[House Hearing, 108 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
FEDERAL ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE: A BLUEPRINT FOR IMPROVED FEDERAL IT
INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT AND CROSS-AGENCY COLLABORATION AND INFORMATION
SHARING
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION
POLICY, INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS AND
THE CENSUS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MAY 19, 2004
__________
Serial No. 108-227
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
96-944 WASHINGTON : 2004
____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512�091800
Fax: (202) 512�092250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402�090001
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DOUG OSE, California DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
RON LEWIS, Kentucky DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
CHRIS CANNON, Utah DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
NATHAN DEAL, Georgia C.A. ``DUTCH'' RUPPERSBERGER,
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan Maryland
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio Columbia
JOHN R. CARTER, Texas JIM COOPER, Tennessee
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee ------ ------
PATRICK J. TIBERI, Ohio ------
KATHERINE HARRIS, Florida BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
(Independent)
Melissa Wojciak, Staff Director
David Marin, Deputy Staff Director/Communications Director
Rob Borden, Parliamentarian
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental
Relations and the Census
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida, Chairman
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
DOUG OSE, California STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania ------ ------
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Bob Dix, Staff Director
Shannan Weinberg, Professional Staff Member
Juliana French, Clerk
David McMillen, Minority Professional Staff Member
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on May 19, 2004..................................... 1
Statement of:
Evans, Karen S., Administrator of E-Government and
Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget;
Randolph C. Hite, Director, Information Technology
Architecture and Systems, U.S. General Accounting Office;
Daniel Matthews, Chief Information Officer, Department of
Transportation; and Kim Nelson, Chief Information Officer,
Environmental Protection Agency............................ 11
McClure, David, vice president for E-Government, Council for
Excellence in Government; Venkatapathi Puvvada, Unisys
Chair, Enterprise Architecture Shared Interest Group,
Industry Advisory Council; Norman E. Lorentz, senior vice
president, Digitalnet; and Raymond B. Wells, chief
technology officer, IBM Federal, vice president, Strategic
Transformations for IBM Software Group, Application
Integration & Middleware Division [AIM], IBM Corp.......... 86
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Clay, Hon. Wm. Lacy, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Missouri, prepared statement of................... 9
Evans, Karen S., Administrator of E-Government and
Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget,
prepared statement of...................................... 14
Hite, Randolph C., Director, Information Technology
Architecture and Systems, U.S. General Accounting Office,
prepared statement of...................................... 22
Lorentz, Norman E., senior vice president, Digitalnet,
prepared statement of...................................... 113
Matthews, Daniel, Chief Information Officer, Department of
Transportation, prepared statement of...................... 62
McClure, David, vice president for E-Government, Council for
Excellence in Government, prepared statement of............ 89
Nelson, Kim, Chief Information Officer, Environmental
Protection Agency, prepared statement of................... 69
Putnam, Hon. Adam H., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Florida, prepared statement of.................... 5
Puvvada, Venkatapathi, Unisys Chair, Enterprise Architecture
Shared Interest Group, Industry Advisory Council, prepared
statement of............................................... 97
Wells, Raymond B., chief technology officer, IBM Federal,
vice president, Strategic Transformations for IBM Software
Group, Application Integration & Middleware Division [AIM],
IBM Corp, prepared statement of............................ 121
FEDERAL ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE: A BLUEPRINT FOR IMPROVED FEDERAL IT
INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT AND CROSS-AGENCY COLLABORATION AND INFORMATION
SHARING
----------
WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 2004
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy,
Intergovernmental Relations and the Census,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:35 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Adam Putnam
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Putnam and Clay.
Staff present: Bob Dix, staff director; John Hambel, senior
counsel; Shannon Weinberg, professional staff member and deputy
counsel; Juliana French, clerk; Felipe Colon, fellow; Kaitlyn
Jahrling, intern; David McMillen, minority professional staff
member; and Cecelia Morton, minority office manager.
Mr. Putnam. A quorum being present, this hearing of the
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy,
Intergovernmental Relations and the Census will come to order.
A little bit late, but we are in order. I apologize for the
delay; we have just finished a long series of votes on the
House floor.
Good afternoon and welcome to the subcommittee's hearing
entitled, ``Federal Enterprise Architecture: A Blueprint for
Improved Federal IT Investment & Cross-Agency Collaboration and
Information Sharing.''
The purpose of this hearing is to provide congressional
oversight on the progress being made by the Office of
Management and Budget and the Federal agencies to develop and
implement a Federal Enterprise Architecture. The subcommittee
will also examine the progress, success, and continuing hurdles
facing various agencies and departments in integrating their
individual agency enterprise architecture with the FEA
initiative.
This hearing is a continuation of the series of oversight
hearings conducted by the subcommittee during the 108th
Congress to keep Federal Government agencies and decisionmakers
aggressively focused on meeting the key goals of the E-
Government Act of 2002: greater accessibility to government by
citizens and businesses; improving government efficiency and
productivity; enhancing customer service; facilitating cross-
agency coordination; and tangible cost savings to taxpayers
through the use of 21st century technology and proven ``best
practices'' throughout the Federal Government.
During the 1st session of the 108th Congress, this
subcommittee focused a great deal of attention on the oversight
of the Federal Government's E-Government element of the
President's management agenda. With a commitment to an
aggressive effort, the launch of the President's management
agenda in August 2001 established a strategy for transforming
the Federal Government in a manner that produces measurable
results that matter in the lives of the American people.
One of the five components of the PMA is Electronic
Government, intended to utilize the power and creativity of
information technology to produce a more citizen-centric
government, as well as one that is more efficient, productive,
and cost-effective on behalf of the taxpayers. E-Government
provides a platform to establish cross-agency collaboration and
a rapid departure from a stovepipe approach to government
operations to an approach that facilitates coordination,
collaboration, communication, and cooperation.
With Federal Government expenditures on IT products and
services projected to close in on $60 billion in fiscal year
2005, the Federal Government will be the largest IT purchaser
in the world. For too long, and even continuing in some places
today, individual agencies have pursued their own IT agendas
that focus solely on mission rather than emanating from a
commitment to customer service or sound business processes.
Without a system of checks and balances built into the
investment process to compare IT needs with mission goals, the
potential for waste is great.
As a first step to a meaningful coordination of IT
expenditures governmentwide, Congress passed the Clinger-Cohen
Act of 1996, which included the Information Technology
Management Reform Act and the Federal Acquisition Reform Act.
This legislation sets forth requirements for Federal Government
IT investment management decisionmaking and corresponding
responsibility. It requires agencies to link IT investments to
agency strategic planning, including the linkage to an
enterprise architecture.
Under Clinger-Cohen, each individual Federal Government
agency must create and implement an enterprise architecture. An
EA is a tool that defines the structure of any activity or
mission within a single organization or across multiple
organizations. It allows organizations to then apply IT
resources to accomplish those activities identified. An EA also
helps an organization identify the relationships between
business operations and the underlying infrastructure and
applications that support those operations. The purpose of the
development of agency EAs is to facilitate cross-agency
analysis of the business or purpose of government and to make
possible the identification of duplicative investments, gaps,
and prospects for cross-agency collaboration. The goal, as with
all e-Gov initiatives, is to make the Federal Government more
efficient and customer-focused.
An enterprise architecture, developed and implemented based
on the FEA framework, is an essential tool in guiding IT
investments. A recent GAO study reports that ``that investing
in IT without defining these investments in the context of an
architecture often results in systems that are duplicative, not
well integrated, and unnecessarily costly to maintain and
interface.''
While the utility of EAs in the Federal Government is
promising, the progress of the Federal Government in completing
the agency EA initiative is less than promising. In 2001 and
2003, GAO assessed the progress of agencies' efforts to develop
and implement EAs. In 2003, overall, GAO found the state of EA
governmentwide is not mature, with approximately 79 percent of
agencies at stage 1 of GAO's five-stage assessment framework
and 21 percent were at stage 2. Only one agency, the Executive
Office of the President, reached stage 5, the final stage of
maturity.
The E-Government Act of 2002 makes oversight of the
agencies' EA efforts the responsibility of OMB's Administrator
of E-Government and Information Technology. As a result of a
combination of OMB's oversight responsibilities under the E-Gov
Act of 2002 and the disappointing results of GAO's 2001
governmentwide EA maturity assessment, OMB identified a need
for a common framework for agencies to use in facilitating the
EA effort. OMB cited the lack of a Federal EA as an impediment
to achievement of the e-Government initiatives. So OMB began
work on creating the FEA in 2002. This effort appears to be
initially successful as a tool for recognizing commonalities
and inefficiencies. OMB used the FEA during its review of the
agency's 2004 budget submissions and found numerous common
government functions and consequently numerous redundant
efforts in spending. Out of those numerous common functions,
OMB selected five core government functions and created the
next phase of the e-Government initiative. This new phase,
called the Lines of Business Initiative, specifically targets
duplicative effort in spending. Despite this development, I
still find cause for concern. According to a November 2003 GAO
report, the self-reported costs by agencies in developing their
individual EAs are close to $600 million. Those same agencies
report more than $805 million will be necessary to complete
their EAs. What the vast majority of government agencies' EA
maturity assessed at the stage 1 level, we still have a long
way to go before we fully realize the benefits of effective EA
management. In the course of this hearing, my hope is that we
will be able to determine the anticipated cost savings in light
of the significant investment already made in the efforts to
develop EAs governmentwide.
Today's hearing is an opportunity to examine both the
progress and success of OMB's FEA initiative as well as explore
the obstacles faced both by agencies and departments in
integrating their EAs into the FEA. As we have heard in
previous hearings, many of the impediments are cultural and
people-based, rather than being attributable to the technology
itself or available resources. Case in point, in GAO's 2003
assessment of governmentwide EA efforts, more agencies reported
a lack of agency executive understanding of EA and the scarcity
of skilled architecture staff as significant challenges than
was reported in 2001.
I eagerly look forward to the testimony of our
distinguished panel of leaders in various agencies in an
industry who will also give us the opportunity to demonstrate
the progress that has been made thus far with the FEA
initiative, while acknowledging the magnitude of the challenge
that lies ahead.
Today's hearing can be viewed live via Webcast by going to
reform.house.gov and clicking on the link ``Live Committee
Broadcast.''
[The prepared statement of Hon. Adam H. Putnam follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. I want to welcome the distinguished ranking
member from Missouri who has been a partner in these oversight
efforts, Mr. Clay. I recognize you for your opening remarks.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for calling
this hearing, and I want to thank the witnesses for appearing
before us today.
The implementation of enterprise architectures throughout
the agency community has altered the methods employed by the
Government beyond what used to be little more than the
procurement and maintenance of computers and software. That
concept, however, became outdated as the Government sought to
integrate both business functions and agency goals with
information technology. By serving as a blueprint for
integration among an agency's core components, enterprise
architectures soon enabled an agency to improve its services by
optimizing its performance.
It did not take long for Congress to determine that such
efficiency would prove beneficial in both economic and
qualitative terms. Through legislative efforts such as the
Paperwork Reduction Act, the Clinger-Cohen Act, and the E-
Government Act, Congress established a framework for agencies
to facilitate effective management of enterprise architectures
governmentwide. Along with the efforts of the CIO Council and
OMB's Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management
Office, the Government has successfully laid a foundation for
effective coordination among agencies for business operations,
information flow, and IT investment management.
I remain concerned, however, that the agency community is
not meeting all of its obligations for effectively managing the
development and utilization of enterprise architectures, as
only half of all agencies are meeting such standards according
to GAO. Further, there seems to be no improvement in the number
of agencies performing a full complement of management
practices for the effective oversight of architectures. If the
Federal Government is to continue to appropriate its annual $60
billion investment in IT systems, we must demand better
implementation and management practices for enterprise
architectures throughout the agency community.
I look forward to our discussion today and ask that my
statement be submitted for the record.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Without objection.
We will move directly to the testimony. If all the
witnesses and any of your supporting cast who will be providing
you answers would please rise and raise your right hands for
the administration of the oath.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Putnam. Note for the record that all of the witnesses
responded in the affirmative.
I would like to recognize our first witness, Ms. Karen
Evans. On September 3, 2003, Karen Evans was appointed by
President Bush to be Administrator of the Office of Electronic
Government and Information Technology at the Office of
Management and Budget. Prior to joining OMB, Ms. Evans was
Chief Information Officer at the Department of Energy, and
served as vice chairman of the CIO Council, the principal forum
for agency CIOs to develop IT recommendations. Prior to that
she served at the Department of Justice as Assistant and
Division Director for Information System Management. She is a
frequent guest of this subcommittee.
