal admits some 45.000 patients per year and its policlinics have about 400 000 consultations per year.
The situation
Ullevaal University Hospital (UUH) owns and maintains a very complex portfolio of systems that supports a variety of purposes. In addition to clinical/medical systems supporting physicians and nurses in patient treatment, there are systems for research support, education, administration and of course everyday office support. This, in addition to region/nationwide initiatives ensuring collaboration and information flow between various healthcare actors, makes this a complex sphere indeed.
The project
The enterprise architect from Devoteam daVinci, Tore Notland, worked together with the chief IT Architect at UUH. Together they focused on structuring the knowledge on the business, the processes, the applications, the information and the technology. This knowledge is already present, of course, but it is not written down or represented in a manner that makes it easy to find.
In order to accomplish this task the architects utilized the EA Framework developed by the Devoteam Centre of Excellence on Enterprise Architecture (CETEA). As with almost all frameworks in the Enterprise Architecture field, it was necessary to adjust it to fit the specific purpose and the specific domain that should be modeled. After having done this adjustment, the architects set out to populate it with artifacts representing the business, application, information and technology aspects of the UUH enterprise. This work was done in the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect modeling tool.
In addition the enterprise architect from Devoteam daVinci was responsible for introducing the TOGAF ADM (Architecture Development Method) as a methodology for doing Enterprise Architecture work at UUH. The main task in doing this was to make the methodology “fit for purpose”, i.e. aligning the scope of the ADM process steps to the reality of the architecture work needing to be done. This included documenting the process steps, together with instructions on how to use the chosen tool in order to create models in the adjusted framework.
For more information contact us at CET-EA@devoteam.com
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