The Center for Enterprise Architecture (EA) at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) has received a donation valued at $6.7 million from Tonex, a company that provides training and consulting services to a wide variety of industries. The donations will support curricular development in the field of enterprise architecture at IST.
“We thank Tonex for this generous donation. Donations of this type add to our ever growing pool of software, hardware and course content resources. This unique collection of resources will help ensure that our programs remain on the leading edge,” said Brian Cameron, executive director of the Center for Enterprise Architecture.
Tonex, based in Plano, Texas, provides instructor-led, hands-on, customized training courses and certificate programs for professionals and managers in business and government organizations. In addition to assisting EA practitioners, Tonex provides educational services to industries such as telecommunications, wireless, engineering, defense and mobile applications.
“We are very pleased to work with the Center for Enterprise Architecture to help put more focused emphasis on the need as well as capabilities needed to move EA forward towards more productive services and agility driven by the needs of the business,” said Charles Alexi, senior EA instructor, course developer, and consultant for Tonex.
Enterprise architecture, Cameron said, is the process of translating business' vision and strategy into effective operational planning. By integrating the various dimensions of an organization, an enterprise architect takes a company's business strategy and defines an information technology system to support that strategy.
The purpose of the Center for Enterprise Architecture, which was launched in January 2011, is to gather intellectual resources across Penn State to address research concerns and questions that span the design, functioning and governance of contemporary, information-driven enterprises. In April, the College of IST launched the master of professional studies program in enterprise architecture, the first EA program in North America and the first online EA master’s program in the world.
The course content that will be obtained through the Tonex gift, Cameron said, will be used in a variety of graduate and undergraduate EA courses. Professors will be able to pull relevant material, which they will integrate into their courses over time.
“Tonex has been assisting architects in business and government to understand the resources available to them to build efficient enterprise architectures in a pragmatic way for several years and welcomes the opportunity to work towards even more efficient methodologies and capabilities,” said Howard Gottlieb, director of training programs.
To learn more about Tonex, visit http://tonex.com/.