We are delighted to have you. Welcome, Ms. Evans. You are
recognized for your 5-minute statement.
STATEMENTS OF KAREN S. EVANS, ADMINISTRATOR OF E-GOVERNMENT AND
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET;
RANDOLPH C. HITE, DIRECTOR, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURE
AND SYSTEMS, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE; DANIEL MATTHEWS,
CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION; AND
KIM NELSON, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
AGENCY
Ms. Evans. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member
Clay. Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today and
discuss the administration's Federal Enterprise Architecture
Program.
The FEA provides a strategic model and a plan to improve
the Federal information technology investment management,
create cross-agency collaboration, and enhance governmentwide
information sharing. My remarks will provide an update on key
enterprise architecture developments across the Federal
Government specifically focusing on the value of the FEA
program and its support of individual agency EA initiatives in
using IT to achieve results for the American citizens.
The administration is working to ensure the Government as a
whole and the agencies in particular integrate resource
decisionmaking with discipline planning activities to yield
better program performance in managing our IT resources and
assets, and EA is the information asset that defines the
mission program, the information and technologies needed to
perform the mission, and the transitional processes for
implementing new technologies when needs change.
The goals of the Federal Enterprise Architecture are to
enable the Federal Government to identify opportunities to
leverage technology and alleviate redundancy, or to highlight
where agency overlap limits the value of information technology
investments; facilitate horizontal, cross-Federal, and vertical
Federal, State, local, and tribal integration of IT resources;
establish a direct relationship between IT and mission program
performance; and support citizen-centered customer-focused
government to maximize IT investments to better achieve mission
outcomes.
Whether at the Federal, agency, or program level, a mature
and continually utilized EA helps in the management of
resources by plainly organizing the enterprise IT assets within
an understandable strategic framework. This enables agency
leaders to develop a clear road map for future investments
while ensuring a more effective IT portfolio supports the
delivery of faster and better program performance.
In addition to supporting agencies' EA efforts, the Federal
Government is using the FEA to identify numerous cross-agency
opportunities to cut costs and increase efficiencies through
sharing common business functions and technology applications.
Specifically, we are enhancing the FEA to maximize the
performance of the Federal Government's $60 billion IT
portfolio by: identifying opportunities to develop common
solutions within Lines of Business [LOBs] resulting in
increased government effectiveness and taxpayer savings;
linking agency performance to strategic IT investment decisions
through agency enterprise architectures; and using EA-related
budget requirements to ensure security and privacy
considerations are integrated as agencies make strategic IT
investment choices.
The FEA framework has yielded results demonstrating a new
ability for the Federal Government to drive collaboration and
accelerate consolidation of redundant activities, saving
taxpayer dollars. One example of this is the concept of Lines
of Business [LOBs], a functional representation of the overall
business requirements of government. In response to our
preliminary review of fiscal year 2004 and 2005 FEA budget
data, OMB launched a governmentwide effort in February 2004 to
analyze the first set of LOB initiatives. The LOB Task Forces
are now using EA-based principles and proven best practices to
identify business-driven common solutions to transform
government by breaking down traditional agency silos and
increasing collaboration. The FEA structure and analysis are
foundational to the LOB initiatives. This activity provides a
glimpse of how we can use the FEA as transformational framework
to accelerate the delivery of services and truly achieve the
21st century e-Government. Implementation of these LOB common
solutions will begin in fiscal year 2005, leading to
significant improvements in process efficiency, system
interoperability, and data sharing.
OMB has developed an EA Assessment Framework to help
agencies improve their EA programs and benefit from the results
of using EA as a strategic planning tool. OMB's EA Assessment
Framework is designed to help each agency assess the capability
of its EA program and is intended to compliment the GAO EA
management maturity framework which assesses the EA program
capacity.
The EA Assessment Framework will be used annually by OMB
and the agencies to identify opportunities and facilitate the
discussion of EA performance and use. This ongoing
collaboration between OMB and the agencies removes the
discussion of EA from the current budget cycle and allows us to
engage when results can be used by agencies during the
development of their request instead of after the fact when
they submit the information to OMB.
OMB continues helping agencies align their efforts with the
FEA program, and toward this goal Federal Enterprise
Architecture Management System [FEAMS], is ready for agencies
to use for the fiscal year 2006 budget process. This will be
the first time ever that agencies will be able to use this Web-
based tool to look across the Government and identify potential
collaboration partners and share technology components as they
develop their own IT investments.
As part of our commitment to strengthen our agency
security, OMB and the CIO Council are developing the FEA
Security and Privacy Profile, an overlay to assist Federal
managers in discovering early on where risk exposures exist,
the potential range for controls needed to address such risks,
and the potential cost of those controls. The FEA program is
helping agencies to identify, understand, and integrate
security and privacy issues in the earliest stages of planning
and development, promoting the efficient operation, and
preventing unintended consequences which may require costly
corrections at the end of the development.
In short, we are looking to evolving the FEA reference
models and further enhancing resources such as FEAMS and the EA
Assessment Framework for agencies. OMB seeks to develop the
Government-wide practice of enterprise architecture so that
agencies can proactively collaborate to make investment
decisions prior to submitting their budgets to OMB.
In the longer term, the administration will continue to
create opportunities for transforming government delivery of
service to the citizens, working to fully integrate performance
measurement concepts throughout the FEA reference models to
ensure agencies are considering outcomes in all aspects of IT
portfolio planning.
The administration will continue to collaborate with
agencies and with Congress, State, local, and tribal
governments to ensure the promise of the enterprise
architecture is fully realized across government. I look
forward to working with you on these matters and will be happy
to take questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Evans follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Ms. Evans.
Our next witness is Mr. Randolph Hite. Mr. Hite is the
Director of Information Technology Architecture and Systems
Issues at the U.S. General Accounting Office. During his 25
year career with GAO, he has directed reviews of major Federal
investments in information technology such as IRS's tax systems
modernization and DOD's business systems modernization. Mr.
Hite is a principal author of several information technology
management guides such as GAO's Guide on System Testing, the
Federal CIO Council Guide on Enterprise Architectures, and
GAO's Enterprise Architecture Management Maturity Framework. He
frequently testifies before Congress on such topics and is an
ex-officio member of the Federal CIO Council. He has received a
number of awards throughout his career, including being a 2003
Federal 100 Award winner.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Hite. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First let me commend you
for holding this hearing. You know, it wasn't too long ago that
enterprise architecture in the Federal Government was a lot
like what Mark Twain said about the weather: everybody talks
about it, but nobody does anything about it. Fortunately, this
has changed in a lot of corners of the Government, and I am
cautiously optimistic about what the future holds in this area.
Nevertheless, we are clearly not where we need to be when
it comes to developing and using enterprise architectures
across the entire Federal Government, as your statement
recognized. What I would like to do is make two brief points,
one dealing with the Federal Enterprise Architecture [FEA], and
one dealing with Federal agencies' enterprise architecture
maturity.
Point one, OMB is making progress on the FEA, but it is
still a work in process, and what I mean by that is it is still
evolving both in terms of content and in use. In my view, this
evolution is not a negative, but rather a reasonable and
expected phenomenon given the broad-based purpose and scope of
such a framework. For example, the FEA is intended to
facilitate the development of agency enterprise architectures,
no trivial feat in and of itself; promote the reuse of common
IT components across agencies; and identify opportunities for
interagency collaboration on common IT solutions. We support
these goals and believe that the FEA can be an integral part of
a transparent means to accomplish this.
Now, having said this, we nevertheless have questions about
the FEA at this juncture, which, if addressed, we believe will
increase the understanding about the tool and thus facilitate
its extension and use. One question is should the FEA be
represented as an enterprise architecture. Our reading of it
suggests it is more akin to a classification scheme or a
taxonomy, rather than a true enterprise architecture.
A closely related question is whether the expected
relationship between the agencies' enterprise architectures and
the FEA have been clearly defined. In this regard, OMB talks
about agencies mapping and aligning their architectures with
the FEA, but what this really entails is not well defined, and
such ambiguity leads to assumptions which in turn increases the
risk that expectations don't get met, and this is particularly
true in the enterprise architecture arena.
Still another question is how will security be introduced
into the FEA. OMB has stated that it plans to address security
in the FEA through a security profile, but our reading of the
FEA shows that this profile is not yet part of the FEA. And, in
my view, whether we are talking about enterprises or we are
talking about systems, security should permeate every element
of the architecture and shouldn't be an afterthought, again,
whether we are talking about systems or enterprises.
Point two, like the FEA, enterprise architecture programs
in the individual agencies are still maturing. Using our
framework as a benchmarking tool, as you alluded to, Mr.
Chairman, we reported in September 2003 that Federal agencies'
collective progress toward effective management of
architectures was limited: 22 agencies increasing their levels,
24 agencies decreasing their levels, and 46 agencies remaining
basically the same. We further reported that only 20 of the
agencies that we looked at had established the foundation
needed for effective enterprise architecture when you compare
them against our most recent maturity model, which raised the
bar on what constitutes effective architecture management. This
governmentwide state of affairs can be attributed to several
longstanding challenges which were the basis of some
recommendations that we made to OMB in 2001, and then we
reiterated those recommendations in 2003.
In summary, development and use of architectures in the
Federal Government are maturing, but they are not mature.
Progress is being made, but the progress is uneven and much
remains to be accomplished. I will say the recent steps by OMB
and the CIO Council to assume stronger leadership roles in this
area are encouraging signs; however, hard work lies ahead to
clarify and evolve the FEA and to ensure that well-managed
architecture programs are actually established and executed,
underscore executed, across the Government.
As our maturity framework emphasizes, the goal is not
merely to check the box on some form, but rather to make
enterprise architecture an integral and useful part of
informing government transformation and achieving breakthrough
performance. That is the end game.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my testimony. I would be happy
to answer any questions you have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hite follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much, sir.
Our next witness is Mr. Daniel Matthews. Mr. Matthews was
appointed Chief Information Officer for the U.S. Department of
Transportation in March 2003. As CIO, he serves as the
principal advisor to the secretary on matters involving
information resources and information services management, and
provide leadership in using IT to achieve the Department's
goals and objectives. Prior to his appointment at DOT's CIO,
Mr. Matthews served as senior vice president of Savantage
Financial Services from July 2002, where he was responsible for
efforts to modernize the financial management systems of a
number of Federal agencies. He spent most of the previous 22
years at Lockheed Martin, most recently as vice president.
You are recognized for 5 minutes. Welcome to the
subcommittee.
Mr. Matthews. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee,
thank you for the opportunity to appear today to discuss the
Department of Transportation's implementation of the Federal
Enterprise Architecture Program.
The Department of Transportation Office of the CIO has
operational responsibility for departmental network and
communications infrastructure, as well as providing shared
services for the Office of the Secretary and several operating
agencies currently engaged in the Department's Information
Technology services consolidation.
It is my observation and experience at DOT that the Federal
Enterprise Architecture initiative is working well to focus on
business-based, results-oriented, information technology best
practice investments, their common infrastructure and external
information services delivery. This drive is beginning to
deliver results that will expedite our ability to improve cyber
security, mine data, enhance information sharing, eliminate
redundancies, and to document our IT costs and performance.
Our enterprise architecture provides a clearer
understanding of where IT dollars are being spent, what
technologies support our business processes, who is responsible
for and impacted by process and technology changes, and what
technology standards we should employ today as well as in the
future.
The DOT's enterprise architecture can be described as a
federated model composed of smaller segments that are distinct
areas of mission activity carried out from within each of the
Department's operating agencies, yet they are all linked to the
overall DOT enterprise architecture. It de-emphasizes
organizational structure and shifts that emphasis to DOT
missions, in particular safety and mobility. It promotes an
end-to-end consideration of business process needs across the
operating agencies, a focus that is at the heart of Clinger-
Cohen Act compliance at Department of Transportation.
Implementing architectural segments is important because the
large scope of the DOT enterprise makes it difficult to
effectively fund and successfully manage a large number of
enterprise architecture activities simultaneously. By taking a
phased approach to the development of our enterprise
architecture, the Department is able to determine a prioritized
sequence of activities that takes into account urgency,
maturity of solution, and stakeholder support for future
phases. This sequencing approach also improves the likelihood
of successful implementations of IT solutions and it optimizes
IT spending across the Department.
