1. Connected Systems assisted the project using our portal methodology.   During the Strategy Phase, Connected Systems completed to following activities:
• Compiled a surveyed to gather information from key user groups.  This information would be the basis for discussion points during the Focus Group Workshops.
• Ran Focus Group Workshops with key user groups.  Five sets of Focus Groups workshops were run. The deliverable from these workshops was a reported that outlines the findings; this was used to assist in the design phase of the UWA portal project.
2. Connected Systems also assisted the project during the Discovery phase.  During the Discovery Phase, Connected Systems completed to following activities:
• Compiled a surveyed to gather information from key user groups. 
• Conducted interviews to understand core infrastructure and Information Management architecture to gain a preliminary analysis of the technical and information management landscape.
• Compile a findings report that feeds into the Design process.  

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Workshops

Introduction

The main objectives of this first phase of the project was to understand the requirements, technical feasibility and manage expectations of the key stakeholders.  

One of the first activities undertaken to help deliver these objectives, was to organise the key areas of UWA into focus groups and determine the requirements of each focus group.   This was facilitated through workshops with a report and presentations being the primary deliverables of this process.

pre-Workshop Survey

A pre-workshop survey was created for the focus groups.  The aim of this was to gather an understanding of the participatant's requirements.  It helped gathering information and helps drive discussion during the workshop process.   If you are interested in a copy of the survey, please email rick@connectedsystems.com.

Focus Group Workshops

Connected Systems was engaged to facilitate a set of workshops with key focus groups at UWA.   The aim of these sessions is to deliver

1. A vision for the UWA Portal – what does it mean to them versus what it means to UWA?  Is it about better student experience, educational outcomes, internal efficiencies or something else?
2. An understanding of what each focus group is responsible for delivering in terms of student interaction.
3. An understanding of the end-to-end requirements of the UWA portal for each focus group – which features are key to their success?
4. An understanding of their pain points with current solutions – is integration currently achievable?
5. A ranking of most to least important deliverables and features.
6. An understanding of the core business applications that the portal needs to leverage.
7. An understanding of the key challenges of each of the focus groups.
8. An expectation of the user roles and the breadth of coverage of the UWA Portal.

Theme of the workshops

An underlying theme or vision needed to be established to keep the discussion focussed on achieving measurable outcomes as part of this phase.   Although there was open discussion, these workshops followed a specific agenda.   For a copy of this agenda, please email rick@connectedsystems.com.

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Architectural Discovery 

Introduction

The role of a Portal Architect is to plan and coordinates technical activities and system architectural component development throughout the project lifecycle by working closely with the Project Management, Stakeholders and Focus Groups as well as the design and implementation team.

The Portal Architect surveys and analyzes business and technical information, conceptualises the viable solutions by exploring technology alternatives and applies industry standards and best practices.  

Preliminary analysis of the technical landscape within a complex environment like UWA, shortened the planning process as this was done in parallel to the requirements gathering.   The benefit of doing it before a decision to develop is made, is that it reduces the overtime to deliver by downing a lot of the "heavy-lifting" upfront and then simply including the findings into the functional specification and design process.

Fundamental technical concepts and features

When we consider any large portal project like the UWA Portal, there are some fundamental technical concepts and features that underpin any technology platform decision. 

For example, one fundamental concept is understanding the types of "plumbing" required to enable information from backend systems (finance, student management, learning management, etc.) to be integrated and presented in a single student object.    This could mean pulling together student contact information, courses, fees payments and course results all on one web page.    This collection of once silo information from disparate systems is now “merged” into a view that relates to a student using the portal.  This flattening of the data objects can be done through services-orientation and understanding how to plan for service-orientation is one of the fundamental design activities we would do.  

Other common features that can be considered as preliminary activities include:

1. Integrating security (in simple terms, achieving a single login username and password.
2. Personalisation of portal components (governance around the types of personalisation allowed)
3. Integrating mail & calendar (understanding what can be consolidate versus integrated) 
4. Integration with  business applications (like Student Information System, Course Management Systems, Financial Systems, Library – this is where the majority of the service-orientation gap analysis is done)
5. Organisation-wide Search (which objects and document types need to be indexed)
6. Integration with mobile devices (related to current application support)
7. Targeted content (Audience groupings and governance of subscriptions)
8. Multiple roles or transition students (what is the matrix that needs to be supported - teacher is student, student to alumni and managing transition)
9. Privacy control (protect personal data).
10. Workflow (human-based versus document versus business-process)
11. Video/voice conferencing (integration challenge with current technology and mapping supported versus non-supported scenarios)

In architecting for these features, we can start planning to better understand how this needs to be handled when selecting a technology solution.   Having an understanding of the impact existing systems have on any selected technology reduces to risk of this being covered off during the due diligence of vendor selection.     The risk of selecting a vendor that may not fully support applications across the faculties is reduced.   Activities like auditing of basic infrastructure across UWA is key and would need to be done anyway.  Without a well-known base it is impossible to architect a solution, regardless of final platform and technology.

Architectural activities to be undertaken

Connected Systems was engaged to execute a range audit-based activities as phase 1.   The aim of these activities is to deliver a report outlining:

• Fundamental technical considerations for the common features listed above.
• Application-based connection requirements to facilitate silo information integration into a portal environment.
• Service-orientation and service-contract gap analysis.

If you would like more information about our framework, please email rick@connectedsystems.com.