What is the Enterprise IT BOK?

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1 Introduction to the Guide

In this guide, the IEEE Computer Society establishes a baseline for the body of knowledge for the practice of Enterprise Information Technology (EIT). This work has been undertaken as part of the Society’s responsibility to promote the advancement of both theory and practice in this field. It is written by practitioners, for practitioners, as well as for others who are interested in what EIT is. The authors are invited experts from different countries, professional associations, industry, government, and academia. They have contributed –and continue to contribute—hundreds of volunteer hours to the creation of this Guide.

We have chosen to use the term Enterprise IT to distinguish it from the wider terms “IT” (Information Technology) and “ICT” (Information and Communications Technology), which are often used to refer to the entire industry of creating, selling, and using electronic information products.

It should be noted that the Guide does not purport to define the entire body of knowledge for the Enterprise IT domain. Rather, it is to serve as a compendium and guide to the body of knowledge that has been developing and evolving since the 1960s.

This guide complements the “Bodies of Knowledge” outlined in the model computing curricula for undergraduate degrees. This Guide discusses the application of knowledge in professional practice. While a university IT program may have a capstone project intended to demonstrate the integrated use of the 13 Knowledge areas in the IT curriculum, it cannot capture how these elements of the KAs come together in the professional lives of practitioners.

Furthermore, the practice of Enterprise IT necessarily requires the application of knowledge not just from the IT curriculum, but also from the adjacent disciplines of Information Systems and Software Engineering. This Guide attempts to help the practitioner and aspiring practitioner see themselves as part of a community of those who work together within enterprises across the globe to facilitate the successful execution of the enterprises activities. EIT, at its heart provides the circulatory system for the information that drives the enterprise’s decision-making and thus its ability to survive and thrive.

By depicting the activities that an IT professional engages in we are able to see the skills needed to perform the various roles within an EIT organization. In this Guide, we refer to skills described in the Skills Framework for the Information Age, and roles described in ITIL and/or the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. Although there are very many nation-specific and region-specific job classification schemes and skill certifications, this Guide recognizes that EIT is global, and that its skills are international. For this reason, the most international reference points are used: SFIA and ITIL. We hope to add skills from the European Competency Framework (eCF) as well as the Japanese government’s ICompetency Dictionary.

The development of this book has engaged the participation of individuals from several countries.

There are several hallmarks for the maturing of a profession. One of the most important is an agreement by the professional community on what knowledge is included in the profession, including how that knowledge should be captured and organized to facilitate use by practitioners, researchers, and educators; i.e., a guide to its body of knowledge. Without a recognized body of knowledge for practitioners, each practitioner has no community-accepted framework to structure his understanding of the field, and any organization that certifies practicing Enterprise IT professionals and guides career development does so without the benefit of community-accepted standards. And in everyday work, the lack of a standard, commonly-accepted vocabulary to facilitate communication among its practitioners and with the larger enterprise they operate within impedes effectiveness and advancement.

1.1 Motivation for the Guide

The EITBOK Guide project was undertaken because:

  • There is no authoritative source that defines and organizes the knowledge across the whole of Enterprise IT, including its methods, processes, practices, and tools. The resulting knowledge gap creates unnecessary inconsistency and confusion in understanding roles in enterprise IT projects and programs; and in defining common products and processes.  This EITBOK will fill that gap, becoming the “go to” reference for IT practitioners and practitioners to be.
  • The process of creating the Enterprise ITBOK Guide will help to build community consensus on the boundaries and context of Enterprise IT thinking, and use this to help understand and improve the ability of business management science and engineering disciplines to work together.
  • Having a common way to refer to Enterprise IT knowledge will facilitate communication among IT professionals and their business partners. It will also provide a shared baseline for consistent competency models, certification programs, educational programs, and other workforce development initiatives around the world.

The Enterprise ITBOK Guide leverages respected existing guides to bodies of knowledge in specific areas of IT practice, such as Business Analysis and Data Management. As well, these include guides to the related disciplines of software engineering (SwE) and project management (PM), and three of the five ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula: those for Software Engineering, Information Systems, and, of course, Information Technology.

It is important to point out that the EITBOK Guide is not in itself an inclusive compendium of all Enterprise IT knowledge. Rather, this Guide to the Enterprise ITBOK is a portal that guides the user in finding and understanding where to seek information in the vast amount of material that has been separately published in books, articles, websites, and other generally accessible resources. All references included in the Enterprise ITBOK Guide are generally available to any interested reader; i.e., no proprietary information is referenced. However, references that are available to any interested reader are not necessarily free; some references are to books or standards that must be purchased. The criterion for inclusion is simply that the authors believed them to be among the best generally available sources of information on the topic.

1.2 Objectives of the Guide

The Guide to the Enterprise IT Body of Knowledge (ITBOK) was established with the following objectives:

  • To promote a consistent view of enterprise IT work and its importance, worldwide, across national boundaries
  • To provide consistency with an internationally accepted skills framework (SFIA) as the basis for role definitions within enterprise IT and therefore as a basis for competency evaluations
  • To provide a single, readily accessible portal to the widely scattered parts of the Body of Knowledge stretched across the globe.
  • To provide information about existing international standards that can be useful for IT practitioners and organizations.
  • To provide a common, unified foundation for discussing, analyzing and maturing the EIT profession.