Examples of the DOT's emphasis on enterprise architecture
begin with my own CIO organization, where an Enterprise
Architecture Program Management Office team is dedicated to
full-time leadership and continuity in the development,
implementation, and maintenance of a single DOT enterprise
architecture.
A Departmental Investment Review Board, chaired by the
Department's Deputy Secretary, reviews proposed IT investments
from across DOT and decides their appropriate disposition based
on project assessments performed using standardized investment
review criteria, including enterprise architecture alignment.
The Department's Architectural Review Board is the
governance body charged with evaluating and recommending
changes to the DOT enterprise architecture and ensuring that
investments in IT comply with established departmental policies
for enterprise architecture, capital planning, security
standards and processes. The DOT's Enterprise Architecture
Technology Reference Model provides the Architectural Review
Board with information on specific technologies, hardware, and
software used throughout the Department of Transportation
enterprise. These activities reduce security vulnerabilities,
they wean out duplicative IT spending within our operating
agencies, and they hasten the delivery of successful IT
solutions. When taken together, elements of this governance
model gracefully implement the investment review requirements
of the Clinger-Cohen Act.
Building on our current efforts at DOT, we recently
published an updated version of our modernization blueprint and
developed several documents to aid in inculcating enterprise
architecture understanding and use.
The Federal Enterprise Architecture implementation, while
viewed as fairly successful thus far, does have its issues. In
several instances the time allowed between budgetary guidance
and/or changes and expected agency execution has been
constricted. Other expectations, such as a full-time program
manager for each initiative, is unrealistic for many small
agencies with limited staff. These shortcomings are being
reviewed and the Federal CIO Council is working with OMB to
ensure a workable Federal Enterprise Architecture process is
rapidly adopted and implemented.
This concludes my testimony. Again, I thank you for the
opportunity to discuss this important topic and, Mr. Chairman,
I look forward to answering any questions you may have. Thank
you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Matthews follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Our next witness is Kim Nelson. In November 2001, Ms.
Nelson was sworn in as Assistant Administrator for
Environmental Information and CIO of the Environmental
Protection Agency. Prior to joining EPA, Ms. Nelson served the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 22 years. During her career,
she worked in the Senate of Pennsylvania, the Public Utility
Commission, and the Departments of Aging and Environmental
Protection. For the past 14 years Ms. Nelson held a number of
positions in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental
Protection. She was the first Director of the Program
Integration and Effectiveness Office, the first executive to
hold the position of CIO, and most recently served as Executive
Deputy Secretary. She was primarily responsible for managing
department-wide projects with a goal toward improving processes
and integrating programs and functions. She was recognized for
outstanding service on three occasions during her career with
the Department of Environmental Protection.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized.
Ms. Nelson. Thank you, Chairman Putnam, for the opportunity
today to testify about the progress being made by OMB and
Federal agencies to develop and implement the Federal
Enterprise Architecture, and some of the challenges that the
agencies are facing in aligning their own architectures with
that of the Federal enterprise.
Today my testimony is going to reflect my dual role, as you
mentioned, as CIO at the Environmental Protection Agency, but
also as Co-Chair of the Federal CIO Council's Architecture and
Infrastructure Committee.
We live in a point and click culture that has incredibly
high expectations for government. In the past, when governments
wanted to improve service delivery, the typical response was to
move some boxes on an organization chart and the reassignment
of people. But today it is possible to improve our government
services through the alignment of our information systems by
looking at our common business functions from across different
organizations.
The FEA provides that ability, the ability to look across
the Federal departments, the agencies, to look at their
missions, to look at their strategic goals, their programs,
their data, and their information technology, and using it as a
planning tool which allows the Federal Government to take
advantage of the IT revolution and ensure the responsible
spending of over $60 billion of the Federal IT budget. It is
the one blueprint that will lead to a more efficient delivery
of services and is key to the citizen-centric government that
we all seek.
In the last year I would say I have seen what I consider to
be very significant progress in the implementation of the FEA.
OMB has completed work on all major components of the FEA
reference model and they are giving the Federal agencies a
common way to look at their business functions and align our
investments appropriately. EPA, like a lot of other Federal
agencies, is now mapping our own architecture and our own
blueprint to those in IT investments under the Federal model.
A couple of other examples of some progress are the CIO
Council's development of a reusable component strategy. That
strategy will enable an IT service built by one agency to be
used by others, and the development of a draft security and
privacy profile.
The 24 e-Gov initiatives and the five Lines of Business are
proving to be what I consider to be real-life laboratories that
highlight for OMB and the Federal CIOs the critical Federal
Architectural design decisions needed to achieve both
information integration and information sharing throughout all
levels of government.
As for some of the challenges, I think your charts up there
speak well to some of those we are facing. The General
Accounting Office recently reported that most of the Federal
agencies are still in the development stages of building their
architectures. To quickly increase that capacity, OMB and the
CIO Council have created a Chief Architects Forum, where all
the chief architects can leverage their efforts in addressing
the specific strategic management and operational challenges
that were noted in that report.
Frankly, I think our challenge with enterprise architecture
is that it is still a relatively new discipline to a lot of
people, and like all new disciplines, it is going to require an
acculturation process. Each Federal agency has to integrate
enterprise architecture into the fabric of its strategic
management culture before that agency can begin to eliminate
redundancies, target citizen services, and integrate the
information for improved decisionmaking. It is not an IT tool,
it has to become part of the strategic management process of
the organization; and that is not an easy process to change.
Finally, I would like to address the issue of
interoperability as it relates to the Federal Enterprise
Architecture and networks that are currently being built by
governments.
Within EPA, we are using the enterprise architecture to
design and implement services for environmental decisionmakers
across the country. Approximately 95 percent of all of the
information in EPA's major systems come from State and tribal
governments. With that being the case, and also understanding
that all of our major air, water, and waste laws are heavily
delegated to the States, we have to work with those partners on
the exchange of information. This practical business reality
drives the approach we are taking to enterprise architecture.
We have to have a collaborative effort with our States and
tribes to implement common data standards; we have to implement
something that we have called our Central Data Exchange for
reporting purposes; and we are designing and implementing our
environmental exchange network.
This network, which is becoming a reality as we speak, we
have 10 States with operational nodes on the network, is due in
large part to the $25 million State and tribal grant program
begun by President Bush and funded by Congress the last 3
years. Our strong partnership with our State co-regulators will
continue to drive our innovation at EPA and is going to require
EPA to work not just vertically with environmental agencies,
but horizontally. We have to work across the Federal
Government, particularly with health and resource agencies, to
better demonstrate results in protecting human health and
safeguarding the natural environment.
So I thank you for the opportunity to appear here today,
both representing EPA as well as the Federal CIO Council's
Architecture Committee.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Nelson follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you all for your opening comments.
Ms. Evans, GAO reports in its testimony that OMB was unable
to comment on the status and development of the security
profile the FEA component is intended to address IT security.
What is the status of the security profile and what are the
development plans?
Ms. Evans. Currently, we are working with the AIC off of
the CIO Council to develop those profiles, and we have a plan,
and Kim can probably speak more specifically to the due dates
where these plans in the profiles will come forward to the
Council and then come forward to OMB, so I would yield to her
on the specific dates of those profiles.
But I would like to comment on one thing, and there was a
lot of discussion going forward, and as the vice chair of the
CIO Council when these efforts were going on, while we were
talking to OMB, we specifically asked not to have a specific
security reference model. And the reason why we asked not to
have that was because we didn't want to have security
segregated from all the models. What we wanted to ensure was
that we had worked so hard and came so far in ensuring that
cyber security and overall risk is being looked at as each
investment goes forward and how you manage your program
overall, that we had concerns as a council that if we had a
separate model, that we may start down the path again of
separating it without always thinking about it going forward.
So that is why we are taking the approach of having it be
overlaid across the framework and it will go through all the
models that way.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Nelson.
Ms. Nelson. The committee that is working on that security
and privacy profile is actually meeting as we speak to review
some of the most recent comments that have been received. We
hope that document will be available before the end of the
summer, and once that is out and is in use, we will start
working on another revision.
The one thing I want to point out about that profile, what
is so important about it, it really does provide the
opportunity for agencies to start thinking about security on
day 1 and privacy on day 1 versus thinking about security and
privacy when you are ready to roll out a system or once you are
into the later design stages.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Hite, do you wish to add anything or
respond to the response?
Mr. Hite. I offer a couple thoughts. I agree that security
is part and parcel of each of those reference models, it is not
a standalone item, and it needs to be interwoven explicitly
into those models.
I think there are lessons learned out there. I know IRS
went through the same process where they found it useful, after
trying to deal with the security elements of their enterprise
architecture, to explicitly extract security as a separate
visible view into the architecture so that they would in fact
be able to make informed decisions about how complete and
correct they were in defining their security profile.
So I think there are lessons learned out there in terms of
how to proceed in introducing security into the architecture.
But I would reiterate what I said in my oral statement, that it
is not something that is done after the fact and you try to lay
on top of it. Rather it is something that is done in concert
with defining the business and the data and the technical, etc.
elements of the architecture.
Mr. Putnam. The relationship between the development of the
FEA and the agency EA efforts presents something of a chicken
and egg dilemma. The FEA is designed to provide a framework to
facilitate the adoption of standards into common Lines of
Business. Agencies were required to develop their own EAs prior
to work on the FEA began to identify potential opportunities
for standardization. How is OMB mediating these competing
influences?
Ms. Evans. Well, actually, I have the opportunity to talk
from both sides of the fence on this particular issue. Coming
from an agency where the work had already started, because
having an enterprise architecture is not a new requirement that
the agencies were to have; they were to have modernization
blueprints. We were supposed to have all of these things going
forward. But as we continue to evolve, and I think that it has
been clear and it has been said by all the distinguished
members of the panel today, that this continues to evolve, and
it is not like you finish the work and you are done and you
move on. These things have to continue to evolve and the work
has to continue to progress, and it is important that OMB now,
in this new role that I am in, continues to provide the
leadership through the framework and through this effort so
that we can then ensure that the agencies' investments and the
decisions that they are making support the outcomes that they
intend for the overall programs of their departments. It isn't
so much the IT itself, but how is the IT supporting the overall
program outcomes?
So we are working, and we continuously work, to improve the
models and realign those, but also to continuously provide
feedback to the agencies so that their ongoing efforts can
align with what we are doing governmentwide as well.
Mr. Putnam. The initial development of an EA is a huge
investment in time, dollars, talent. Recognizing that the
maintenance of an EA is an ongoing process, when might we
expect to see some dividends returned on this investment?
Ms. Evans. Well, I would argue that you are seeing them
happen right now live, and the reason that I would argue that
is that through the efforts and with the budget submissions
that came in through 2004 and 2005, OMB had the opportunity to
really analyze across the Government where they could see
redundant investments or where it looked like agencies were
going in a similar direction. That is now what we are calling
the Lines of Business analysis. And so we have those Lines of
Business going forward. We know how much the agencies intended
to invest in that area, we know the numbers of investments that
are in those areas, and so now what we are doing is going
forward and saying this is an opportunity; ``you guys are all
working in this same area here,'' ``let us come up with a
common solution so that we can reduce the cost, make use from
lessons learned, and be able to go forward with a common
solution.'' So you are seeing it now.
Do I have quantifiable benefits? The answer would be no
because we haven't defined the common solution. We are targeted
to do that in this upcoming month. We had sent out a request
for information, and I am happy to say we got the submissions
in and we have well over 100 submissions that came in
responding to the Lines of Business in our questions on that
and what is the best way for the Government to proceed. That
analysis is going on now, and when we come to what the common
solution will be, we will have projected benefits that we
believe we will be able to obtain.
Mr. Putnam. Do you know how much we have spent on FEA
efforts so far?
Ms. Evans. It is outlined on the Exhibit 53s, but we
actually have it. It is mixed in with the overall planning. I
can get you that number and get back to you and give the number
for fiscal year 2004 and 2005, if you would like, sir.
Mr. Putnam. Please. And while we are talking about 2004 and
2005, you raised this in your last response about some of the
duplication of effort that was identified, how many duplicate
investments were identified?
Ms. Evans. OK, I have that for you. I do have that. OK, in
fiscal year 2004 and 2005, we have the dollar amounts, but the
top Lines of Business based on what we have done so far is
there is a category called Information Technology Management,
which includes our cross-agency investments. So the account
that we have of investments there are 822 investments.
Financial Management, which is one of the Lines of Business
that we are currently looking at right now, we have 445
investments in that area. The Knowledge, Creation and
Management, which is another top Line of Business that we have
identified through investments overall, there are 251.
