OMB to look at enterprise architectures

Office of Management and Budget officials plan to compare agency enterprise architectures with the federal enterprise architecture to ensure that agencies are working from the same framework, an official said today.

For example, the Defense and Treasury departments have developed architectures that officials want to examine for gaps and similarities, using the federal enterprise architecture as a foundation, said Bob Haycock, OMB's chief architect.

"The plus side of that is everyone is attempting to do enterprise architectures," Haycock said, speaking at an enterprise architecture conference in Washington, D.C. "The negative side is it's very hard to look across those architectures when they talk about things in different ways. The [federal enterprise architecture] is an attempt to do that — to have one common set of reference models."

The the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee is working to "rationalize and normalize those frameworks," he said, but it's not an easy task.

"That's incredibly hard work," Haycock said. "That's going to take some time and take some effort."

The data reference model is the final component of the federal enterprise architecture scheduled for release, and the most difficult to develop, Haycock said. Officials are at the "tail end" of development, and a draft should be released to agencies soon, he said. The other components are the performance, business, service and technical reference models.

Officials are making slight changes to the business reference model and hope to have it in place for the fiscal 2006 budget process, Haycock said. "For 2006, adjustments to this reference model will be done between now and the end of the calendar year," with plans for release by early February, he said.