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GCN Home > 07/17/06 issue

OMB refines use of architectures

Federal Transition Framework designed to make cross-agency initiatives easier

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

After the last budget cycle, Richard Burk could clearly see the correlation between the maturity of an agency’s enterprise architecture and how well it controlled spending.

Burk, the Office of Management and Budget’s chief architect, found agencies that were successfully using their EAs—those that scored at least a 3 out of 5 in OMB’s assessment—spent less of their discretionary budget on IT than other agencies.

“This is exactly what we want,” Burk said. “The issue is not [so much] to spend less money, but the fact that we can deliver higher quality services in a more economical way.”

That’s why OMB is giving agencies a set of guidances designed to make integrating their enterprise architectures with their budget submissions easier and more effective.

Burk, along with members of the Chief Architects Forum and the CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee, released the first guidance, the Federal Transition Framework, earlier this month. The framework gives agencies a standard way of describing cross-agency initiatives and makes the sharing of that information easier.

OMB officials are asking agencies, beginning with the fiscal 2009 budget submission, to adhere to a more structured way of characterizing governmentwide projects that can be mapped to the Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference models.

“We wanted to find a way to use architecture to facilitate agency adoption of cross-agency initiatives,” Burk said. “The first step is to standardize the information on these initiatives. We want to bring information together and organize it in a consistent way.”

Along with the FTF, which OMB will update in September, Burk said his office will issue a new EA assessment framework and update the five FEA reference models in the same month.

Having all these documents in September lets agencies better develop their budget submissions using their enterprise architectures, Burk said.

“Creating this central repository that has a consistent view will be highly valuable, not only to architects, but program mangers and CIOs, who need to understand how is this going to help them,” said Michael Tiemann a senior associate with Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of McLean, Va.

Version 1.0

The initial version of the FTF provides agencies with a series of processes to better understand how the governmentwide initiatives affect their missions.

“This is another step toward an actual federal architecture,” said John Sullivan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief architect. “You understand how E-Authentication and E-Rulemaking affect the Financial Management Line of Business, and how the combination of those three affect how you manage your financial management business.”

The three parts of the FTF are a usage guide, a catalog and a metamodel reference guide.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture, Management, IT Management



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