So we look at these and we say, OK, there is a lot of
potential. When you start looking specifically at the ones that
we have outlined, and looking forward and saying, OK, for Human
Resources how many do we have in there, for investments we have
89 Human Resources investments that showed up in the 2005
budget. For Grants Management we have 36. So when we start
looking at that and then we look at the new development dollars
that are associated with each of those, for example, in Human
Resources, with the 89 investments planned, there is planned
new development dollars of $215 million associated with that,
which means that there is a possibility that we should be doing
things in a consolidated way that could reduce that
implementation cost.
From a general appearance, from the 50,000 foot view, when
you come into OMB, from our perspective it looks like it is all
duplicative, because when you start really looking at what is
the business that an agency does, the core accounting types of
functions, all agencies do core accounting; they have general
ledgers, they produce financial statements. So from our
perspective, from an OMB perspective, it all looks duplicative.
However, when you have to start getting down into how does an
agency manage from day to day, what are they doing, you have to
then step back and really use this as the tool that it was
intended: it is to start that discussion, it is to start
delving down and doing the analysis. Is this one investment
that was counted six times in a business case going across or
is it truly six different investments within an agency? And
that is one of the things that we have learned through the
business cases and getting the information in from the business
cases, is that we need to continuously give better guidance to
the agencies so that we can then say, OK, this really is truly
duplicative or, no, this is the one investment that was counted
six times coming across and it is really a corporate,
departmental knowledge management system that each agency is
counting as they do their business case.
So that is why we go out and we meet with the agencies. We
have done the analysis, this high-level analysis, and we hand
it back to the agency, and that is the assessment framework
that we are doing. And we say from our viewpoint this is what
it looks like. We are asking you now, through your budget
cycle, through your spraying and your planning cycles and your
capital investment plans, to look at these investments. Is it
just a data issue or do you truly have that many duplicative
systems? And if you do, this is your opportunity to do
something about it.
Mr. Putnam. How about gaps? Do you have a number on the
gaps that were identified? In the 2004 and 2005 budget
submissions, when you reviewed those, were there things that
stood out as being common gaps that needed to be filled?
Ms. Evans. We looked more, when we were doing the analysis,
to what it appeared that agencies were investing in, not so
much was there a big gap overall. I mean, we do know, for
example, that EVMS project management types systems, we don't
have those, so that was one and that was written into the
scorecard so that could then ensure the investments going
forward. But what we really are trying to do is get a handle on
is this really a duplicative investment. And the other piece is
if you have this service component, if you have this type of
service that you are doing in your agency, can you leverage
that now across with other partners, versus someone who says,
oh, I am starting up a new system, and we have another one that
looks very mature over here.
So we have tried to ensure that collaboration is occurring
among the agencies, so we haven't really looked at what gaps
analysis, other than in our skills gaps, which GAO has brought
up about chief architects and our overall human capital skill
gaps of project management that we need.
Mr. Putnam. Let's talk about the skill gap a little bit. A
number of agencies, as Mr. Hite pointed out, reported there was
a scarcity of skilled architecture staff. Have there been
problems recruiting and retaining the skilled personnel to
develop and implement EAs?
We will start with Mr. Matthews.
Mr. Matthews. At the Department of Transportation we have
been blessed that we have two core architects; one is a
gentleman serving on my staff, another comes to us from the
FAA. And they have been spearheading inside the department the
enterprise architecture requirements. They have been working
with all of the operating agencies to bring them up to speed on
the enterprise architecture process and also giving them some
preliminary or primer type information on enterprise
architecture and what it means to them on a day-to-day basis.
But, by and large, in the market place there are few resources
available to draw on for enterprise architecture. Additionally,
as we bring resources into the Federal Government, their
ongoing work over time has to be considered and how to keep
their skills updated and upgraded with the current goings on in
the marketplace.
Thank you.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Nelson.
Ms. Nelson. I concur.
Mr. Putnam. What do you see as being the utility of an FEA
as you set about developing your own agency's EA?
Ms. Nelson. In EPA, we were one of the agencies that were
working on our architecture before the FEA was in place, so
what I see as the benefit of the FEA at this point in time is
using it, as well as the new Federal Enterprise Architecture
Management System that will be put in place, it provides an
opportunity for the agency to get an early view of what work is
being done in other Federal agencies. So where we might have
opportunities for collaboration, both in terms of some of the
products that we have developed that we might be able to roll
out to other agencies to use, reusable components, like our
Central Data Exchange, as well as looking at work that other
agencies have done that might allow us to avoid our own
significant investments.
So using that new management system which will be available
to agencies for the first time, you will be able to look across
the Federal Government in an easy-to-use tool and see what kind
of investments and projects are underway, and hopefully avoid
earlier in the process, redundancies or duplication. OMB has
been able to do that after submissions have been made. Like
everything else, you want to get ahead of the curve and you
want to be able to make those decisions earlier in the process
rather than later.
Mr. Putnam. Earlier in your testimony, Ms. Nelson, you
referred to the Chief Architects Forum. They met for the first
time in April of this year to identify the individuals
responsible for their own agencies' EA efforts and discuss
common concerns. The forum was convened by the CIO Council.
What role is the Chief Architects Forum playing in the
development of the FEA and what is the relationship between the
forum and the CIO Council?
Ms. Nelson. Some chief architects from throughout the
Federal Government have been actively engaged in all aspects of
the Federal Enterprise Architecture, and they have done that
through the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure
Committee, of which I am the co-chair, only since December.
When the most recent, I guess the third, GAO report came out,
my colleague and my co-chair, John Gilligan, who is the CIO for
Air Force, decided we needed to take a step back. As the co-
chairs of the Architecture Infrastructure Committee, we
realized that the work plans we had for that committee for the
next year may have been too aggressive if in fact most
agencies, as GAO indicated, were still at stage 1. And one of
the things we did was to say we really need a large forum, an
opportunity for the chief architects to talk to one another.
Before that forum was held in April, the chief architects
from the agencies had never once been brought together. So with
the forum and quarterly meetings now, they have an opportunity
to discuss common issues, challenges, hurdles, solutions, best
practices, and hopefully we can use that as an opportunity to
work with GAO and say what are the most common--and Mr. Hite
was at that introductory meeting--what are the most common
challenges and how can we quickly move forward on some easy
solutions with the goal Mr. Gilligan and I have is using that
forum to quickly get as many agencies as possible to stage 2
and stage 3, because while that column is very big under stage
1, we think there are some simple solutions where we can
quickly slide that column over to stage 2, and we want to use
the forum to do that.
Mr. Putnam. Do you want to elaborate on what some of those
easy things would be to get everybody into stage 2?
Ms. Nelson. Sure. Well, I'll speak for my own agency. My
own agency went from a three in the first GAO evaluation to a
two to a one. That is not good progress.
Mr. Putnam. Going the wrong way.
Ms. Nelson. It is a slide, a slide the wrong way, you are
right.
We feel that right now, with some simple changes we have
made, we are probably at a three, and using the OMB self-
assessment, probably have rated ourselves as a three. Simple
thing. We have never had a formal written policy.
Mr. Putnam. Wait a second. You gave yourself a three, but
they gave you a one?
Ms. Nelson. Well, they did, but the one thing you have to
understand about the GAO policy or the GAO approach, and I
think it is a good approach, but the one thing you have to
understand about it is you could get 31 out of 32 right, and in
most classrooms across the country that is an A, that is close
to a 95 percent----
Mr. Putnam. Even under No Child Left Behind.
Ms. Nelson. But under the GAO framework, if you got 31 out
of 32 correct and the one you didn't get correct is a stage 1,
then you are way back at the beginning.
Mr. Putnam. Do you hear that Mr. Hite? She doesn't like
your grading scale.
Ms. Nelson. So you do have to delve down a little. And I am
not arguing. I think the questions they are asking are the
right questions, but you have to understand that.
So, for instance, all through stage 1, 2, and 3 there are
two things we can take care of. One of them is do we have
enough resources. We answered no because at that period of time
we were in a freeze. We do have enough resources now. That is
easy. Checkmark. That automatically takes us to stage 2. Stage
3, we did not have a formal written policy that the
Administrator had signed. Even though we are using the
architecture, it is part of our investment process, we are
applying it, we have aligned it with the FEA. Because there
wasn't a piece of paper with Administrator Mike Levitt's
signature on it, it kicked us all the way back. We will have
that policy signed in the next few weeks; we are working it
through the process now.
There are things like that many agencies have cited, and we
are helping them find the best policies throughout the Federal
Government and get them in place. But what is important is you
have to use them. Just having that piece of paper signed is
meaningless if you are not really using it.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Hite.
Mr. Hite. I would offer a couple additional thoughts to
amplify on what Ms. Nelson is saying.
What you see on that chart is a point in time
representation. Most of those responses were as of about 10
months ago. So the way things are today I would hope are much
better than they were then. And as Ms. Nelson is saying, they
are in her situation much better.
The other thing to keep in mind when you look at that is
that is a representation at an aggregated level of a lot of
detailed information. When you aggregate information, you can
lose specifics, so you have to have rules governing how you
aggregate it. The rule that we used in applying our framework
was in order to be at a stage, you need to satisfy all core
elements at that stage. If you don't satisfy all, you don't
qualify for that stage. So embedded in that is the reality that
an organization could be not satisfying one stage 2, and thus
be at stage 1, and they may be satisfying a half a dozen stage
3, 4, and 5 elements. That level of detail is not in an
aggregated view, it is in the details of what we reported.
And, of course, the other thing to keep in mind, the reason
we adopted that philosophy is these things, these core elements
that needed to be present were not trivial things; they all
have a very real purpose, a purpose that is grounded in best
practices, a purpose that is extracted from the Federal CIO
Council practical guide on managing enterprise architecture. So
they are not things that we came up with, saying this would be
nice to have; these are fundamentals.
Mr. Putnam. What about this signature thing? If they have
this great policy and they are doing it, and they just have a
slow bureaucracy that the Administrator can't get around to
rubber-stamping this policy that is already in place, that is
really enough to backslide two grades?
Mr. Hite. Well, the core element that needed to be met
relative to stage 2 was that you had a policy governing
enterprise architecture development, and whether in EPA's case
it was because a policy existed but it just was not signed, to
be honest with you, I can't speak to the specifics of every
situation. But the purpose of a policy is very profound. A
policy demonstrates an organization's commitment to perform a
certain way. In the absence of policy which says this is how we
are going to operate in this organization, then people are left
to their own devices. And people left to their own devices go
off in different directions, all with good intentions, and
architecture is designed to get people all marching in the same
direction.
Mr. Putnam. Is there some deadline when that policy was
supposed to be in place by, Ms. Evans?
Ms. Evans. No, we did not establish a specific deadline
that said all agencies have to have a policy. As a matter of
fact, I believe that was one of the suggestions that GAO had
offered, that we should send a letter out enhancing that and
advising going forward on that. That was one of the suggestions
going forward, because there wasn't specific guidelines out
there saying every agency needs to have a policy in place.
But I would like to followup a little bit on that and say
that I don't disagree with the way that the GAO model is set up
in ensuring that the basic tenets of a good program are in
place. I would like to say, though, that you have to take both
of those into consideration to really see if an agency is truly
using enterprise architecture to go forward to manage its
portfolio. And so we are not here to debate whether the GAO
maturity model and framework is a good one or a bad one,
because it is based on the tenets of the CIO Council as well, a
framework that came out of the CIO Council, but what we are
saying from an OMB perspective is that--and this is another
recommendation that came from the GAO report as well--is that
we had to exercise even more oversight and more guidance out to
the agencies. And that is the reason why we came up with the
assessment framework from our perspective, too, because then it
compliments what GAO is doing, so that you can then look at it
as if, well, OK, if the policy is in draft, then it is going
through, but yet they have all the other tenets there and they
have the capability and they are using it, then you can use the
two frameworks to really get a handle on how an agency is
moving forward and how mature that process really is, and is it
really embedded into the strategic planning going forward.
Mr. Putnam. I don't want to harp on this and punish Ms.
Nelson for being candid, but it just seems like the policy
ought to be first base. How do you do all the other stuff if
you don't have the leadership from the top? That is what we
harp on in every one of these hearings, is getting leadership
from the top. And if you all are already doing these things, it
sure seems like having a policy signed and in place by the
agency head or the department head ought to be one of the first
things that is done just to get them committed, the name on the
dotted line, and get them invested.
