Serious about enterprise architecture

The Office of Management and Budget is finally getting serious about enterprise architecture, according to government and industry officials.Although having an overall blueprint of the agency's information technology system has been mandated since 1996, actual completion of these documents have varied greatly among agencies. This year, however, OMB is making enterprise architecture implementation a requirement for securing new funds ? strong medicine designed to get agencies moving, according to George Brundage, chairman of the federal architecture framework subgroup for the Chief Information Officer Council."With the fiscal 2003 budget round, OMB has clearly indicated that [it wants] to see enterprise architecture alignment addressed in the projects that are proposed," said Brundage, who is also the chief enterprise architect for the Treasury Department. "[It wants] to see the agencies evaluate bureaus' enterprise architecture processes."OMB, he said, sees enterprise architecture as essential to eliminating redundancies and reducing bureaucratic resistance to change. A recent OMB survey found that only five agencies ? the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Personnel Management and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ? had fully working architectures in place.OMB's report, "Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2003," which accompanied the Bush administration's proposed 2003 budget, has a summary of where each of the agencies are in developing enterprise architectures. The State Department has not implemented an enterprise architecture, but plans to do so in 2002. The Interior Department does not have a plan for agencywide enterprise architecture. Other agencies have architectures, but they need to be more encompassing, according to the report. The Department of Health and Human Services fell into this category, as did the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy and Treasury. Most agencies are now implementing plans, such as the departments of Agriculture, Defense, the General Services Administration, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, NASA, the Social Security Administration, Transportation and Veterans Affairs.The Bush administration's renewed emphasis on enterprise architecture is already having the desired effect."I have received at least four calls from agencies that want to know how they can produce a framework and architecture descriptions as soon as possible," Brundage said."CIOs are definitely thinking about this," said Jan Popkin, president of Popkin Software and Systems Inc., New York. Popkin customized its architectural design software for Defense and Treasury department frameworks. It also has started offering classes in designing federal enterprise architecture plans, as has California State University, which has a 10-week class (including three weeks in-house and six onsite supervision) starting in March in the Washington area."Have we seen an uprise in interest in EA? Absolutely," said Tim Emrick, senior vice president for systems analysis and technical support for SI International Inc., McLean, Va. In December, SI opened a lab that will allow agencies to get a handle on architecture framework requirements. Emrick said SI has also answered inquiries from people with the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Department's space-based radar program, NASA's National Space Security Architect and the Defense Department's office for command, control, communications and intelligence. The drive for enterprise architecture comes from the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which requires that agencies submit reports on the spending of IT budgets, including performance benefits. The legislation mandated an enterprise architecture to ensure agency management remains effective and modern, according to OMB's budget analysis. "The EA establishes an agencywide road map to achieve an agency's mission by improving its core business processes and effectively using information technology," the OMB report said.Enterprise architecture is different from systems architecture in that "EA is at 40,000 feet, and systems architecture is at 100,000 feet," Brundage said. "Contractors need to understand how an EA is different from a systems development project."Rob Byrd, SI's chief operational architect, likens the process of enterprise architecture to putting marbles into a bucket to weed out the duplicate ones. In the same way that marbles of the same color can be easily identified and removed once in a bucket, so too can duplicate processes in different parts of an organization be eliminated once identified in an agency blueprint.This was the approach SI employed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command's underground combat operations center at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colo. SI had to integrate the three aging legacy systems, each built and maintained by different program offices and using different equipment and software. As a result, each operator had three different keyboards and three monitors to work with, Byrd said.Using an operational architecture analysis, the company "did a side-by-side comparison of the systems," he said. SI found a lot of overlap in the processes of each system."In each, you monitor the situation, you assess the situation, you plan operations and execute operations," Byrd said. The three operations executed approximately 370 command-and-control-related activities. Working from the company's own operational architecture framework, SI was able to align the capabilities with the mission and consolidate identical operations."We found similar processes and reduced those processes dramatically," Byrd said. When the integrator was finished, it had lowered the number of unique operations to about 80.Proponents also hope enterprise architecture will act as a solvent for departmental bureaucracies and fiefdoms. The president's August 2001 management agenda for e-government stated the problem: "IT offers opportunities to break down obsolete bureaucratic divisions. Unfortunately, agencies often perceive this opportunity as a threat, and instead make wasteful and redundant investments in order to preserve chains of command that lost their purpose years ago."With an enterprise architecture plan in place, Brundage said, agencies can best determine how to allocate data, applications and technology to projects from an enterprise level, which would reduce redundancy considerably. "In the past, the project manager could act like a petty potentate, and integration between projects was minimized," Brundage said. "I recognize that the islands of technology and the out-of-control proliferation of systems solutions in an origination may not be the fault of systems development people, but it probably reflects the flow of money and territoriality."XXXSPLITXXX-Enterprise architectures are the blueprints for defining an organization's information systems from an enterprise level, or in terms of what operations the organization needs to do to carry out its mission. Enterprise architectures allow agencies to uncover redundant organizations, processes and projects, unify and simplify business lines and easily identify points at which information can be handed off to other agencies. "It's a drawing of what is going on in the system. It doesn't just have to be IT. It could be the business goals, the process, the flow of information," said Jan Popkin, president of Popkin Software, New York, which customized its system integrator suite of enterprise architectural design software for the architectural frameworks at the departments of Defense and Treasury."A good analogy would be building a house. A hundred years ago, if you were to build a house, you probably wouldn't use a blueprint. Good craftspeople were able to do it, and sort of knew where the bathroom was and knew where to put in the pipes. Now it would be difficult, if not impossible, to build a house without blueprints," Popkin said.