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ACT Architecture Committee Wiki#

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Background: The ACT Architecture Committee is the primary ACT forum for developing a shared vision of how information technologies can best support UC San Diego Administrative Systems and Services. The ACT Architecture Committee carries out this charge through research, consultation, advice, and communication. The Architecture Committee reports to the ACT-AVC. The Architecture Committee consults with campus constituencies, including the technology experts in departmental units and outside technology experts.

The vision to be shared, known as the Enterprise Architecture (EA), encompasses issues related to information management, business process analysis, applications architecture, and technology infrastructure. In addition, the EA encompasses certain non-technical topics that affect the feasibility of the EA, including IT skills, training, as well as governance and cultural implications of changes induced by the EA. The EA provides a framework in which decisions may be made in designing and purchasing technology.

The Architecture Committee identifies, analyzes, and makes recommendations on EA issues. The Architecture Committee documents key technical components of the EA and articulates policy questions for referral to the ACT Policy Committee (ACTPC). The Architecture Committee also advocates for appropriate use of innovative technologies and educates the campus community on matters related to the enterprise architecture. Architecture Committee voting members are appointed by the CIO and the Executive Directors of Applications and Infrastructure and include technology managers and experts from the various ACT teams. Other individuals from the campus IT community may be brought in to participate in Architecture Committee meetings, mailing list discussions, subcommittees, and working groups on a as needed basis but will have no voting rights on decisions made by the group. Methodology: The Architecture committee will maintain the complete list of approved technologies that will be released to the production environment and used by the development teams. The approved technology list should be developed to solve the needs of the campus, infrastructure and applications teams. Examples of affected projects and applications include:

• Database and data warehouse
• Mid-tier application development
• Mainframe application development
• Infrastructure applications and systems
• Middleware architecture
• User Interface

The Architecture committee will take an active role in approving new project architecture and roadmaps to assure that the best technologies are being presented to our clients and end-users. In the case that a business decision needs to be made that goes against the committee’s recommendations, a write-up will be created to discuss the business decisions that drove the final decision.

The Architecture committee will review requests from the ACT teams in a timely manner and abdicate decisions to the sponsors if they cannot reach a decision in the timeframe necessary to assure a successful project release. ACT teams will react to the recommendations of the AC by upgrading development environments and assuring all QA and staging servers are using the correct technologies and versions of OS, infrastructure, mid-tier and mainframe components.

Requests to the Architecture Committee:
Any ACT team can request a modification to the current technology list. All ACT teams will need to request a review of their product architecture and roadmap prior to developing their project. Templates should be created and expected timelines will be stated.

Decisions from the Architecture Committee:
The chair of the AC will contact and deliver the decisions of the AC to the team lead after rendering a decision. Appeals can be made to the AC sponsors for further analysis.

Governance:
The Architecture Committee will use a voting system to determine the outcome of some technical decisions and recommendations.
A vote must occur with a quorum of voting members which is 70%.
There will be one vote per member and ties will be broken by the comttee sponsors.
Sponsor: Executive Directors for Infrastructure and Applications Development & ACT CIO
Chair: Rotating – must be committee member, two year term.
Vice Chair: Voted by membership, two-year term.

Membership:

• Executive Director, Applications Development
• Executive Director, IT Infrastructure
• Mainframe application architecture
• Mid-tier application architecture
• Application Middleware
• Data management
• Security
• Data Center Support
• CWO
• Project Services

Visitor Membership:

• SIO
• Medical
• Biology
• Student Affairs
• Extension
• BFS
• Human Resources
• Environment Health & Safety
• Office of Graduate Studies
• Provost
• SOM
• Library
• Foundation
• School of Engineering
• Electronic Research Admin
• Campus Planning Office
• School of Business
• ACMS
• Other technical members of ACT & campus departments as needed

Working Groups:
Some of the work of ACT Architecture Committee is carried out by working groups that bring together technical experts to study particular topics in depth, prepare reports, and make recommendations to the larger group.
The working groups are appointed ad hoc for a finite term and can be comprised of both ACT Architecture Committee and non-ACT Architecture Committee members.

Communications:
ACT Architecture Committee is fundamentally a decision-making and advisory body, but also has responsibility for communicating decisions about standards and best practices to the ACT department and periodically to the campus technical community.
The following channels will be used to communicate with the campus:

• BLINK website, Wiki’s
• Appropriate campus mailing lists (e.g., sysadmins, End User groups)
• CIO communications and outreach vehicles
• Executive Director communications and outreach vehicles

Critical Issues for 2009–10:
In 2009–10, the ACT Architecture Committee will review the following critical information technology issues, all of which will have an immediate or relatively near-term impact on the campus and the systems ACT support.

• Approved Technologies list: The committee shall create a list of current accepted technologies within ACT. The committee shall create a list of technologies and products or development techniques that should be sunsetted. This may include the requirement of upgrading products and/or rewriting existing code.

Managers will work with the AC to receive advice on moving forward with these projects.

• XO middleware: The Architecture committee will take an active role in the development and maintenance of the XO middleware component that drives most of the ACT application development process. This role includes advising on feature development, issue resolution, technology approvals and roll out to the production teams. XO will be created to be modular and connect to many third-party components. It should not be assume that the XO team will maintain all connected third-party components and other ACT teams should expect to manage components that are needed for their applications with the production teams.

• Kuali Rice: UC San Diego is a founding member of the Kuali Rice university consortium. Kuali Rice is being designed as a full Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system to replace San Diego's Application Middleware. The Architect Committee needs to assess the impact of the implementation of Kuali on San Diego's current and future technology architecture as well as to consider and provide recommendations on how to "move" the campus in a direction that readies us for a successful implementation. The work performed by the committee in this area will be fully coordinated and complement the work San Diego staff does as part of the Kuali Rice consortium.