Ms. Evans. I would just like to comment one further point
on this. The policy itself isn't so much about do you have an
enterprise architecture in place and are you doing certain
things. The policies and the guidelines that come out from OMB
are based on the tenets that are in the Clinger-Cohen Act and
in the E-Gov Act, talking about overall management of the
portfolio and how you are moving forward with your capital
planning.
Now, if you have a good mature capital investment planning
program, then that means you have a modernization blueprint
which is your enterprise architecture. So that is the point
that I am making, that this is not a new thing that the
agencies had to do. So when we talk about the details there,
the agencies do have policies and plans in place of how they
manage capital investments, and so those are in place, those
have been signed by the agency heads going forward.
Additionally, what we have done to bring this to the agency
in holding an agency accountable is this is specifically
included in the President's management agenda and in the
scorecard under the E-Gov element. So for an agency to be able
to go green, this is a green criteria; that you have to have
your enterprise architecture in place, you have to have that
modernization blueprint in there, and you have to be using it.
And so that is how we are holding the agencies accountable in
that manner through the scorecard.
Mr. Putnam. So there is a direct connection, then, between
your at-risk status and the FEA initiative. So you use this
scoring mechanism to decide whether they are making progress or
made progress on the FEA?
Ms. Evans. We actually use a combination. And so we have
our own assessment model, and actually what we do, and you
would recognize it, we put up a quadrant when we meet the
agencies and we map our assessment score against the GAO
assessment score, and the agency falls into a quadrant. I would
be glad to give you a draft, in essence a report that we
provide each agency as we go forward so that they can see how
we are looking at their architecture efforts in concert with
how they showed up in the GAO report, and then we go into a
detailed assessment based on criteria that we have developed;
and then we show them, based on all of that, how many of your
investments aligned to the BRM, we give them very specific
information about where we couldn't see clear alignment of
investments and we give them the number, and then we also give
them very specifically a list of investments that look like
they are duplicative to us, getting back to your original
comment. So we give them a whole huge package so that they can
look at it. And we can give you a draft of this report, a
representative sample of how we are doing that.
Mr. Putnam. I don't think I want to see. I don't even
understand the Cliff Notes version you just gave me.
Ms. Evans. Well, what happens is that we take this and we
take our assessment and we map it on a grid, and there is a
maturity model associated with it. And then, with all the other
tools that we have in place, we look at, OK, if this isn't in
place, there is a series of documents that we look through
based on the submission, what they were required to do. So what
will happen is if they don't have--I mean, the best way to do
this is if they don't have enough information for us to even
assess it, we show them what we are doing with the other
agencies and it is marked DRAFT all the way across, which then
that means they don't have the checkmark on the scorecard that
says that they have a modernization blueprint, which then that
pretty much drives down, it is a cascading effect to all the
other things that are going on that they are being measured for
of how they do their overall portfolio.
So if you have an agency who is just trying to get
checkmarks, which means that they may have a group of people
who are working on filling out paperwork for business cases and
another group that is trying to fill out the paperwork so they
can get their checkmarks for enterprise architecture, when you
pull it all together, you can see that is why they have at-risk
investments, that is why they don't have a good cyber security
program, because they are just trying to get the checkmarks
going forward.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Matthews, do you understand the system? You
have to live with it.
Mr. Matthews. Yes, sir.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Nelson, do you understand it?
Ms. Nelson. I believe so. Karen and I are meeting on Friday
to go over this, so I am sure I will have a fuller
understanding on Friday.
Mr. Putnam. Well, bring your quadrant paper. If you all
understand it, I am happy. I mean, I think that is great. I
just get a little bit nervous about all the different ways that
we grade things. A legitimate complaint about things is that we
are always changing the rules of the game. So as long as the
folks having to do this understand the rules of the game and
what they are being held accountable for, I think that is
wonderful. But if she thinks she is a three and GAO thinks she
is a one, I don't know which quadrant that puts her in, maybe
she is a two, but it does get a little confusing, at least for
the slow learner in the crowd who is sitting in this chair.
Ms. Nelson. Can I clarify?
Mr. Putnam. Please.
Ms. Nelson. I do want to say, and I think hopefully it came
across before, I support the measures that GAO has in place.
And, in fact, in conversations with our own architecture
committee and our chief architects, I said we need to accept
these. This isn't about disagreeing with these, because these
are accurate, these are right. All I was trying to do is point
out, though, that the numbers on the surface can be deceiving,
because you can get up to 20 here. There are about 32 things
you get ranked on, and if you miss one of those, you could be
stage 4 or stage 1, depending on what you miss. So that is why
I am just suggesting delve down one layer to see which one an
agency is missing and how significant is that.
It is also important that the GAO model really measures
maturity. And that is a little bit different than what OMB is
measuring. So while they are different, that is OK, as long as
the people who are using them understand the difference. And
those of us who are using them, I think we do understand the
difference. As I said, we just did our own self-assessment
using the OMB model, and I think we are close to a level 3. You
don't want to confuse those because they are measuring
different things.
Ms. Evans. Let me try one more time. But when you map the
two of those together, because it is the question that you are
asking. OK, you get an assessment from GAO and it is saying,
for example, let us take EPA, and it says it is a one. Then we
have a tool that says, oh, they are a three. So the natural
question is, well, what the heck is that and why are you
measuring two separate things. Well, we are trying to then give
you a view into, OK, they may have the basic tenets, you know,
they may be practicing things very well, but they don't have
the core of what they need to have a sustaining practice beyond
the current people that are there. So that is why we tried to
put it in a framework that an agency could look at it.
So if you took a one and a three, based on these two, they
would show in the quadrant that is growth, which means that
they have the potential to continue to grow in EA competencies,
which would definitely show that there is a difference there
and that communication needs to go forward; that it is
definitely not a best of breed there.
Mr. Putnam. Room for growth. Seems like my junior high
report card. Room for growth.
I apologize if I have dragged this into the weeds.
Mr. Hite, do you have any comments that you would like to
leave us with before we move to panel two? You started all
this.
Mr. Hite. Yes, sir, if I could offer a couple of comments
on what we have been talking about so we can get further into
the weeds, one of which is that I would be willing to accept on
behalf, for you, what Karen asked to share with you, because I
would be very much interested in seeing those results.
But let me also say that when we did this framework, we
didn't believe that it is going to be the end-all and be-all,
the one measure that is going to tell you everything you want
to know about progress in enterprise architecture. One of our
motives was that it is not being measured now at all, so let us
get a measurement tool out there. But we also recognize that it
measures a particular thing: it measures the maturity of the
management process. It is a process framework. It does not
measure maturity of content of the architecture, for example.
That is a whole different set of criteria. So we believe that
there needs to be multiple measures.
Now, I haven't looked at the specific one that Ms. Evans is
talking about, so I can't comment on it particularly, but I can
say that I support the idea of multiple measures so that you
get a clearer picture of where an agency is in this very
important area.
Mr. Putnam. How many people work in GAO's IT division?
Mr. Hite. Rough number is 160 to 165.
Mr. Putnam. Isn't it fun having 165 people checking out
everything you do, Ms. Evans?
Ms. Evans. Yes, it is.
Mr. Hite. Well, I would like to also add that I have about
six looking at enterprise architecture across the entire
Federal Government.
Mr. Putnam. Well, we haven't really cracked any heads or
anything over what is on this chart, and I think now that we
are digging in, there are good reasons for doing that. But I
think that you can generally say, looking at the trend, for
whatever falls are in your scoring mechanism or in the grading
content, the trend isn't real high.
Mr. Hite. Absolutely.
Mr. Putnam. I mean, you have 76 in stage 1, nobody in stage
4, and 1 in stage 5.
Mr. Hite. Well, this one over here shows you the actual
trend. This shows you if things have gotten better since they
were in 2001. And that is comparing against the same version of
the framework.
Mr. Putnam. I think that is the overarching lesson here,
without digging down into exactly what the content was. The
bottom line is we have a long way to go.
Mr. Matthews.
Mr. Matthews. Mr. Chairman, one thing that I wanted to
mention on the OMB version, there are certain criteria in each
one of those stages, and while an agency may be working at
satisfying criteria in stage 2 and 3, and they don't have, as
Ms. Nelson pointed out, a signed document from the
Administrator of the Secretary's office, it would reflect them
as being in stage 1 until such time as they had that document,
even though they had satisfied everything in two, three, four,
and five. Perhaps when we report, an acknowledgment that
certain criteria are being met in other categories would be a
better indication of an agency's growth along that framework
path. Certainly agencies need to have senior management
support, but the true measure of the work that is going on is
how many of those criteria are being met from year to year.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Nelson is going to go camp out in front of
the administrator's door and hold him down until he signs her
paper.
Ms. Nelson.
Ms. Nelson. I have the pleasure of having an administrator,
Mike Leavitt, who gets it, who understands enterprise
architecture. In our very first meeting he raised and used
those words, so we will get it done. But I concur with Mr.
Matthews, because an interesting chart for you to look at maybe
is to see if you take the 32 items or characteristics we are
being measured on for maturity, how many agencies answered yes
to those characteristics in stage 4, stage 5, stage 3, stage 2?
Because you are going to see a lot way out there in four and
five, and the question becomes some people believe you can't
get to four unless you do every single thing in three. I
disagree with that. I think in order to really truly sustain it
for a long period of time that may be necessary, but I think
you can gradually move into higher levels of stages, because it
is not a perfect world. And it might be interesting, as Mr.
Matthews said, to look out and see how many people do have
yeses in threes and fours and five. It just gives you a
slightly different picture. We still need to do everything GAO
said. I agree wholeheartedly we have to do it. But it is a
slightly different picture or perspective on the same
situation.
Mr. Hite. I would agree that is a relevant thing to look at
and, in fact, we looked at that. So we looked at the
performance of core elements between 2001 and 2003, regardless
of what stage they were in, and basically we found that--I
can't remember the exact numbers, but this is the rough
figures. I think it was something like 57 percent of them were
being performed or 47 percent were being performed in 2001 and
53 percent of them were being performed in 2003. So if you even
look at core elements, regardless of stage, there wasn't much
change between 2001 and 2003.
Mr. Putnam. Fifty-three percent is an F in most places.
Ms. Evans, do you have any final thoughts?
Ms. Evans. Well, first and foremost, I would like to thank
you for having the hearing today on the Federal Enterprise
Architecture, as well as giving the agencies the opportunity to
talk about their enterprise architectures. As you can see, this
is going to be a continuous challenge just based on the dialog
that we were having today, and how we are using it to continue
and manage overall. But I think the big key is to really
realize that this isn't really just an IT tool, and that the
CIOs, yes, are chartered to do it and we have mapped it to do
things with the IT investments, but this really is a management
tool, and it is a strategic management tool. And I have been
able to answer questions very quickly and very rapidly for my
management by saying, yes, I know what agencies are in this
area providing this type of service and, oh, by the way, I do
know how many dollars are being invested in IT this way. We may
not necessarily talk about the models, and you can see when you
start getting down to a certain level here we have to start
talking the same language, and technical people go off in one
direction and management people go in another, but the key here
is that this tool and a hearing like this raises it to a level
where we then can talk about it and start going down that path.
So I would like to commend you and thank you for having this
hearing today for us.
Mr. Putnam. Well, thank you, and you all keep working on
it. We have a long way to go, but it is very important, and we
appreciate the work that you are doing on it.
The committee will stand in recess for a couple of moments
while we arrange for the second panel.
[Recess.]
Mr. Putnam. The subcommittee will reconvene.
I would like to welcome our second panel of witnesses and
ask that you please rise and raise your right hand, along with
any others who may be accompanying you for the purposes of
providing information to the subcommittee.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Putnam. Note for the record that all the witnesses
responded in the affirmative, and we will move immediately to
their testimony.
Our first witness for the second panel is Dr. Dave McClure.
Dr. McClure is the vice president for E-Government with the
Council for Excellence in Government. In that position, Dr.
McClure serves as the strategic leader of the Council's E-
Government Information Technology programs, developing
strategies with public and private sector leaders to use
information and communication technology to improve the
performance of government and engage citizens. Dr. McClure is
also involved in many of the Council's intergovernmental
partnerships and helps runs the E-Government Fellows Program.
Prior to joining the Council in 2002, Dr. McClure was the
Director of Information Technology Management Issues at GAO. As
a member of the SES at GAO, he conducted governmentwide
evaluations of IT investment and performance measurement
issues, monitoring agency implementation of IT management
improvement efforts, evaluating the progress being made with E-
Government initiatives, and reviewing agencies' IT work force
planning strategies.
