United States Government Publishing Office publisher pbl distributor dst United States Government Accountability Office Accounting and Information Management Division author aut Government Organization text government publication eng GAOREPORTS Legislative Agency Publications gao legislative 2010-08-12 U.S. Government Printing Office 2000-08-01 monographic deposited born digital 24 p. GA 1.13:AIMD-00-212 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212 P0b002ee18039cab8 f:ai00212 DGPO 2010-08-12 2011-03-24 GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212 machine generated eng fdlp REPORT GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212 AIMD-00-212 Systems design Information resources management Systems development life cycle ADP procurement Information technology Strategic information systems planning DOJ Information Technology Architecture INS Computer Linked Application Information Management System Letter Report AIMD GAO reviewed the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) development of an enterprise architecture focusing on the: (1) status of INS' efforts and; (2) effectiveness of INS' structures and processes for managing this development effort.<p/>GAO noted that: (1) INS recognizes that it does not have an enterprise architecture and has taken some limited steps to develop one; (2) however, it has considerable work left to accomplish before it will have a complete, and thus useful, enterprise architecture; (3) moreover, its approach to managing the development of its architecture lacks fundamental controls; (4) specifically, INS' Office of Information Resources Management (OIRM), which is the organization responsible for managing INS' information technology (IT) functions and assets, has, in isolation from INS business owners, put together a bottom-up description of INS' IT environment and it has mapped its software applications to INS' three major business areas; (5) this is a reasonable start to describing INS' architectural environment; (6) however, important steps still need to be accomplished, such as linking the systems environment description to a decomposed view of INS' business areas, including each area's component business functions and subfunctions, and information needs and flows among functions and subfunctions; (7) doing this with any degree of reliability, however, requires business owners to validate the resultant linkages; (8) also, INS has not begun developing either a target architecture or a plan for sequencing between its current architecture and a target architecture; (9) in lieu of the target architecture, OIRM is developing what it calls an "initial" target architecture that, according to the architecture team leader, is a 2-year plan for correcting known system-level problems; (10) this plan will basically describe near-term system maintenance efforts and will not provide a definition of the business and systems environments needed to optimize INS' mission performance; (11) INS' limited steps to date to develop an enterprise architecture are due to the absence of certain fundamental management structures and processes associated with successful architecture development; (12) INS has focused on the technology layers of enterprise architecture, rather than on an agency wide effort that includes participation by INS business owners; (13) INS' architecture development efforts are not being managed as a formal program; (14) also, these efforts do not include performance measures and progress reporting requirements to ensure that the effort is progressing satisfactorily; and (15) without these management controls, it is unlikely that INS will produce a complete and useful enterprise architecture. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212/html/GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212/pdf/GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212.pdf GAO/AIMD-00-212 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GAOREPORTS-AIMD-00-212 Letter Report GAO/AIMD-00-212; Information Technology: INS Needs to Better Manage the; Systems design Information resources management Systems development life cycle ADP procurement Information technology Strategic information systems planning DOJ Information Technology Architecture INS Computer Linked Application Information Management System Public Law 104-106