OMB Web site will post inventoried agency architectures

The Office of Management and Budget is developing a Web site to make agencies’ plans for system architectures accessible to government officials and vendors. Norman Lorentz, OMB’s chief technology officer, said yesterday the Enterprise Architecture Management System should be online by the end of June.Lorentz spoke about OMB’s progress in developing a governmentwide architecture at the Secure E-Business Executive Summit in Washington. He said the site will list the architectures agencies submitted to OMB when it was constructing a governmentwide inventory for the 24 Quicksilver e-government projects earlier this year.“Agencies will be able to access their architectures and update them as needed through this Web site,” Lorentz said. “They also can construct their plans based on these architectures.”The next step, Lorentz said, is for agencies to tie their budget planning to the enterprise architectures. OMB is going to “join the enterprise architecture database at the hip” with the IT Investment Portfolio System through Extensible Markup Language, he said. ITips is an online capital investment and project management system that agencies use in their planning process.“Agencies must identify the outcomes based on the component architecture,” Lorentz said.Lorentz also said agencies have provided comments on the first version of the e-government business reference model. The business reference model outlines the business lines, or chief missions, each agency engages in and how each line relates to programs at other agencies.