In 1998 and 2001 and in 2004 he was named one of Federal
Computer Week's top 100 IT executives in the Federal
Government.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized for 5
minutes.
STATEMENTS OF DAVID MCCLURE, VICE PRESIDENT FOR E-GOVERNMENT,
COUNCIL FOR EXCELLENCE IN GOVERNMENT; VENKATAPATHI PUVVADA,
UNISYS CHAIR, ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE SHARED INTEREST GROUP,
INDUSTRY ADVISORY COUNCIL; NORMAN E. LORENTZ, SENIOR VICE
PRESIDENT, DIGITALNET; AND RAYMOND B. WELLS, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY
OFFICER, IBM FEDERAL, VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGIC TRANSFORMATIONS
FOR IBM SOFTWARE GROUP, APPLICATION INTEGRATION & MIDDLEWARE
DIVISION [AIM], IBM CORP.
Mr. McClure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to
be here. As you noted, my organization, the Council for
Excellence in Government, has been dedicated for more than 20
years to helping achieve high-performance government and
increasing public participation and confidence in government.
I think it is very important that we not lose the citizen
perspective in the discussions that we have today. Our national
polls and some of the homeland security town halls that we have
had around the country recently show that the public wants a
government that is accountable, simple, convenient to interact
with, and accessible through the means of their choice.
The FEA provides some important tools for defining and
providing this streamlined, simplified citizen-centric
government to the American public. OMB has provided a crisp
analysis of the Federal Government as it is and has offered a
strong vision of where it can be. The common program, business
and service delivery patterns of government are presented with
clarity and help reveal the complex overlapping and often
duplicative nature of its interactions with citizens and
businesses.
The FEA approach follows leading-edge commercial practice.
Many Fortune 500 companies are using similar approaches to
better align their technology with business process needs. They
have recognized that IT is more than just building and running
systems. Enterprise architecture approaches ``tune-up''
organizations, focusing on management of information as a core
asset, and emphasizing component reuse rather than the constant
``scrap and build'' that we have had in the past.
The FEA is not defining a single architecture for the
entire Federal Government. Rather, it assembles the assets and
the tools that can provide cross-agency analyses,
identification of performance gaps, and opportunities for
better alignment of resources. It is not static; it will change
and it will evolve as technologies change.
We must stay this course with the FEA. The payoff for the
Government simply can be huge. Not only can this help achieve
cost savings and performance improvements, but it also can grow
the public's confidence, trust, and satisfaction with
Government itself.
Let me touch on three important challenges that lie ahead.
First, we have to proceed with disciplined maturity and
alignment. We have to make some sense of the many moving pieces
of Government programs, policies, and services, and the
enterprise architecture approach is a valid tool for doing
that. But we have to get agencies up to par. GAO's audit work,
using its widely endorsed EA Assessment Framework, reveals this
very mixed progress in the pace, speed, and direction of the EA
work taking place in the Federal Government.
The good news is that there are a lot of bright spots.
GAO's aggregate or top line numbers, as you have seen on these
charts, while maybe disappointing, tell only a partial picture.
Many agencies are actually doing things at higher maturity
levels but cannot be tagged that way because they are not
performing completely at lower levels. Several of these
agencies, by the way, Mr. Chairman, are on the verge of getting
fives on GAO's scale.
But putting agency-centric architectures in place really
stops short of the larger governmentwide transformation that EA
can help create. We need both vertical alignment of goals,
processes, and technology within agencies, and, where possible,
horizontal alignment across common governmentwide functions and
processes. There is a lot of work to be done in both of those
areas.
My second point is about the ``so-what.'' It makes sense
that those that determine budgets should see measurable impact
from the time, cost, and energies that we are putting into
enterprise architecture approaches. They are many that come to
mind: streamlined and simplified processes, greater systems
interoperability that facilitate the exchange of information,
faster application delivery, and enterprise licensing
opportunities, just to mention a few.
These are important. They have real dollars attached to
them. When combined with measuring and scoring the EA
capability maturity, the measures provide a fact-based
assessment of capacity, capability, and results. These measures
are necessary, but by themselves I don't think are sufficient.
The real high value return from enterprise architecture are
those that capture the impact on direct mission-related
performance, whether that be saving lives, protecting the
environment, inspecting the food supply, or identifying and
deterring terrorist threats. Better EA should translate into
time, cost, and quality improvements in government, and we
cannot lose this line of sight.
A final key challenge is leadership. Enterprise
architectures require commitment and participation from top
leadership, beginning with the heads of agencies and program
executives all the way through the CIO, CFO, and procurement
officer communities. It cannot be the sole purview of CIOs and
CTOs.
In this vein, I think it is imperative that OMB's vacancy
in its chief architect position be filled carefully and very
expeditiously. This person is the most visible spokesperson for
architecture in the Federal Government, and directs the FEA
work, and also supports program assessments and business case
reviews in the OMB budget cycle. We need a credible,
experienced individual with strong outreach, collaboration and
communication skills. That person has to translate a lot of the
jargon of EA into something that is understandable to non-
technology managers and executives, and it is a very, very
important job.
So we need continued focused leadership from OMB. We also,
Mr. Chairman, need to extend this dialog on the Hill beyond
this committee and into the Budget, Appropriations, and
Authorizing Committees of the Congress. Enterprise
architectures offer great hope both as engines of change and
instruments of sorely needed management controls over orderly
government transformation. Transparency, accountability, and
results that translate into better Government for the American
public should be front and center in all of these efforts.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. McClure follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Dr. McClure.
Our next witness is Mr. Venkatapathi Puvvada. Mr. Puvvada
serves as Chair of the Industry Advisory Council, Enterprise
Architecture Shared Interest Group, and works closely with the
CIO Council, Office of Management and Budget, and other
Government agencies in that capacity. Mr. Puvvada co-founded
the EA SIG in 2002 to address the need for industry and
government partnerships to help bring industry best practices
and expertise together in a common forum. The IAC EA SIG is
comprised of over 200 practicing architects and executives from
over 100 companies.
That is harder to say than your name.
Mr. Puvvada was recognized with the prestigious Federal 100
Award in 2003 for his contributions and impact on the direction
of IT in government. For more than 18 years, Mr. Puvvada has
worked in information systems, 16 years of that with Unisys. In
addition to serving as the chair of the EA SIG, Mr. Puvvada is
the chief technology officer of Unisys Global Public Sector, as
well as the vice president and partner for Unisys Worldwide
Enterprise Architecture Solutions Services Practice. The Unisys
EA Solutions Practice consists of world-class enterprise
solution architects that develop and implement architectures
for clients such as the TSA, the GSA, the DOD, the VA, the FDA,
and several State governments.
Welcome to the subcommittee.
Mr. Puvvada. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will try to
simplify these acronyms next time around.
Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I am really
honored to be here representing Industry Advisory Council
[IAC], and I would like to acknowledge some of my colleagues
that are here for their hard work and their passion to improve
architectures in the government in the truly excellent way that
they represent 400 member companies of IAC.
In terms of our work, before I get into the details of the
testimony, our recommendations and best practices have been
successfully published in the form of five white papers, and
they have been widely recognized for their innovative insight,
and the details are included in my written testimony.
In our view, enterprise architecture is the only practical
way on a consistent basis for comparison of investment decision
by agency executive leadership. Private sector experience
suggests that the proper development and usage of EA can lead
to a major transformation of an organization, its processes,
and its performance.
As for commenting on the progress of the FEA initiative,
the development of the interlinked reference model allows the
Government to have an enterprise view of its business for the
first time. As a result of the progress on FEA, we acknowledge
significant improvements in the way the agencies conduct the
quality and the assessment of their budgets and the preparation
of the budget process. Various departments and agencies are
also making good progress in allowing their enterprise
architectures in the context of the Federal Government and FEA.
EA products are effectively used by several CIOs as
decisionmaking framework in the capital planning portfolio
management and general IT governance. Therefore we rate very
high marks for the blueprint for improved IT investment
management aspect of the hearing, Mr. Chairman.
However, major hurdles exist for cross-agency collaboration
and information sharing aspects. Some of these challenges are
as follows. First one is lack of sufficient positive incentives
for agencies to collaborate and have common business process
integration and secure information sharing. The second one is
lack of sufficient funding and key resources, especially chief
architect of the OMB, as Mr. McClure referred to, and the
skills in the context of business architecture skills to lead
and implement this transformation at the department level, as
well as the Federal level. Also, the Government needs to move
the FEA and EA as a high priority transformation mechanism for
the owners business and mission program so that it doesn't turn
out to be a technical exercise for architects and the CIOs.
Going forward with the FEA and the agency EA, we believe
timely completion and implementation of the data and
information reference model is very important. The ability of
the Federal Government agencies to understand and map to each
other's data through the use of a common model is a major
factor in achieving the cross-agency collaboration, information
sharing and data interoperability, along with some quick
success pilots. Development and implementation of the big 10
enterprise security and privacy architecture, as referred to
earlier by Mr. Hite, that is integrated into all layers of EA
is very critical as well.
Mr. Chairman, industry really appreciates your commitment,
your committee's commitment in getting involved as a major
stakeholder in this initiative. We believe that the
articulation of legislative priorities and activities in the
context of FEA are really pertinent in advancing the maturity
of business-driven IT solutions that citizens are expecting.
To summarize our view, IAC is very supportive of enterprise
architecture initiatives as a major government priority and
agrees with its general direction and recommends staying the
course. There are a lot of challenges facing these initiatives,
but they can be overcome with strong executive leadership,
clear governance, and positive incentives for agencies to
collaborate. We applaud the Government for reaching out to IAC
and industry and leverage our expertise, and we are committed
to continuing this support in future.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today,
and I would be very happy to answer your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Puvvada follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Our next witness is Norman Lorentz. Mr. Lorentz joined
DigitalNet as senior vice president in September 2003. Prior to
that, Mr. Lorentz served as the first Chief Technology Officer
for the Federal Government at the Office of Management and
Budget, where he was also the Acting Administrator for E-
Government and Information Technology. While at OMB, Mr.
Lorentz spearheaded the White House mission to overhaul the
Federal Government information technology infrastructure and
its processes. In driving this initiative, he directed the
development of the Federal Enterprise Architecture. In
addition, during his tenure with OMB, Mr. Lorentz was a member
of the Chief Information Officer Council's Executive Committee
and the recipient of numerous government and industry awards
for his leadership and innovation.
You are a frequent guest of this subcommittee. We are
delighted to have you back, and you are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Lorentz. It is nice to be invited back, and also
members of the subcommittee. I am here today to talk about the
progress that has been made on the implementation and
operationalization of the FEA in OMB and the Federal agencies.
In my role as CTO of the Federal Government and OMB, I
directed the development of the FEA. I believed then that the
FEA provided a tremendous amount of promise in becoming the
structure for governance for the effective development and
management of information technology and other asset classes in
the Federal Government, and I continue to advocate that today.
I would like to talk a bit about the current situation,
what the value of the FEA is to the agency and citizens, the
impact on the business plan process, the continuing challenges,
and then, finally, success factors.
The FEA models are just about finished. The data reference
model and the security profile that has already been discussed
are about to be completed, and this framework will provide
significant progress. The FEA really consists of two
components: the framework outline in the FEA models, as well as
the EAs that are in the agencies themselves. Without the
connection between the FEA and the EAs, there is not a solid
construct within which to make investment decisions.
In the past couple of years, and we have already discussed
in quite detail, the GAO and OMB have provided assessment
models. What I would say about assessment models is that they
are necessary, but they are not sufficient. What is sufficient
is the measurement of citizen and mission-centered results.
These assessment models are used to describe a weigh station,
not the end result. And, finally, OMB is using the FEA to
identify high priority Lines of Business and consolidation in
the context of those Lines of Business.
The value to the citizen is that the FEA provides
visibility into the agencies' business and solidifies future
business plans. It helps reduce the cost of current business
processes by eliminating redundancies and improving the
efficiency of IT investment. The outcome for the citizen is
high-quality cost-efficient government services.
From an investment standpoint, the FEA supports the
establishment of a portfolio approach to prioritize IT
investments. Without the FEA, the Federal Government would not
be able to prioritize in a collaborative manner in these
investments addressing the highest priority for the citizen.
From a governance standpoint, the FEA provides a holistic point
of view; it gives both a business perspective in terms of the
performance and business reference model, which is the ``what''
for the improvement, and then it also provides the more
technically oriented reference models, which describe the
``how.'' And from a technology standpoint, FEA provides a
coordinated approach to reporting between OMB and the Chief
Information Officer's Council is making significant progress in
maturing the reference models.
