Enterprise Architecture
by Legislation
You've heard of design by committee. How about enterprise architecture by legislation?
by Rick Murphy
The world's largest IT customer, the U.S. federal government, is driving a growth market for enterprise architecture. In 1996, Congress passed the Clinger/Cohen act, which legislated the planning and implementation of information technology architectures. Information technology architectures, also known as enterprise architectures (EA), are mandatory for every department, agency, and bureau in the federal government. Not only is an EA legislated, it is used by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to support strategic alignment with the President's Management Agenda and monitor agency performance.
Clinger/Cohen defines an EA as "an integrated framework for evolving or maintaining existing information technology and acquiring new information technology to achieve the agency's strategic goals and information resources management goals." Clinger/Cohen assigns the responsibility of "developing, maintaining, and facilitating the implementation of a sound and integrated information technology architecture" to the CIO. Once Congress passed the legislation and assigned the CIOs this responsibility, the Federal CIO Council set about defining the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA).
The FEA is a top-level architecture defined in the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework. The framework specifies various approaches, models, and definitions for communicating the overall organization and relationships in the FEA. It logically decomposes the EA into four subarchitectures for business, application, technology, and data. Segments cut across the subarchitectures and provide the foundation for cross-agency collaboration. The framework provides four levels of abstraction to represent the detailed description of eight architectural components. At Level IV, the lowest level of abstraction, the framework prescribes the use of Zachman and Enterprise Architecture Planning models to plan and build the EA.
To put the framework document into practice, the CIO Council published a Practical Guide to the FEA describing how agencies can initiate an enterprise architecture program, defining an architectural process and approach, and establishing baseline and target architectures. Business and design drivers influence how baseline architectures evolve into target architectures over a sequencing plan.
The President's Management Agenda for Expanded Electronic Government defines three key business drivers that influence the FEA. First, agencies should create a citizen-centered, not bureaucracy-centered electronic government, described by OMB's Mark Forman as "[providing] simplified delivery of services to citizens." Second, agencies are directed to measure performance by requiring business cases and to monitor the results. When agencies seek funding from OMB, technology expenditures must be rationalized in relation to agency mission and return on investment. OMB uses a scorecard to categorize an agency's performance into green, yellow, and red. Third, agencies should support innovation through outsourcing and market-based initiatives, which are expected to introduce commercial products and contracting opportunities.
To support the President's Management Agenda, OMB defined an overall E-Government Strategy identifying 24 high-payoff, cross-agency initiatives. These efforts are expected to reduce operating efficiencies, redundant spending, and functional decomposition across the federal government with an expected payoff of several billion dollars in savings.
Supporting the FEA
OMB established a program management office (FEAPMO) to support agencies planning and implementing an EA. FEAPMO defined a common reference model and is currently developing a set of detailed reference models as nonrestrictive, snapshot representations of target architectures. FEAPMO recently released version 2 of a Business Reference Model (BRM) and first releases of a Service Component Reference Model (SRM) and Technical Reference Model (TRM). The Performance Reference Model (PRM) and Data Reference Model (DRM) are yet to be released. The reference models align roughly with the sub-architectures of the FEA. Agencies are expected to leverage reference models to develop an agency-specific EA.
The world's largest IT customer takes enterprise architecture seriously. The Federal Enterprise Architecture has legislative and executive commitment, and agencies must implement technology planning with the President's Management Agenda.
About the Author
Rick Murphy is a Sun-certified enterprise architect, a practicing member of the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. Reach Rick at richard.c.murphy@acm.org.
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