Meet Your Colleagues: IT Enterprise Architecture team

Manager Clint Criddle admits that the IT Enterprise Architecture team he manages is “a little hard to define.”

IT enterprise architects are often compared to urban planners. With cities and IT environments, things change over time and work with what already exists. While an urban planner helps guide community change with an understanding of land use, zoning, environmental factors, and transportation, an enterprise architect understands the university’s overall goals and strategy and how to comprehensively design and implement IT infrastructure, services, and products to meet its current and future needs.

Most IT staff, Criddle said, naturally “tend to get hyper focused on what they’re doing, so as architects, we try to broaden their perspectives a little and help them to see a bigger picture.”

Caprice Post, Microsoft 365 senior architect, agreed, adding that “IT enterprise architecture informs how technology fits in your organization as part of a comprehensive  plan.”

“You have systems, IT security integration, data flow, and governance. Enterprise architecture is the fundamental planning around how all our IT fits together to meet our goals,” Post said.

Where Post’s role relates to application development in the Microsoft 365 environment — “tying technical roadmaps to customer scenarios and deployment timelines, creating reference architecture, and helping to identify and reduce duplicative spend” — Brian Stephens’ expertise is disaster recovery (DR). As a DR architect, his role involves identifying critical IT systems and dependencies to better prioritize recovery processes and ensure continuity following a catastrophic event.

“My focus is creating standardized processes around disaster recovery and architecting DR-related solutions for different applications and services,” Stephens said.

Because a lot of DR work involves data storage, Stephens benefits greatly from the diagramming work of his colleague Bryce Fox, enterprise IT architect. Fox works with various IT teams, including Hardware Platform Services and the Identity & Access Management team in the Information Security Office, to create visual representations of software system components, applications, and integrations via Lucidchart.

“Like the adage goes, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’” Fox said. “You can sit down and describe something, and a person can get lost in it, whereas, with a diagram, someone can get a decent understanding of complex systems, like high-level network connections and data storage services.”

Fox also conducts architecture reviews to ensure IT solutions and their implementation align with the strategic goals of UIT and the university at large. For example, he plays a role when a new virtual server is requested in the university’s Downtown Data Center.

“The review is an important step in determining if someone’s trying to introduce a new solution that isn’t necessary or if it’s something we already use,” Fox said.

Architecture review requests can be made via the IT Service Catalog (login required), after which the team will schedule an assessment meeting.

The team, rounded out by Senior IT Architect Andrew Reich, also facilitates the university’s Network Architecture community of practice (CoP), which provides recommendations on network technology architecture opportunities, initiatives, issues, and policy surrounding network implementations and core services enabling the network.

The team aligns its principles and processes with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), The TOGAF framework is a globally recognized standard for designing, implementing, and managing enterprise architectures, which are the blueprints for how an organization’s business and IT work together.

The Enterprise Architecture team is a partner on several projects underway at the U, including a new credit card reader for hospitals and clinics, the deployment of a cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution, and introduction of Instrument Manager, a lab instrument management system, at University of Utah Health.

Criddle said he couldn’t imagine managing a more talented team.

“I hire people who are interested in the details, who I trust, and who have the breadth of knowledge and experience to do their jobs well. They are all very smart and truly experts at what they do,” he said.

 

 

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