The impact of the FEA on the business case process in OMB.
Although the agencies have been making progress in the business
cases, last year, the first year, the OMB issued guidance in A-
11 that included specifics on the FEA. Doing so was a
significant step. The agencies should provide similar guidance
for consolidation opportunities in the context of the EAs.
The continuing challenges. Some agencies are struggling to
implement the FEA. As OMB provides additional support in the
reference model areas, this should be accelerated; in building
and maturing EAs and gaining participation and ownership of the
business areas. This is not a technology problem, this has been
reinforced many times. This is a business problem, so it
requires business leadership in the agencies; deputy
secretaries, chief financial officers, as well as the chief
information officer. There is limited up-front visibility in
the detail of other agencies' EAs, and so the FEA provides the
construct up front to be able to do those consolidation
analyses. The target EAs for the agencies are limited in their
forecast and scope. In other words, they cannot see very far
into the horizon. And some agencies have separated EA and
capital planning, and that is not sufficient.
Critical success factors. As an integrated governance
model, a marriage between the business owner, the chief
financial officer, and the chief information officer in making
the business decisions.
To reinforce what my partners here have already said in
terms of the chief architect position, it is necessary that we
provide someone to that position who has both business and
technology expertise. And, also, that OMB architect position is
necessary, but not sufficient. There is further analysis
resources that are required at OMB level in order to be able to
do the cross-organizational analysis for transformation.
In conclusion, I have recognized significant progress, and
we have heard that said here. There has been much that has been
accomplished, but there is still work to be done. And, finally,
in a futuristic scenario, right now the Federal Enterprise
Architecture is being viewed to look at the IT asset class. But
this business-oriented Federal Enterprise Architecture can also
be used for the other asset classes: human capital and fixed
assets.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here today, and I would
look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lorentz follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Our final witness on this panel is Dr. Raymond Wells. Dr.
Wells is the chief technology officer for IBM Federal and vice
president, Strategic Transformations for the IBM Software
Group's Application Integration & Middleware Division. In
addition, he is on assignment to one of the U.S. Government's
classified agencies. Prior to accepting the CTO Federal
position in October 2002, he was Director of Strategy for 4
years. He has 35 years experience in information technology and
has been employed with IBM since 1993. Dr. Wells has served in
various administrations of the State of Alabama and as the
Chief Financial Officer for the State of Alabama. He began the
process of transforming the State's financial management
systems. Later, as Chief Technology Officer, he completed the
transformation, known as the Financial Resources Management
System, the most integrated financial management system in the
public sector at the time.
Welcome to the subcommittee, and you are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Wells. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. IBM appreciates the
committee's invitation to speak today about the Federal
Enterprise Architecture. Our message to the committee today is
quite simple: the focus provided by the Federal Enterprise
Architecture initiative of the Office of Management and Budget
is sound policy. FEA is about leveraging technology to focus on
strategic priorities. Enormous benefits will be returned to the
Government and its citizens.
Enterprise architecture is a framework or a set of
interlocking frameworks which has as its core the
organization's mission and strategy. It is about the strategic
management of technology resources which provides the
substantiation and manifestation of efficient and effective
business processes. This is paramount. Understanding the key
business processes is a prerequisite for prioritizing and
guiding information technology investments.
Perhaps no organization understands this better than IBM.
Our own transformation has an obvious relevance to the business
modernization efforts now in progress within the Federal
Government. IBM underwent a major financial, competitive, and
cultural transformation beginning in 1995. IBM refocused itself
on the customer in the marketplace as the measure of success
and recreated the company as an entity that could translate
technology into business value.
The Federal Government finds itself in much the same
situation as IBM 10 years ago, a vast, siloed organization with
disparate information technology systems, a multitude of data
bases and applications that didn't work with each other, and
with complex and often competing business processes that
hindered organizational efficiency.
IBM's own transformation required a fundamental
reexamination of everything that we were doing. We consolidated
and focused our business processes, improved our time-to-market
by 75 percent, reduced business applications we used to run the
business from 16,000 to 5,200, consolidated 155 data centers
into 12, reduced 31 private networks into 1, went from 128
different CIO positions to 1; we have installed multiples of
the IT capacity that we had in 1993 at roughly one third the
cost. In short, we learned to manage technology strategically
and discovered it was less expensive and vastly improved
productivity.
So enterprise architecture is about common processes and
supporting systems based upon open standards which foster
interoperability. Enterprise architecture also has the
additional advantage of helping to create a unified culture
within the agency. IBM's experience dictates one key facet for
success: the key to enterprise architecture is sustained
executive commitment and the strategic allocation of resources
to key operational initiatives.
At the leadership and framework level, the Federal
Government is approaching FEA correctly; there is a program
office in place to manage the process, a management system is
available which provides agencies the tools to assess
enterprise architecture requirements and develop and implement
their own enterprise architectures. Empirical knowledge and
effective solutions are being captured so that the agencies can
reuse and extend lessons learned, avoiding duplication and
leveraging available resources.
As in any major transformation effort, there are areas for
improvement. The examination of OMB's scorecard, as has been
repeated here, shows some agencies moving more rapidly than
others. In some instances this can be explained by the sheer
complexity of the operational requirements and technologies
that need to be mapped. What is needed is more agency
leadership on enterprise architecture implementation and more
discipline with respect to strategic IT investments. We still
see far too much in the way of tactical investment in
technology.
Consider the Department of Defense, with over $1 trillion
in assets and an annual budget of roughly $400 billion and 3
million military and civilian employees, global missions,
facilities and suppliers. DOD is obviously the world's largest
and most complex enterprise. DOD's enterprise architecture is
the largest, most complex, and most pervasive enterprise
architecture developed to date, either in the public or private
sector. Historically, the Department's services and agencies
have used individual procedures with multiple systems to
support those procedures. This limits DOD's ability to provide
timely, accurate, and reliable business and financial
management information, and creates a higher than necessary
cost for performing the business of defense.
IBM, along with others, has delivered to the DOD the first
stages of an enterprise architecture that will help transform
and modernize key business operations. Developing this
framework has been and remains a massive undertaking, involving
over 2,000 information systems and many thousands of business
processes. Hundreds of existing policies will change, dozens of
systems will be modified, more than 1,000 existing systems will
be sunsetted, and more than 100 new systems will be
implemented.
A key component of any agency transformation involves
cultural change. You can't do business the same way. Moving to
a common agency enterprise architecture and the infrastructure
it fosters will contribute to building agency culture. However,
sustained commitment of top management officials is required
for success.
Enterprise architecture is an enabler of the transformation
of government. Enterprise architecture provides the basis for
evolution from tactical to the strategic management of
technology assets and significant transformation and
operational processes.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to discuss our
views and experience with you. I look forward to answering any
questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wells follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much, Dr. Wells.
We will begin with some questions for the entire panel,
beginning with Dr. McClure. What is the Federal Government's
shining achievement in this area? What is the key area where we
can hang our hat and say we have actually made some real
progress here?
Mr. McClure. Mr. Chairman, I think just looking back 5
years or more and seeing where we are today, despite the fact
that those bars on those charts look dismal, we are, believe
me, much further ahead than where we were previously. There is
agreement on frameworks, there are a lot of available tools, we
have a common assessment process that GAO uses that the
industry and the agencies accept to a large degree, and we are
seeing progress. It is, I think, a tough area, as Dr. Wells
just said. The complexity of what we are doing in the public
sector environment, particularly at the large department level,
can be a little overwhelming at times. I think there is good
news here as well in that progress is being made and that we do
have some agencies that have done some absolutely fabulous jobs
putting architectures together.
The other shining light is the FEA. I think it represents a
world-class view of trying to look at how government functions.
And for the first time we have a clear picture of the real
possibilities of operating government in a different way, and I
think that is a very significant achievement.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Puvvada.
Mr. Puvvada. I concur, Mr. Chairman. I think one of the
biggest improvements that we have seen is that agencies are now
beginning to think about enterprise architecture at the start
of a system development process or the start of an investment
management process. So from that perspective, that is a
significant change in terms of behaviors, in terms of
incentives there. There are aligning IT strategic plans,
investment review boards, and business case and budget
submissions. We have seen good leadership from OMB. We are
obviously concerned about lack of resources, as we talked about
earlier, but this has been a priority and this is going to take
time to get to see most agencies show up in stage 5 category,
but we are really positive about the progress that has been
made, and a lot of agencies are actually looking at the first
thing that they do this transformation through architecture.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Lorentz, do you wish to add anything?
Mr. Lorentz. I think the one thing that sticks with me, I
didn't keep track of how many times in the course of the
testimony to this point that we have referred to this problem
as a business problem, not a technology problem. I have to tell
you 3 to 5 years ago we probably would not have had that
conversation. That is being shown in significant behaviors by
business leaders, deputy secretaries. Just look at the five
initiative, the President's initiatives, all business oriented,
and E-Government enables the other four. So it is really the
understanding that we are trying to solve a business problem
here.
I sometimes think back to the CTO experience. It should
have been chief transformation officer instead of chief
technology officer, because I would say 99 percent of the time
that I spent in that position was spent on non-technology
issues. It was about business mission roles and outcomes. So I
think the real major progress, certainly the FEA I happen to
believe is a great ``how,'' but the real issue is mission
citizen-centered real business problems.
Mr. Putnam. War Eagle.
Mr. Wells. War Eagle.
I agree completely with Norm's assessment. The change in
focus is the correct change, that is, that we are focusing not
on IT as a cost center; how much are you spending on X. It
should be how much are you spending on X to improve a certain
process. So this change in focus I think is the primary success
of FEA and the enterprise architecture initiative in the
agencies. This is a management problem, it is not an IT
problem. It is a management problem, and focusing the assets
strategically to be addressed to the mission and processes of
the agency itself.
Mr. Putnam. Well, you have used a number of examples from
your IBM experience and you talked a little bit in your opening
testimony about the scale of a department like Defense. What
lessons can we draw from the private sector that do apply to
something as mammoth as the Federal Government?
Mr. Wells. The Federal Government has, as most businesses,
historically managed information technology either tactically
or sub-tactically. By changing to a focus of managing It as a
strategic asset to enable the business transformation, we have
discovered that it costs a heck of a lot less. I know agencies
in town that actually have too much money. And when you have
too much money, you can waste it.
IBM ran out of money in 1993, and we had to fundamentally
reassess our business. And so when we started managing
technology, we took the toys away from everybody and started
managing those toys as strategic assets. And for a technology
company to take toys away from its employees represented a
massive cultural change that had to be managed from the top.
But when we did it, we found out we could consume a lot more
resource, a lot more, multiples of what we used to consume,
with fundamentally much less investment.
Today, the IBM Corp. has no paper processes. I could not
even remember the last time I touched a piece of IBM business
paper. We manage our business electronically. We have
substantially reduced the cost of our support staff, we have
substantially increased our own productivity, and we are
spending a heck of a lot less. It is a fundamental change in
looking at technology as a strategic asset to be managed by
senior management, not by the IT staff.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Lorentz, you are back in the private
sector. Would you like to comment on the lessons we can pick up
from the private sector that apply to something as large as the
Federal Government?
Mr. Lorentz. Well, it is interesting. Recently I have had
the opportunity to talk to some private sector CEOs, and a lot
of them are taking significant interest in the technology
investment, and so that the CEOs are actually saying I need to
understand the technology injection because technology now is
improving their product line and business processes. Any
conversation in the boardroom with the CEO includes whatever
the chief technology is, CIO, CTO, as well as the chief
financial officer. So the fact that we are putting this
construct in place in the Federal Government will, I think as a
leading indicator, the leadership piece of this is a leading
indicator to the progress that we can make.
And I certainly support what Dr. Wells was saying. What has
to show up now is consequences. Transformation does not occur
without consequences. There needs to be more significant
analysis done of the cross-agency, cross-organizational
opportunities for consolidation, and then the agencies and the
Federal Government need to go on a collaboration diet. And that
means that they get the money to do the collaborative
initiatives and they do not get the money to do the one-offs.
And it is not a bottoms-up experience, it is a top-down
experience.
Mr. Putnam. When you say consequences, are funding issues
the best consequence?
Mr. Lorentz. Absolutely.
Mr. Putnam. The only consequence?
