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GCN Home > 01/12/04 issue

On enterprise architectures, White House walks the walk

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

When it comes to enterprise architectures, the White House is leading by example.

In a recent report, the General Accounting Office rated the Executive Office of the President’s modernization blueprint as complete and at Stage 5 of GAO’s tiered EA framework.

GAO said the agency was the only one of 93 surveyed that was wholly using an enterprise architecture that met all the criteria of the audit agency’s Version 1.1 maturity model.

The IT team for EOP—which includes approximately 2,800 employees in 14 separate organizations such as the Office of Management and Budget, National Security Council and the Office of the Trade Representative—credits the architecture with helping it set a plan for consolidating four disparate e-mail systems by spring.

The plan also led the White House team to modify an electronic records management system that it already was implementing rather than buy a potentially duplicative one.

“We felt we met enough provisions to be in Stage 5, but we weren’t sure if we would make it,” CIO Carlos Solari said. “It is a matter of getting people to participate and understanding the importance of this. There is nothing fancy about it but good executive level support and staying focused.”

Overall, GAO found the government’s overall progress stagnant when it comes to the development and use of enterprise architectures. To help agencies, GAO has over the past three years issued two versions of an EA framework that defines the pertinent features of crafting a workable enterprisewide IT plan.

In the study released last month, GAO found most agencies remained in stage 1 or 2 of Version 1.0 of the EA framework. When rating agencies against the Version 1.1 framework made public in April, GAO said 76 of the 93 agencies reviewed were in Stage 1.

“I was surprised there wasn’t more progress,” given the Office of Management and Budget’s emphasize on the architectures and the money that agencies have pumped into these efforts, said Randy Hite, GAO’s director of IT architecture and systems issues.

More news on related topics: Enterprise Architecture, IT Infrastructure, IT Management