Office of Enterprise Architecture and Change Management

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is essentially a planning process that converts strategy statements into plans for supporting underlying technical, data, and business process implementation.  It does this by identifying a path from where we are now to where we need to go. The specific way we go about this is our "Architecture Development Model".  The main output of the EA office are principles, architectural roadmaps, and high level project specifications.

EA's handoff project implementations to a PMO or to line management. EA's have a role in oversight of those projects. The EA has some governance rights over projects, and a duty to interface to projects so that they understand the architected environment.

Change Management

Change Management is a process that protects the production operational environment.  The Change Management Policy governs the Change Management Process and Procedures. The Change Manager is accountable for gating changes to the production environment.  The Change Management office runs processes that:

• Screen requested changes for business need.
• Consider the needs of the production environment, and authorize plans to build and test releases.
• Consider the needs of the prodution environment, and authorize the deployment of a release into the production environment.
• Review changes after implementation.

The level of risk associated with a change determines the amount of scrutiny applied to each change. The planner of a change submits a plan, and fills out a risk assessment questionaire. A risk level is computed, which may be adjusted by change management processes.  Plans for change with high risk are brought before a Change Advisory Board (CAB).  Lower risk releases are considered by the Change Manager. The Change Manager or CAB  also authorize "standard changes" which have a fast path through the system.

At Fermilab, Change Management is implemented within the context of the ITIL V2 process framework. The change management processes are driven by "request for change" tickets in the BMC Remedy system.

Onboarding

Change management has finished its construction phase and is in its commissioning phase. During this phase, service support groups are onboarded to change management serially.  On boarding all the service support groups will take several months to complete. The sequence and schedule is determined by the ISO20K project.

The Change Management task of the ISO20K project provides an onboarding process. The process will evolve as we gain experience. In this process, groups:

• Learn about change management and learn about filing change tickets in remedy tool. 
• Check that their activities are fully modeled up to the level of maturity of the companion ITIL processes, for example, service level management  and configuration management.
• Negotiate a  "Change Risk Classification Document" based on a template, which provides guidance as to whether a change is work, standard, minor or major. 

The service support group files Requests for Change (RFC's) only after onboarding is complete. After onboarding is complete, all changes for that service support are governed by Change Management.