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Federal Enterprise Architecture

The U.S. Federal government undertook the ambitious Federal Enterprise Architecture adventure on February 6, 2002. Its vision: to maximize technology investments in a more citizen-centric and customer-oriented government by leveraging systems and similar efforts across federal agencies in alignment with Lines of Business as identified.

The Challenges

• Gaining visibility and control over what systems and associated software development assets it has.
• Leveraging assets in its evolving IT portfolios.
• Collaboratively defining what makes sense for systems modernization.
• Coming to terms on such issues as common processes, semantics, standards, performance expectations, metrics, and management practices.

Existing enterprise architecture modeling tools provide valuable visibility into systems at the Agency level (e.g., Popkin SA, Computas Metis, and the like). However, they are typically developed from laboriously aggregated collections of service component and system inventories that do not include such things as underlying (and reusable) architectures, web services, or components. These models are currently disconnected from FEAMS, the Exhibit 300 database, and component repositories (e.g. PVCS, ClearCase, Endeavor, GO XML, etc.), which means Agencies must appoint people to manually create the associations and reporting necessary to use these disparate systems for IT Investment Management in Federal enterprises.

Noblestar's Solution

In September 2003, Noblestar undertook a business analysis of services and technologies to support the special needs of the Federal Enterprise Architecture efforts in context of federal agencies and their heavily outsourced IT environments. In addition to the enterprise architecture service overview provided above, the need for a metadata infrastructure platform to create the automation necessary to enhance the effective realization of various management practices became apparent.

By April 2004, Noblestar had worked with the Federal CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee to demonstrate pilots of two powerful and scalable metadata solutions that represent the next evolution in technology to support effective Enterprise Architecture management, including:

• Providing a single-point of reference and increasing breadth and depth of visibility into components, service oriented architectures, and web services - as associated to systems mapped in tools like FEAMS, Popkin SA, and Metis - to reduce the level of effort required to identify targets for reuse and reduce duplicative systems development projects.
• Mapping of disparate artifacts and components upward through subsystems and systems into the governing FEA Reference Models, CPIC exhibits, Projects and Programs for trace-ability, cross-agency billing, searching, and auditing purposes.
• Centralizing IT Investment domain-specific asset aggregation, management, and reporting capabilities to effectively streamline and provide key connections between FEA technology management practices, CPIC fiscal management practices, and PART program management practices.
• Managing multiple lifecycles of the Enterprise Architecture, Reference Models, technical reference models, legacy systems, components, and other software development related artifacts and assets.
• Providing an open distribution platform and communications system for additions and changes of assets, governance rules, standards, taxonomies, ontologies, etc.
• Enabling the secure federation of interoperable infrastructure platforms together to enable permission-based visibility and use between multiple enterprises within a single agency as well as cross-agency and into state and local governments.

The Federal CIO Council's Architecture & Infrastructure Committee named these pilots "Federated Repository." Noblestar's work, in team with two leading companies in the software development domain-specific metadata repository space, won a "Breakthrough Performance" award from the ComponentTechnology.org CoP at the Second Quarterly Emerging Technology Components Conference on January 26, 2004. Subsequent to receiving this award, Noblestar partnered with LogicLibrary to provide and support the Logidex repository with its enhanced federation capabilities, metrics definition and collection, and commercial adoption by enormous enterprises, including technology leaders Microsoft and IBM.

Service Offerings

• Federated Registry Jumpstart
• Process Assessments, Mentoring, and Workshops
• S/W Development Process & Organizational Assessment
• S/W Development Process Implementation 
  

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