Teams bring architecture to life

Governance is a crucial element to building an enterprise architecture.

It describes the different teams of government executives and stakeholders

(agency users, government business partners and citizens) that will contribute

to building the architecture, and the processes they will use to keep the

architecture current with changing technology and business requirements.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers' Enterprise

Architecture Tool-Kit describes five governance components in its model,

as follows.

* Policy: A team headed by an enterprise executive — such as mayor

or a governor, and perhaps the CIO also — that establishes the enterprise's

information technology vision and direction.

* Control: A team headed by the chief IT architect that develops and

recommends IT resource policies and procedures, and the technology architecture

itself. This team also governs the architecture and standards process.

* Implementation: A team of department CIOs and directors that develops

and implements operation-level IT strategies, and also includes an IT business

planning board that defines IT business strategies and provides access to

the executive's Cabinet.

* Management: Basically the CIO and his or her staff, this team is responsible

for implementing policies and procedures, as well as project management

methodologies and other elements of the process.

* Advisory: A helpful, though not necessary, body on both internal IT

issues within agencies, and on IT issues deemed important from the citizen

and business community perspective.

Robinson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore.