McClure and others spoke May 19 at a hearing of the House Government Reform Committee's Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census Subcommittee.
The progress, however, is not yet where agencies need to be in order to sustain any level of performance on enterprise architecture. In fact, on the General Accounting Office's framework to evaluate the maturity of agencies' EA processes, 76 of the 96 agencies are still ranked at the first, most basic stage, said Randy Hite, director of information technology architecture and systems.
That ranking does not mean that agencies are all at the bottom of the list, said Kim Nelson, chief information officer at the Environmental Protection Agency. Many meet requirements at higher stages, and keeping that in mind is important to understand where agencies stand, said Daniel Matthews, chief information officer at the Transportation Department.
The GAO framework uses the same standards to show improvement as the Office of Management and Budget does for the President's Management Agenda Scorecard, requiring that all conditions at one level be satisfied – no matter how seemingly insignificant – before raising a score, Hite said.
OMB has its own assessment, which officials developed to complement GAO's maturity evaluation, and putting the two together provides a more complete picture of the good and the bad, said Karen Evans, administrator for e-government and IT at OMB.
"You can use the two frameworks together to really get a handle on how the agency is moving forward, how mature that process really is," she said.
Some things holding up agencies are critical, particularly the lack of skilled architects in lead and support positions, said Norman Lorentz, senior vice president at DigitalNet Government Solutions and former chief technology officer at OMB, where he led the initial development of the federal enterprise architecture. Filling the vacant chief architecture position at OMB with a person who has the technical and business know-how to talk to both sides of every organization should lead to finding similar people within the agencies, he said.
RELATED LINKS
- Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office
- "GAO seeks better architectures" [FCW.com, May 10, 2004]
- "Assessing the architecture assessment" [Federal Computer Week, May 10, 2004]
