I/T Integration Process Planning

Work-In-Progress, August 15, 1995

Susan Minai-Azary, Director, I/T Integration

Work underway as of August 15

All the Integration work underway in IS will continue, including:

The I/T Infrastructure Readiness Team ongoing work
The project work in the current DCNS, ASD, and O&S sponsored by the I/T Infrastructure Readiness Team
The Integration Lab planning and setup initiated by R-IT group
The Oracle Rollout project
The work of the Object Group
The planning and testing of the new connection from Lincoln Laboratory to the mainframe databases
Developing and maintaining the MIT data model
Developing the MIT Warehouse

A planning team for integration began working on Wednesday mornings in July and will continue through September. The charter of this team is to develop the integration process transition plan. The issues the team is addressing include:

what is the purpose of integration?
what are the goals of integration?
what are the critical success factors for integration?
what are the principles of integration?
what kinds of work are in the integration process?
how is the integration work organized?
what kinds of the work would be accomplished by project teams and what by standing teams?
what is the charter, membership, and member skills of any standing teams?
what current work in I/T is integration process work?
how do we transition the current work into the newly designed process?
what are the boundaries, interfaces, handoffs to other processes and organizations?

The members of the team are: Greg Jackson, Jerry Isaacson, Susan Minai-Azary, Andy Oakland, Theresa Regan, Jim Repa, Rachel Sage, Scott Thorne, Ted Ts'o, Jeffrey Schiller, Dan Weir.

As of 8/14, the team

has refined and added to the trans-it team answers, in the slide presentation of 11/16/94, for the first five questions

what is the purpose of integration?
what are the goals of integration?
what are the critical success factors for integration?
what are the principles of integration?
what kinds of work are in the integration process?

The planning team has also

gathered information on current integration work in IS
begun to group the ongoing work of the integration process to develope team structure

You may contract any of the team members for copies of this work or with concerns or suggestions you might have for the integration process.

Upcoming work August 15 - December 15

Many of the Infrastructure Readiness projects are scheduled for rollout this fall as they are needed by the Reengineering projects. We will be developing several support and service plans and practicing handoffs.
The Infrastructure Readiness Team has been discussing a possible project to help programmers developing a three tiered architecture for transaction systems.
The Oracle rollout group will be planning and testing support and service models to provide Oracle products to the MIT community.
The Infrastructure Readiness team will be planning a migration to Kerberos V5 after finishing the development of the first release of Kerberos V5.
The Infrastructure Readiness Team will be examining the authorization issues around administrative applications and databases after the SAP authorization project is completed.
The I/T community is looking at object technology. In order to coordinate efforts across I/T IS will need to work with all I/T groups undertaking this effort.
We need to develop and document our User Interface Standards.
We need to document the Architecture from the programmers point of view and provide pointers to needed software and standards for discovery and delivery.

Some responsibilities for Integration work change as of August 21

Integration work in today's IS departments will move under the influence of the integration process leader as of Monday, August 21. Initially, this means:

Current groups continue doing that work under the leadership of current managers and team leaders. We expect there will be changes in the structure and roles of these groups during the period 8/15-12/15.
Also initially, budget authority for those groups remains as it currently has been in the IS department structure, under the continuing auspices of the designated members of the IS Finance team. We expect the cutover to a new accounting structure for the new framework to occur later in the fall, coordinated by the IS Finance team
Thirdly, administrative support for these groups remains as it currently is. Staff who need supplies and other administrative assistance, for instance, in the upcoming weeks should plan to get them wherever they get them today.
We recognize that staff doing this work also may wear hats in other processes.

Next steps in integration transition planning

The Planning team for Integration will develop the standing team structure of the Integration process by the end of August.

A plan to accomplish the I/T Infrastructure Readiness ongoing tasks will be developed next within the standing team structure. Finally we will determine the boundaries, interfaces, handoffs to other processes and organizations.

During this time there may be further announced changes.