The main role of the EA Special Interest Group is to share the EA expertise within the sector, harmonize used terminology, be enabler for producing descriptions that can be used for mapping thus showcasing a European wide set of HEI services in a unified form (incl. vocabulary and notation). We also encourage our members to build contact relationships within national stakeholders.

Currently EA SIG has three main themes: “Capabilities”, “Interoperability” and “EDU-API”. Monthly meetings are hosted in regular online fashion and attended by more than 10 organizations sharing great insight to what architects are involved today. There are major changes ongoing in both system development and organizational structures. Legislation is pushing digitalization to a more centralized data sharing model, forcing strong focus on information architecture and data models. Sharing information about both failure and success are the key!

Main focus

• Regular monthly online meetings “EUNIS EA SIG Meeting” every first Friday
• Work on the language translations of the Capability model and actively promote the pragmatic use cases it can be applied to
• ​Deepen the cooperation with UCISA, CAUDIT, IMS Global and ITANA in 2 online Follow-up -meetings per group
• EIF & EIRA  work to be continued, but pending on EU Commission intentions to fund and support the education sector modelling​

Upcoming events EA-SIG plans to be present at:

• Spring forum – Higher ed Helsinki (tbc)
• EUNIS25 pre-conf 2 days,  Belfast
• EA WEEK full 5 days in October 2025,  Leipzig, Germany 

Recent seminars/workshops:

• UCISA Leadership conference 2025
• 10-12 March 2025 THE Digital Universities Europe in Wroclaw
• 4 June 2024, Athens: pre-Congress EA SIG morning session
• 4 June 2024, Athens: pre-Congress EA SIG afternoon session
• 17 May 2024: EA SIG VC meeting
• 13 June 2023, U. of Vigo, Spain, EA EUNIS23 pre-Congress meetings. Read more here.
• 9-10 March 2023, CSUC, Barcelona, Spain, workshop on HERM Capability model. Read the outputs here.
• 27-28 April 2022, Tampere Univ., Finland: EUNIS BI and EA SIGs seminar on on Modeling for strategic decision making: explore how to combine enterprise architecture (EA) and business intelligence (BI) to improve strategic decision making in higher education institutions (HEI). Read more here.

2024 EA SIG summary

We enjoyed a productive and insightful year in 2024! Read the EA SIG annual summary.

Capabilities

The UCISA Capability Model is currently evaluated in many countries and multiple Universities. EA SIG supports that work by providing PowerBI Model which supports publishing national language versions of the Capability map.

We are also continuing the discussion on how to support development initiated by UCISA and CAUDIT to harmonize the models.

EDU-API

IMS European group has finished it’s work with the first specification set.

Interoperability

The work is currently pending as we do not have an active group following up this activity.

EA SIG monthly meetings

Best way to stay in tune with these themes is to participate in our monthly meetings (every month first Friday between September and May). We also continue organizing other workshops and do our best to regularly send out a newsletter to our member list.

Join the Enterprise Architecture Special Interest Group​

Invitations and newsletter will only be sent out to our mailing list (ea@eunis.org). If you have not yet joined the list please do so (email: esa.suominen@eunis.org).

Patrik Maltusch and Esa Suominen

Chairman and Secretary of the EUNIS EA SIG