The Office of Management and Budget has made progress on
the federal enterprise architecture (FEA), as its called,
that it developed in 2002 but it remains very much a work
in process, the General Accounting Office has said.
The FEA is intended to guide and constrain federal agencies’
enterprise architectures and IT investments through the
reuse of common IT components across agencies, and the
identification of opportunities for interagency collaboration
in developing common IT solutions.
OMB reported that the FEA has been used to help identify
potentially redundant agency IT investments, choose five
lines of business such as grants management where agencies
could collaborate, and begin to develop the architectural
foundation for some of these business lines, said GAO.
Using its enterprise architecture management maturity
framework as a benchmark, GAO found little change in overall
maturity between 2001 and 2003, stating that just 20 of 96
agencies it examined had established the foundation for
effective architecture management.
Overall, 22 agencies increased in maturity since 2001,
while 24 decreased and 47 stayed the same, said GAO.
