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GCN Home > 04/16/07 issue

Divide & conquer

Segment architecture puts owners in charge

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

In building a new litigation case management system, the Justice Department is looking beyond the technology. Officials are going a step further by developing an enterprise architecture for the entire case management line of business.

By delineating the business processes, key data elements and services the program will provide, Justice is taking the lead in the government’s attempt to move enterprise architecture out of the chief information officer’s shop and into the business owner’s office.

“It looks like a mini-EA with links to programs and the evolution of those programs,” said Kshemendra Paul, Justice’s chief enterprise architect. “We are making sure we can drive measurable results that are attributable to the mission. The key focus for us is to…deploy our resources and properly address policy concerns — such as privacy and security — and deliver on our need for information sharing.”

Justice is using this approach, known as segment architecture, on two additional lines of business: Justice Information Services, which is a core mission segment similar to litigation case management, and information sharing, which is a crosscutting business line.

Some agencies have been breaking down segments for a while. Paul said Justice has been working on case management — litigation and investigation — for a few years, but the Office of Management and Budget mandated it for agencies in their February fiscal 2007 enterprise architecture submissions.

“We want the architecture to be a reflection of their business because in the past it was reflection of their IT,” said Richard Burk, OMB’s chief architect. “If we are going to solve the problems of the agency, we want the architecture to reflect where the business wants to be in three to five years.”

OMB just finished reviewing all agency architecture submissions, and Burk said 25 of 26 agencies submitted at least one segment by the February deadline. Six agencies submitted at least two, he added.

“This is the line of sight for architecture,” he said. “The point of the EA is to inform decision-makers.”

It is that desire, in a sense, to move architecture out of the “IT ghetto,” as Burk described it, to show its value beyond systems design.

Paul said segment architecture is a more structured way to describe where the priorities are and how they map to business needs.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, Enterprise Architecture, Lines of Business, IT Management



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