Strategic Planning

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Tactical Enterprise Architecture: Challenges to Building a Strategic Program

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is widely accepted as a strategic practice, focused on building a definition of future state and then managing a business and technology roadmap to help get there. The young EA program however, is often expected to contribute immediate benefits to the organization before an enterprise strategic vision or the long term roadmap has been defined. While engaged in building the solid foundations of an EA program, the Chief Architect will need to be sensitive to two distinctly different management expectations. The EA program must first be visionary, leading their management teams towards an integrated and enterprise view of business, information and technology architecture. Second, the program must also be flexible enough to manage tactical issues thrust upon them, and find ways to work those solutions into the longer term end-state architecture.

Assessment of a Government Agency’s Enterprise Architecture Program

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the Enterprise Architecture (EA) program for an Anonymous Federal Agency (AFA), a title chosen because actual situations from a federal agency EA program are used in this article, some of which are sensitive in nature. The evaluation methodology used in this article is based of the United States Government Accountability Office’s EA Management Maturity Framework (EAMMF) and its five stages of EA program maturity. In 2005, AFA’s current capability to utilize their EA received the lowest EAMMF rating (Stage 1) overall, with only some EA areas being at Stage 2. The AFA could improve their EA program by (1) avoiding Anne Lapkin’s “seven worst EA practices”; (2) involving stakeholders from throughout the AFA enterprise, not just from information technology; (3) education, involving, and requiring leadership’s participation (business and technical); and (4) remembering that developing EA documentation is an important aspect of the EA program, but may not be the best way to affect cultural change and use of the EA in planning and decision-making. Involving stakeholders is the most important element in using EA to improve agency performance.

Implementing Enterprise Architecture at the U.S. Secret Service

This article describes a ten-step process used by the United States Secret Service to build its Enterprise Architecture (EA) program. EA is the discipline that synthesizes key business and technical information across the organization to support better decision-making. The Secret Service program improves on the traditional approach to EA by going beyond the collection of voluminous information to synthesize and present it in a useful and useable format for decision-makers. It achieves this by using a clear framework, incorporating a three-tier approach to displaying the information, and drawing on principles of communication and design in a 10-step process.

The District of Columbia’s City-Wide Enterprise Architecture

The District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) recently completed a set of Citywide Enterprise Architecture (EA) blueprints that illustrate IT systems and enterprise business processes with a near-term focus of the nine Services Modernization Programs (SMP). The Citywide WA is compliant with the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework Level III. The Citywide EA is comprises four blueprints: business architecture, information architecture, application architecture, and infrastructure architecture. The Citywide EA application blueprint comprises a Services Oriented Architecture for hared software components. Three of these EA blueprints will be published in the District’s IT Strategic Plan 2005-2008. The fourth viewpoint, infrastructure architecture, is classified as Protected Critical Infrastructure Information by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In addition, the District is designing long-term Concepts of Operations that constitute strategic program plans and target architectures for each SMP. The District’s to-be planning approach incorporates best practices from Business Process Reengineering and EA.