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04/08/23
Services-approaches in Dutch Higher Education Expectations, opportunities and current activities
Expectations, opportunities and current activities3
Services ……..
- Relatively small software components- Each component provides a unique functionality- These can be linked to support more complex work
processes- Standardise on the messages, allowing diverse
technical implementations
Expectations, opportunities and current activities4
Service Orientation: the expectations
- For the user (students and staff):- Increased user-friendliness and transparency- Demand-driven instead of supply-driven
information function- For the ICT department:
- Standardise interfacing between system components (integration)
- Leading principle for (shared) information architecture development
- For management- May lead towards shared services centres
Expectations, opportunities and current activities5
HEI services adoption in the Netherlands
- Closely linked to IT governance and ‘working under architecture’
- Services approach as a leading principle in reference architectures
- Practical work often in reaction to disappointing portal projects
- Main drivers:- application integration- reduction of duplicate functional components
Expectations, opportunities and current activities6
Some sectoral initiatives
- Services approach to integrate existing institutional e-learning infrastructures: 3TU Graduate School
- SIS User Group taking the lead in making their application service-enabled: Osiris
- Joint SIS requirements specification & selection on the basis of services definitions: SaNS
Expectations, opportunities and current activities7
National level framework: NORA
- Dutch Public Sector Reference Architecture
- part of ‘e-government’ strategy
- functional perspective: ‘client first’
- technical perspective: semantic- and service oriented
- Defined at 3 architectural layers:
- Business architecture
- Information architecture
- Technical architecture
- 20 ‘fundamental principles’ + 140 derived principles:
- Interoperability principles (mandatory)
- Internal principles (advised)
- De jure principles
- Now working on sector instantiations
Expectations, opportunities and current activities8
National methods and tooling
- Service oriented architecture modelling language: Archimate
- Archimate-approved tools: BiZZdesign and ARIS- But:
- Limited adoption- Various ‘local modelling dialects’- No shared underlying semantic models
Expectations, opportunities and current activities9
SURF activities
- Developing SOA building blocks
- Federated identity management: A-select
- National integration: StudieLink – ‘almost soa’
- Federated educational and research repositories:
LOREnet and DAREnet
- Promoting cooperation and dissemination
- Architects community
- Archimate partnership
- Cheap licences for archimate tooling
- Support ‘business demonstrator’ projects
- Plan to make outcomes widely and ‘standardised’
available for repurposing
Expectations, opportunities and current activities10
International cooper-ation
- E-Framework
- Partnership between UK-JISC; Australian DEST; New
Zealand MoE; Dutch SURFfoundation
- Aim: “…harness the development and wide adoption of
open standards and flexible infrastructures to support
… education, administration, teaching and research.”
- Products: Service Usage Models, Service Descriptions,
and Core SUMS (pattern)
- TENCompetence:
- 4-year RTD project, EU-IST-TEL programme, 15
partners from 9 countries
- Aim: Establish a technical and organisational
infrastructure for lifelong competence development
Expectations, opportunities and current activities11
SOA reality in Dutch HEI
- Most HEIs have entered the ‘awareness phase’- The ‘early adopters’ apply SOA to address
operational problems, not so much for strategic purposes
- ‘service enabling’ of existing applications and ‘self services’ exposed through portals, but no full fledged SOA implementations yet
- Cooperation for system replacement and selection – soa is one of the criteria
- Sectoral initiatives towards interoperability and shared services ‘the next thing’?
Expectations, opportunities and current activities12
Present issues
Just-in-time and just-enough
architecture
Convincing our own manage-
ment is complex enough
Implement an institutional
services architecture
Web2.0 means giving in to
anarchy
…………………………………
Overall architectural design
Only cooperation leads to long
term advantages
Work towards defining and
implementing shared services
Web2.0 provides exiting new
opportunities
………………………………………
Expectations, opportunities and current activities13
So, what’s in it for students
- Personalised electronic learning environment through a ‘plug and play’ architecture
- Transparency in educational offerings, leading to more demand-driven education
- Life-long personal services, spanning education, work, and private life
Expectations, opportunities and current activities14
But still a lot of work to do
Expectations, opportunities and current activities15
Eric Kluijfhout
www.surf.nl/en
http://www.e-framework.org/
http://www.partners.tencompetence.org/
http://www.e-overheid.nl/atlas/referentiearchitectuur/