Is your organization considering establishing a Center of Excellence for Enterprise Architecture? Here are three reasons to create a center.
1. Increase the productivity of enterprise architects on your staff.
2. Be a source of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.
3. Provide a foundation for a federated architecture approach at the department or agency level.
The Navy’s air power division, The Naval Air System Command, is setting up a Center of Excellence for Enterprise Architecture to achieve greater consistency in systems planning. Following encouraging results from a test program, the Navy also is pursuing plans to adopt a federated architecture approach. With that strategy, the service has said it is better to coordinate its architectural activities rather than trying to unify them under a common umbrella.
Though separate, those initiatives illustrate several ways in which the military is managing the sprawling complexity of its information systems, communications systems and, increasingly, network-centric weapons systems.
An enterprise architecture is a set of plans that defines all the elements of an agency or a business and how they interact, just as an architectural plan for a building defines everything from its physical structure to its electrical and plumbing systems. However, in the Navy, the elements are more complex. Mapping the Navy’s interlocking systems of systems is comparable to creating an architectural plan for a city or several cities, according to service officials.
“We wouldn’t think of not having a blueprint for a house,” said Dan Slick, Navair’s deputy chief information officer for enterprise architecture. “The problem is, we don’t have a city plan.”
However, Slick’s office is creating a Center of Excellence that will be responsible for some of that planning. The center’s staff members will also coordinate broader architectural efforts across the Navy and the Defense Department. Officials said they expect to open the center before the end of this year, and Navy employees will primarily staff it.
DOD has tried many approaches to managing complexity. The DOD Architectural Framework (DODAF), first published in 2003 and updated in 2007, provides architectural documents necessary for systems development programs. They include an overview and specialized views of operational, systems, services and technical standards. The DODAF replaced an earlier architectural framework, known as C4ISR —command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
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