Through a gift-in-kind to Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology, the Pinnacle Business Group Inc. and its subsidiary, the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE), an enterprise architecture (EA) service provider and certification body, is contributing software and content to support research and educational initiatives in the college’s Center for Enterprise Architecture. The commitment is valued at $3.2 million.
“We are very happy to have the Pinnacle Business Group Inc., as a partner as we build the Center for Enterprise Architecture,” said Brian Cameron, executive director of the center. “Pinnacle is very supportive of our EA Center and initiatives and is donating EA course content to augment our courses as we deem appropriate. Sam Holcman and his company, Pinnacle Business Group, are a great complement to our new center’s curriculum and advisory group. We have much planned for the next year, and donations such as this will keep our unique, groundbreaking programs on the leading edge.”
Under the center’s direction, a new online professional master’s degree in enterprise architecture and an undergraduate focus in EA are being explored for University review.
The Pinnacle Business Group serves on the center’s advisory board, which provides thought leadership, research collaboration and organizational guidance to the center.
“We are very pleased to work with Dr. Cameron and the staff at Penn State on this groundbreaking program,” said Holcman. “The field of enterprise architecture is evolving as a profession, and academic organizations such as Penn State are at the forefront of this evolution.”
The Center for Enterprise Architecture, which was established in 2011, will utilize intellectual resources across Penn State to address open and important research concerns and questions that span the design, functioning and governance of contemporary, information-driven enterprises. Research in the center will include underlying information technology architectures, data and application architecture and complex, enterprise-level “systems of systems” that make use of these underlying architectures in a legislative and institutional marketplace.
The center applies multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research methods to address large-scale application domains such as health care informatics, large service-based and manufacturing firms, non-profit initiatives, federal and state government transformation and homeland security agencies. The architecture and “systems of systems” perspective allow for addressing concerns focused on the design and effective functioning of organizations and networks of organizations with results such as enterprise transformation, enterprise and network design, global information infrastructure design and management and global enterprise presence and competitiveness.
The Pinnacle Business Group Inc., based in Pinckney, Mich., provides its clients with innovative yet practical solutions to a range of business and systems-related challenges and activities. Holcman served the Ford Motor Company for 11 years in data processing, finance and engineering. He was vice president of a robotics and factory automation firm for two years. He was also a senior member of a technology delegation to the People’s Republic of China, on the invitation of the Chinese and United States governments, and a member of a technology delegation to the Commonwealth of Independent States (Soviet Union).
Gifts from corporate supporters such as the Pinnacle Business Group Inc. count toward the goals of For the Future: The Campaign for Penn State Students. This University-wide effort is directed toward a shared vision of Penn State as the most comprehensive, student-centered research university in America. The University is engaging Penn State’s alumni and friends as partners in achieving six key objectives: ensuring student access and opportunity, enhancing honors education, enriching the student experience, building faculty strength and capacity, fostering discovery and creativity, and sustaining the University’s tradition of quality. The campaign’s top priority is keeping a Penn State degree affordable.
For more information on the Center for Enterprise Architecture, please visit: http://ea.ist.psu.edu/
For more information on the Pinnacle Business Group Inc., and the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE), please visit http://www.EACOE.org.