By all accounts, it was an impressive feat. Last summer, the Homeland Security Department had four months to develop an enterprise architecture so it could prepare its 2005 budget request.
Without an architecture that mapped information technology systems to specific business functions, the Office of Management and Budget could have denied DHS the funding it wanted for new projects.
More importantly, without an enterprise architecture, the department itself could not identify effectively what IT programs it needed.
"We had to come up with a description of the 'as-is' components of 22 agencies coming into the department, an initial 'to-be' architecture, and a technology and project transition plan," said Lee Holcomb, chief technology officer at DHS. "In terms of applications alone, we discovered more than 2,000 that we needed to better manage at the department level."
DHS hired Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego to help create its architecture. SAIC experts, who had worked with several of the department's legacy agencies, analyzed IT systems across DHS' more than 700 disparate computing systems and identified several areas for consolidation.
SAIC found, for example, that DHS had at least eight programs to manage ports of entry and 14 for issuing credentials.
DHS completed the first version of its architecture in September 2003 in what Holcomb called "record time." To put that in perspective, it took a year to develop one portion of the Defense Department's business enterprise architecture.
The DHS effort is just one of many federal enterprise architecture projects under way. OMB reported that agencies spent $1.4 billion on enterprise architecture and planning in fiscal 2003, according to market research firm Input Inc. of Reston, Va. The government is estimating $1.5 billion in 2004 spending and requesting $1.7 billion for fiscal 2005.
As agencies put into place the first blueprints of their IT environments, systems integrators and other contractors face the question of what happens next. Agencies will need help creating more detailed versions of their architectures. SAIC, for example, is already helping DHS with a second version of its plan.
But the importance of this work goes well beyond the creation of an enterprise architecture. Contractors now must focus on winning the follow-up -- and possibly more lucrative -- work of implementing enterprise architectures.
"Once you get an initial architecture out, you can add more detail to it," said Karl Kropp, director of SAIC's Center for Enterprise Architecture. "You can also work on getting it implemented and actually working with programs. And that's where you see opportunities arise for solutions developers and integrators."
Eventually, all IT projects will have an EA component. Integrators that understand an agency's architecture will be better positioned to offer solutions that complement and enhance the overall design.
"It's a matter of not looking at enterprise architecture as an opportunity in and of itself," said Payton Smith, manager of public-sector analysis at Input, "but looking at it for what it will force agencies to do in terms of managing their architectures going forward."