1.3 Audience

Potential audiences for the Enterprise ITBOK will include

  • Experienced and aspiring IT professionals.
  • Executives with an interest in managing enterprise IT assets to provide maximum value to the enterprise.
  • Business managers and information workers who rely on enterprise IT services.
  • Consultants conducting assessments of client IT areas and helping to implement and improve IT solutions at these clients.
  • Educators responsible for developing and delivering an IT curriculum.
  • Researchers in the field of information technology.
  • Acquirers and suppliers of enterprise IT services.
  • Policy makers charged with creating regulations, legislations, and operating environment for the practice of IT professions.
  • Other stakeholders and owners of some or all aspects of IT

1.4 Potential Uses of the Enterprise ITBOK Guide

IEEE-CS foresees several potential uses of the Enterprise ITBOK, including:

  • Informing a diverse audience about the nature and importance of IT.
  • Helping build consensus within the IT community.
  • Providing common ground for assessments of IT effectiveness, maturity, and capability.
  • Guiding efforts to implement and improve IT Knowledge Areas (KA).
  • Educating students, new hires, practitioners, and executives on IT KAs.
  • Informing the development and delivery of IT curriculum content for higher education.
  • Suggesting areas of further research in the field of IT. Help organizations understand and define their enterprise IT strategies, tactics, and operations.

Like other Guides to professional bodies of knowledge, such as the SWEBOK, DAMA DMBOK, BABOK , and the SEBOK, this Guide can serve a variety of useful purposes.

</tr>

<th> <td>Inform Practice</td> <td>Inform IT practitioners about the boundaries, terminology, and structure of their professional domain and point them to useful information needed to practice Enterprise IT in any type of enterprise</td></tr> <tr> <td>Inform Research</td> <td>Inform researchers about the limitations and gaps in current Enterprise IT knowledge that should help guide their research agenda</td><tr> <tr> <td>Inform Curricula</td> <td>Define the content that should be common in undergraduate and graduate programs that lead to careers in Enterprise IT</td></tr> <tr> <td>Inform Certification of Professionals</td> <td>Define the skills for which to certify individuals as qualified to perform in Enterprise IT roles</td></tr> <tr> <td>Establish Common Competencies</td> <td>Illuminate the competencies that IT practitioners should possess in various roles ranging from recent IT graduates to expert levels</td></tr> </table>

As a guide to the body of knowledge, the Enterprise ITBOK Guide most directly enables Inform Practice and Inform Research. These are the heart of what the Enterprise is about. The Enterprise ITBOK Guide supports the remaining three uses, but less directly. For example, the task Certify Professionals is supported by the sections in each chapter that describe the skills needed to perform in that area. The Guide to the Enterprise ITBOK can play an important role in this area. As it stands today, there are thousands of different certifications offered by various vendors and various professional education companies. Very few of these, however, have been able to establish any value in the marketplace because there is no way to determine what essential higher-level skills they can lead to competencies in. That’s because there has been no commonly accepted model of essential IT competencies. The IEEE Computer Society has adopted the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) as the basis of IT competencies and is working with the SFIA Council and Foundation to better define skills in specific areas of specialization of increasing importance today. In addition, we have invited participation by the creators of the Japanese i-Competency Dictionary (iCD) of ICT skills and the European Competency Framework (e-CF).

1.5 Scope of the Guide

The EITBOK addresses Enterprise IT functions, activities and roles in medium to large EIT organizations. Although small EIT organizations may not define jobs (positions) in the same way as larger organizations, the functions performed by various roles are still usually necessary. In the smaller organization, many roles may be carried out by a single person. Thus, the activities described here can apply to any size organization. However, we recognize that not all EIT organizations have the same breadth of responsibilities, so some of the activities described here may not be carried out by all organizations.

1.6 Organization of the Guide

The EITBOK presupposes a flow of information and decision making from enterprise strategy formulation through various activities that cascade that strategy through the organization, via defined projects and translation of project results into operations.

We have divided the EITBOK into two main parts: the Enterprise Perspective and the Life Cycle Perspective.

The Enterprise Perspective presents subjects that bridge the enterprise and the EIT organization (Enterprise Architecture, Strategy and Governance, Change Initiatives) and that form the backdrop for all EIT projects (Interoperability, Security, Quality, Disaster Preparedness, and Operations and Support)

</h2>Common Structure of the Knowledge Areas</h2>

The KAs in the EITBOK represent areas of practice rather than areas of learning. That is, in an EIT organization, we may find specialists in Security practices, in Disaster Recovery planning, in developing requirements for EIT services, or in Construction of those services.

Each KA contains a context diagram that provides a quick overview of the KA. It shows activities requiring knowledge in the KA, information inputs to and outputs from the activities, and the roles involved in the activities.

Each context diagram includes:

  • Definition of the KA.
  • Goals of successfully performing the KA.
  • Activities: The list of high-level activities performed in the KA.
  • Information Inputs – information that is directly necessary for the KA activities to be carried out
  • Information Outputs --information directly produced by the activities for the benefit of other activities
  • Information Supplier Roles: Roles and/or teams that supply the inputs to the activity.
  • Information User Roles: Roles and/or teams that perform the activity.
  • KA Key roles: The most important roles acting within the KA.

CONTEXT DIAGRAM GOES HERE

Figure 3 is an example of a context diagram for a KA.

Each KA description follows the same structure:

  • Acronyms and Abbreviations
  • Introduction: Overview of the KA and its boundaries
  • Goals and Guiding Principles
  • Context Diagram
  • Description of activities in the KA
  • Skills
  • Roles
  • Standards
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