Tertiary education provider aligns ICT architecture to focus on business and learner outcomes

Background

Tertiary education is undergoing significant change and disruption as technology enables new ways and models for adults to learn. Tertiary education institutes need to adopt new ways of working and build capability to adapt to and take advantage of the rapidly changing adult learning market.

A leading New Zealand tertiary education provider focuses their ICT capability on achieving business and learner outcomes in the rapidly changing adult learning market. They achieve this by defining and applying IT architectural principles, standards, and collateral that engage with and guide the business stakeholders.

Work

The institute’s IT architecture team undertook a focused initiative to change its architecture approach. They held workshops to identify key issues and then introduced new IT architecture principles, standards, techniques and collateral to address these issues. They developed a high-level plan of architecture activities and collateral, and they organised for team members to receive guidance and mentoring in the new ways of working.

Techniques, methods and templates were pragmatically selected to meet the institute’s needs, including architectural vision development, architectural principles workshopping, root-cause analysis, application data mapping, and enterprise architecture technology standards.

Outcome

The tertiary education institute’s team has made strong progress following the initiative. The team has strengthened their capability, adopted the new approaches and used the recommended templates. By introducing greater clarity, improved communication, and practical architectural standards, the team is helping the institute to make better business and technology decisions and deliver project results that support business needs.