• Which of the four phases (described in Chapter 4) do you believe will provide the greatest challenges in your school district? Why? What steps can be taken to improve the success of the activities in that particular phase?

Based on what I have read of the four phases of establishing an EA for an organization, I believe Phase I, actually establishing the EA would be the greatest challenge for my school district.  The reason for that opinion is that EA program establishment will require a hefty change in mindset from all stakeholders in how the district is organized and run.  If, among other things, phase I activities are designed to "...communicate the EA implementation plan to the executive sponsor and other stakeholders in order to gain buy-in and support," that will take some time, front-loading of information and rationale, and team building (Bernard, 2012).  Currently VUSD has strong, established departments that fulfill their defined purposes within the organization well.  The initial challenge I see is that currently these departments operate almost... separately, meaning that they do their own thing (most of the time very well), without necessarily concerning themselves with the activity of other departments.  Sometimes this is unavoidable, as in the example where our IT department had to move forward with selecting and purchasing technology for the district based on usability rather than curricular goals established by C&I because of the transition happening with C&I. But many times I am witness to situations where one decision requires input from three or four departments, and those departments are not communicating with each other.  I am sure this is very common, especially in large school districts, so I am not criticizing, rather, it is an observation I have made through participating in meetings with representatives from various departments in the district.  A recent example is attending several separate meetings with HR, IT, Innovation, and with the Director of Online and Blended Learning, all related to the same topic, and realizing that all stakeholders are exploring the same topic, but aren't talking to each other.  Obviously representatives from each department involved in the exploration or decision should be in the same room discussing the issue so that everyone is on the same page.  This would cut down on the red tape and extra time it takes to make decisions, and keep efficiency to a maximum.  I believe having an established EA would help this situation very much, by putting the proposed decision on the table and pulling together the required stakeholders to discuss it rather than the decision being brought to each department separately.  Because of the long-established culture of departments operating more independently, it will require the most shift in mindset, habit and behavior by department leadership. 

I don't believe identifying a chief architect in Step 1 will be an issue, but pulling together the team of trained EA architects might be.  I would imagine that, specifically, Steps 2 and 3 of Phase I would be the most challenging for VUSD.  Actually, "challenging" isn't quite the right word. I believe the cooperation, vision, and mindset of department leadership is in place to allow EA to be successful; these steps will simply require the most investment of learning, time, and the creation and implementation of some new processes and habits. With the current way the various departments operate, establishing implementation methodology, EA governance and links to all management processes would require total teamwork and re-mapping of how things are done.  I wouldn't anticipate buy-in to be an issue.

I am not sure what would make these Phase I activities more successful, except team-building, with district visioning at the core, and much information and rationale for the reorganization of how the district would operate.  The stakeholders not familiar with EA would have much learning to do in order to adopt and implement a new way of organizing, planning, decision-making, and leading.  Our IT director confirmed for me that VUSD's current architecture is the Blueprint (LCAP), which contains the eight strategies to be addressed, with allocated funding linked to each strategy.  It took some EA mindset for district leadership to create and agree upon the eight strategies, so the next jump to EA implementation shouldn't be too difficult.

References:
Bernard, S. A. (2012). An introduction to enterprise architecture. 

• Much of this week’s work and readings focus on setting the stage for Enterprise Architecture.  Typically, school districts have maintained separate plans for technology and the district. For example, a district creates a “district education plan” and then has a separate “technology plan.”  Moving forward, do you think this is still a good practice, or should they be combined? 

This is such an interesting question, and I'm afraid my answer isn't clear cut and easy, as this topic isn't one that fits into a one-size-fits-all solution.  Ideally I would say if a school district has embraced technology as a "normal" part of the district's educational practice and budget for a good amount of time, and it has become part of the culture (as opposed to tech being seen as an "extra"), then the technology plan could become part of the district's comprehensive strategic plan. It would be ideal to see the comprehensive plan include the plans for technology when a district has technology embedded throughout its practice.  That said, technology plans can be so big and involve so many specifics, including financial specifics, that I can see why districts create a separate plan for technology.  There is a great deal to hash out regarding technology, and I can see how having its own plan might make it easier to organize and locate specific information. As education moves forward with technology integrated more and more seamlessly within its process, technology should become more and more a natural or "normal" part of THE plan for each district.  This shift in mindset might lead to integrating the tech plan into the comprehensive strategic plan for each district.

In VUSD we have a separate technology plan, but technology is written into our district architecture, the Blueprint For Educational Excellence (our LCAP), in strategies two and seven specifically.  So it seems VUSD has taken both approaches.  I wonder if eventually VUSD will lose the separate technology plan?  Last week I had a very informative meeting with our IT director, DeWayne Cossey (THANK YOU DeWayne!) who shared helpful "perspective" information.  In DeWayne's words, VUSD is "technology heavy" at the moment.  He explained, very well, what he means by that.  Here is my interpretation: Over the past few years VUSD's C&I department has been through some transition (partly internal, and partly due to implementation of Common Core) and curricular goals for the district are also going through transition.  For that reason, as IT moved forward with purchasing technology for the district in its goal of becoming 1:1 with devices for students, and having the hardware and infrastructure to set up conditions for ubiquitous computing abilities, they chose technology based on usability rather than based on curricular goals.  So the district is technology heavy, and on the C&I side, there is a bit of catching up to do in terms of setting those clear district curricular goals and also implementing PD for teachers that integrates both the technology and addresses the curricular goals.  Maybe when C&I has settled into its transition and the PD is in place for teachers, It might be a natural next step to fully integrate the technology plan into the district strategic plan so that there is only one plan.

This image as a definition came from the National Institutes of Health Enterprise Architecture.  Once I understood what each of the categories embraced, this came into focus as a great tool. For my assignment I chose to put learning management systems for VUSD into the brick, as our district will need to adopt a new LMS in the near future.  It was relatively intuitive to know what to include in each category, although at times there was some overlap that felt a bit ambiguous.  I hope I completed it correctly.  I can absolutely see how creating and using a brick for my own teaching tools and even teaching strategies would be very helpful. At specific school sites I could see grade level teams creating bricks to keep track of what tools they are using to teach and assess, so that they stay current and focused on their ultimate goals, retiring tools as necessary and replacing those with new tools that have been tracked and researched.  A principal would be able to create bricks as a way to keep track of products that are used school-wide.  At a district level I would imagine there could be many, many bricks for all of the various and many products used district-wide.  But what a great, brief, visual to get a researched, balanced, at-a-glance look at a particular category for an organization.  I would think that school districts would want to use tools like this to keep them on track and help to make decisions, especially when budgets are tight and money must be allocated judiciously.