DOD's BEA Version 3.1 on its way to Congress

The Defense Department will meet its second congressionally imposed deadline today when it hand-delivers the latest iteration of its business enterprise architecture and enterprise transition plan to several congressional Defense committees.

Version 3.1 addresses two architecture gaps?between intragovernmental transactions and within environmental safety and occupational health?from the earlier 3.0 version presented to Congress last September. In addition, some architectural clean-up work was completed under six business enterprise priority areas.

"Every six months over the next 10 years, things will get better," explained Paul Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of Defense for business transformation at the FOSE trade show sponsored in Washington by PostNewsweek Tech Media, parent company of Washington Technology, earlier this month. "I don't think this stuff ever ends. We continue to improve."

Later this month, DOD also will release a federation strategy to the services and agencies, outlining how they will certify that their business systems are compatible with the department's overarching BEA.

Dave Scantling, director of information and federation strategy for the Business Transformation Agency, said the federation strategy aligns business rules and processes with service and agency components for what he called "tiered accountability." He likened the set of interoperable rules with the levels of government?federal, state and local?working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

In September, DOD released Version 3.0 of its business enterprise architecture in compliance with the National Defense Authorization Act of 2005. In the BEA, DOD laid out 89 milestones it sought to meet in six months. Out of those milestones, 67 were met.

Thomas Modly, deputy undersecretary of Defense for financial management, said he was pleased with the effort, but acknowledged the department had its work cut out in meeting future milestones, including establishment of new baselines for the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System.

Brinkley added that any milestone that DOD didn't meet has a recovery plan in place, and about 60 percent will be completed by Sept. 30.

DOD components also met about 70 percent of their specific milestones and are working on the remaining 30 percent, Brinkley added.

DOD will post a copy of the BEA Version 3.1 on its Web site by 5 p.m. today.