Enterprise architecture has come a long way in the federal government — so far that the Office of Management and Budget’s top architecture official believes it’s time to start holding agencies to a higher standard.
The assessment framework that OMB has been using to evaluate agencies’ architecture office is based on basic achievements, said Kshmendra Paul, chief architect at OMB’s Office of E-government and Information Technology. Agencies score high simply by taking early steps toward developing an architecture and using it.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2008, 25 of the 27 agencies that OMB tracks had done enough to receive a green score, the highest level on the score card. So now OMB plans to start applying more exacting standards.
“With that data point, we sat back and said, ‘OK, it’s time to take the next step,’” he said. “The new assessment framework is more directly focused on using the architecture to drive agency performance.”
OMB developed a draft, solicited comments from agency chief information officers and their colleagues and is now evaluating comments to factor into the final version, he said.
The key element of the new framework will be measuring how well agencies are using their architectures to improve their performance and ability to fulfill their missions, Paul said.
“In that chain from good intentions to societal impacts, a lot of things have to happen,” he said.
The framework features three broad areas of emphasis. OMB will assess agencies’ process integration and the degree to which the integration of processes produces results in the management chain. That’s linked to strategic planning, he said.
OMB will also want to see how well agencies are implementing the idea of segmented architecture, a concept that just began circulating a couple of years ago. Segmented architecture means developing enterprise architecture approaches for discrete segments of an agency’s operations, designing them so they can link together but without requiring architects to tackle an entire organization at once.
The third area of emphasis in the new framework is reporting, Paul said. Agencies have been gradually moving toward a more standardized, structured assessment process using templates, making for greater uniformity.
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