Mr. Lorentz. Yes, certainly. If you take away the resources
for--you know, when I was in OMB, I think at the time we did
the grants analysis, we had 17 grants engines. OK? You can
argue whether we need one. You can certainly believe we don't
need 17. And so on the face of it, it doesn't hold water. And,
by the way, that means we are spending an extraordinary amount
of money doing the analysis down in the vertical and not as
much money doing the EA FEA cross-organizational analysis. With
that improved analysis and data and the engagement of the
leadership, which would be the PMC, the deputy secretaries in
those issues, and driving those budget conclusions, then the
transformation will occur.
Karen was describing earlier the areas, financial
management, human resources and so forth, where they are doing
that kind of analysis right now. That is where I think we have
the near-term opportunity to exhibit that leadership.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Puvvada would you like to comment on that
line of questioning, the lessons learned and the consequences?
Mr. Puvvada. Digging a little bit deeper into lessons
learned, where we find agencies succeed is where they really
focus on target architectures. We have a hard time, a lot of
times, our folks, when they are working with agencies,
convincing agencies not to get too much into documenting
technically, as is architecture. So in terms of where the
Government needs to be is focused on the target architecture in
the context of how do you improve the business and citizen
services, as you articulated at the beginning of this hearing.
And then taking that target architecture, because it tends to
be conceptual because you are, again, not there in terms of
implementation, take that transition plan and talk about how
that would be integrated into standard business processes. It
is not a separate plan, it needs to be institutionalized. I
think that is when we are going to really see some results.
One of the things that is not quite evident is that the
reason why we are not seeing results is that it is a process
where we all understand now that we need to build
architectures, we need to think architectures. Now, we are just
beginning to see the results. I think as we see more and more
of these successes, then we understand a little bit more about
how to optimize the cycle of going forward in making some
investment decisions as well as implementations. So it is a lot
of work to be done, like we talked about before, but I think
positive incentives and focusing on the right area, not
necessarily documentation for technical purposes, I think will
get us there.
Mr. Putnam. Dr. McClure.
Mr. McClure. I can echo a lot of just what has been said. I
think it all begins at the top. If you don't have the executive
commitment, or even interest in this, it is not going to be
successful. That is certainly learned from a lesson learned.
I think, too, disciplined processes have to be in place.
Successful organizations, public and private, are ones that
find the ways to do things that bring value to what they are in
business for, and they repeat them and they institutionalize
them; and that is very important as we move forward. The
business and performance focus of architecture is what this is
all about, and I agree totally with Norm that is the value that
we are getting out of this right now.
And two other lessons learned are governance and tools.
Don't try to do this unless you have a governance process,
because we have spent decades of writing architectures on paper
but never putting them in place or enforcing them. And the
other is tools. We have some good tools that are available to
do enterprise architecture work, but we have to have people
that know how to use them. So getting the right skills in
place, whether it is inside Government or through the
assistance of contractors, is really key for success.
Mr. Putnam. The contractors point is an interesting one.
What challenges or successes or lessons learned from our
contractors' experience can we apply to this enterprise
architecture improvement process? They certainly have a big
role to play in this. What do we learn from their experience?
Anyone.
Mr. Puvvada. One of the things that we have to do a better
job of is simplifying this whole enterprise architecture and
its concepts. Typically, we don't do a good job of explaining
what it is, to the point where business lines look at this
stuff and say that is technical. So we need to do a better job
of articulating in very simple terms, very clear terms, here is
how you can develop a road map for your business goals and
business performance.
Generally, from a contractor point of view, the biggest
challenge out there is to find skilled enterprise architects;
not just within the Government, even for us. It is an evolving
discipline, and it requires not only technical skills, business
skills, but the articulation of that, because you are
facilitating a business transformation on a regular basis. So
we are working hard. Member companies that I represent are
working very hard in getting better at these skills so that we
can support the Government.
Mr. Putnam. This whole notion of cultural change keeps
coming up. Everybody has mentioned it in some form or fashion.
How do we tackle that challenge? How do we really fundamentally
change the culture? And we will begin with Dr. Wells.
Mr. Wells. Senior management has to provide sustained
commitment. I have witnessed several attempts at transformation
in the last few years in this community, and it is easy to get
a senior manager to articulate the requirement for cultural
change. The words flow easy. But then it requires changing
behavior and enforcing the behavioral change. And this requires
somebody that is going to be around for a while, going to
enforce. Norm said there has to be consequences. There has to
be consequences for not changing behavior. Those consequences
can come from within the agency or they can be encouraged by
the Congress. But there certainly has to be sustained executive
commitment to enforcing behavioral change; otherwise, it will
never happen. It cannot bubble up from the bottom.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Lorentz.
Mr. Lorentz. Just to reinforce that, transformation does
not come from an internal source. In the private sector it
generally comes from a marketplace intervention: you either
change your organization or you become extinct, or you have a
leader that becomes unreasonable and says this is the way I am
going to run the enterprise. So we have to figure out what that
looks like in the Federal Government.
Certainly the President's management agenda, good
fundamental blocking and tackling management practices, is an
excellent start. We have some good codification in law, so
regardless of which of us comes and goes, there is actually
those permanent positions in place. We need to put people in
career positions that can, for instance, the architect position
and also in the agencies that can continue to maintain the
processes while the necessary leadership changes are occurring.
But it really does come down to what Ray was saying. You
have to have leadership ownership, business ownership, and
there has to be consequences to actions. The nearest term thing
to that in the Federal Government is certainly the budget, but
also in the private sector there are other methods that can be
used.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Puvvada.
Mr. Puvvada. If you go back to the enormity of why we need
the culture change, Government and lots of private
organizations, as a matter of fact, have been so much used to
thinking in the context of an organizational structure. So now
what we are talking about is going beyond the organizational
structure, so the order of magnitude of culture change that is
required is enormous. It is going to take different steps,
different stages similar to the maturity that has been talked
about here. Norm certainly addressed the ``who'' part of it;
you have to have some change agents, whether they are from
within the Government, from outside.
I think what will go a long way in impacting the culture
change is really some real success stories and the
eventualization of those success stories, and real results to
go with it. So we really need to see results come out of this
initiative and to be able to articulate that value in terms of
business and government performance and relate to citizens'
expectations. So it is not an easy thing to do. Like Norm said,
in the private sector your existence is at stake if you don't
change. In the Government, our security is at stake if we don't
change. So we have the similar challenges that the private
sector continuously goes through, but it is going to take a
long time for the culture change to occur.
Mr. Putnam. Dr. McClure.
Mr. McClure. I would agree. I think you need a combination
of strong levers. Maybe you need a baseball bat. Some people
just will not fall in line until there is some real pressure
brought to bear. But I think you have to counterbalance that.
You can't do that in the Government just with a forcing
function. You have to incentivize change. And I think PV is
right on target. We need to have some demonstrated results and
we need to go evangelize those results and show executives who
are skeptical that change can happen and this can make a big
difference. So I think best practices, examples, case studies
go a long way.
And then last I think it is just dialog. It is
conversation. It is education. It is awareness building. We
have to continue to have this dialog with more than just the
technical people in the room.
Mr. Putnam. Is there any example that you can think of
where an agency has done particularly well and the right people
have evangelized it and brought about a positive change in
behavior?
Mr. McClure. I think there are examples. That is part of
the issue, is we have examples in the Federal Government where
EA has been used, where investment controls have been used, and
there is just not a recognition of the value of actually
talking about it. Sometimes there is a fear of talking about it
because you don't know what will come back to bite you. So it
is just changing the culture and realizing success needs to be
advertized.
I think there are examples of cost savings and reduction in
duplicative systems and actually progress in making reuse of
software in many of our component agencies and departments.
There are bits and pieces; they are not fully in place
everywhere. So you might have a unit, an office, or an
organization within a department that has done some of this,
and that just doesn't see the light of day. It is not big
enough, the dollars are not big enough when you are talking
about billion dollar budgets.
Mr. Putnam. Unfortunately, we are going to have to wrap
this panel up, but I want to give everyone the opportunity to
have some closing remarks, so we will begin with Dr. Wells and
move down the panel and share anything that you had hoped to
have come out of this hearing that may not have or any thoughts
or question that you wish you had been asked, whatever the case
may be. Dr. Wells.
Mr. Wells. I often hear in the agencies a statement that if
we had the investment money, we would be glad to modernize our
infrastructure. IBM had to self-fund its transformation. It is
about using what you have more efficiently.
The second thing that I would conclude with is the whole
notion of chief architect. These skills are really rare, as has
been mentioned, but the job is really the chief business
architect. It is about architecting the business processes.
Until you have rearchitected those business processes, you
cannot effectively apply technology in a transformational
manner.
Mr. Lorentz. First of all, I thank you for having these
hearings and staying the course and showing the interest and
that kind of support for Karen Evans, who is there now and I
was there before. This is really hard work. There is no aspect
of the Government value chain that doesn't need to be changed.
In the Government today, pretty much everything operates
vertically. That is the natural state. And so the
transformation as to horizontal and why should we do that is
because of September 11, it is because the needs of the citizen
are now horizontal.
The one thing that I would respectfully encourage you to do
is to help with the appropriations process, because even when
we did manage to get funding for cross-organizational analysis
into bills and so forth, we lost that funding in the
appropriations process. Part of that is because perhaps we
weren't as adept as we could have been at telling our story.
But we would really solicit the help in making sure that the
appropriations occur horizontally as well as vertically,
because again, to reinforce, we are spending a lot of money on
EA in the silos. If you look at the amount that we are spending
on FEA and cross-silo analysis, it is not quite a rounding
error.
Thank you.
Mr. Puvvada. I echo Norm's sentiments and thank you very
much for highlighting this to be a priority issue. And I think
the whole methodology as well as the report, has significant
impact on this, and we hope that effort certainly continues.
If I net it down to what needs to be done going forward, if
you really look at a couple of technical things underlying that
actually is going to enable interagency information sharing and
collaboration, the whole data architecting issue needs to be a
very high priority. And one of the impediments to people
wanting to share across is security; do I have security, is my
citizens' privacy really taken care of in terms of meeting the
expectations there. So if you couple data architecting with the
baked in enterprise security architecture as a priority, we
will begin to see some progress in that area, and I strongly
recommend looking at that deeply and show your commitment as
well there.
Thank you.
Mr. Putnam. Dr. McClure.
Mr. McClure. I want to commend you, too, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you for having the hearing and focusing attention on this
topic, as complex and technical as it can get at times.
My bottom line is, I think, as I said at the beginning of
my oral statement, at the end of the day we have to keep our
sight focused on what this is doing to improve the quality of
government. We have to keep the citizen in mind and ensure that
we are creating a more simplified and very cost-effective and
efficient Government. That is what this all about, and we don't
want to lose sight of that.
Second, I think we have to focus on results. We have to
move beyond the assessments to focusing on the ``so what has
happened, what is different'' and get examples. The caveat I
put on that is that architecture is a long-term process. It
requires an up-front investment spike. That is why you see
these large dollar figures in terms of what agencies are
spending. The returns are slower in coming than if you were
building a simple application or a single purpose system. You
are rearchitecting and changing and moving lots of pieces of
organizations. But, nevertheless, I think we have to begin
asking when those results are going to occur. We need tangible,
measurable results in the areas that we have talked about
today, and we need to hold people accountable when they are
saying that those will be the actual results that the Congress
and the American people will see.
Mr. Putnam. Well, I want to thank all of you for your very
informative and insightful testimony. I appreciate your taking
the time out of your schedule to be with us today. And I want
to thank Mr. Clay for his participation in the hearing as well.
Clearly, the proper design, development, and implementation
of EAs across the Government has the potential to save millions
in taxpayer dollars by eliminating redundant spending. Further,
agencies' EA efforts are already facilitating the transition to
a more responsive and citizen-centric Government by improving
efficiency and facilitating cross-agency collaboration.
However, as we have seen, we have much work to complete before
we fully realize that goal. OMB's efforts in creating a common
framework, the FEA, for achieving governmentwide development
and implementation has already proven itself to be a valuable
IT investment planning tool, as evidenced by the identification
and creation of the Lines of Business initiative. While we are
experiencing growing pains in integrating the agencies'
individual EAs into the FEA, I believe the effort will lead to
significant cost savings when the work is further advanced.
In the event that there may be additional questions that we
did not have time for today, the record will remain open for 2
weeks for submitted questions and answered.
With that, we again appreciate your hard work, and the
meeting stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:55 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned,
to reconvene at the call of the Chair.]
[Additional information submitted for the hearing record
follows:]
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