DOD to release financial architecture blueprint

The Defense Department on Friday will unveil its long awaited financial management enterprise architecture. DOD will use it as a road map to whittle down and consolidate more than 2,100 financial systems.

The finished architecture, with an encyclopedia of 1,700 terms, "depicts all of the business operations in DOD that would trigger a financial event," said Catherine Santana, deputy director for enterprise architecture in Defense's Financial Management Modernization Program Office.

The architecture identifies all of the business rules that must be complied with as well as the technology needed to build a departmentwide financial infrastructure, she said.

Under a $100 million blanket-purchasing agreement, IBM Corp. has spent the past year developing the mammoth document under the close scrutiny of DOD's finance chiefs, Santana said.

Defense has broken its financial framework into seven business areas.

"The financial systems receive the data from each of the business systems," Santana said. "Every time you hire an employee, you create a financial event."

Each business area?including logistics, acquisition, accounting and financial management, program and budget, personnel and readiness, technology infrastructure and real property, and environmental liabilities?will be overseen by a domain owner, Santana said.

The domain owners will review the finished architecture blueprint and determine which ideas their division will undertake. By the middle of next month, they must present pilot proposals, Santana said. Then, each group will spend a year to 18 months developing and testing the pilot applications, she added.

"They are looking at an area of the architecture that they would like to prove through testing," Santana said. "There's criteria that we're asking those pilots to test."

Some items that Defense finance chiefs know will need work are the standard general ledger, standard financial reporting and standard line of accounting, she said.

The finished Version 1 of the financial management enterprise architecture will be posted online at www.dod.mil/comptroller/bmmp.