Architecture & standards

As an institution, you want to support your target group in the best possible way. To do this, your information management needs to be in good order. Working with architecture & standards helps with this. With a shared architecture, we help our members towards a common information strategy. Using sector-wide standards facilitates the exchange of information between institutions.

Higher Education Reference Architecture (HORA)

HORA (Higher Education Reference Architecture) is a collection of tools you can use to set up the organisation and information management of Dutch institutions of higher education.

The complexity of higher education institutions' information provision is increasing due to more cross-institutional cooperation, focus on valorisation, internationalisation and digitisation of processes.

Who is the HORA for?

The HORA was developed primarily for enterprise and information architects and other people who focus on the organisation of information provision, such as information managers, solution architects, functional and technical designers and functional administrators. However, the application is also broader; it can also support organisational issues separate from information provision. This means that the HORA is also intended (in part) for policy staff, advisors and others dealing with organisational and process changes.

Structure

The HORA consists of three parts:

Part 1 - Architectural vision

The architectural vision gives a perspective on the future by translating relevant developments and ambitions described in the i-Strategy. This makes more concrete the impact on the design of institutions' information provision. In addition, the architecture vision describes a number of guiding principles and pays attention to a number of specific change themes.

Part 2 - Reference models

A reference model provides a set of generic and relatively stable models that describe, mainly from a business and information perspective, what a higher education institution does and has. It creates a common language that can improve communication, both within the sector and within an institution.

Part 3 - Implementation tools

The implementation tools provide support for the implementation of the reference architecture. Among other things, they describe how the architecture function can be set up and how the models in the HORA can be used for data management and application integration.

Getting started yourself

Are you getting started with the HORA as an enterprise or information architect? You can find all the parts on the HORA wiki.