The Federal Aviation Administration needs to strengthen its
enterprise architecture program to guide its multi-billion
dollar air traffic control upgrade, the Government
Accountability Office has said.
It has placed the architecture program — divided into two
projects, one for national airspace system operations and
one for administrative and mission support activities — on
its high-risk list, and says FAA has so far only put in
place a few of the management capabilities it needs to
effectively develop, maintain and implement an architecture.
FAA still needs to “designate a committee to direct, oversee
or approve the architecture, and establish and architecture
policy,” said GAO.
Reporting on its progress, FAA said it has allocated enough
resources to the projects, established project offices to
develop the architecture, designated a chief architect for
each project, and released version 5.0 of its NAS
architecture, according to GAO-05-266.
It said FAA plans to establish a steering committee, develop
a policy to control program development, maintenance,
and implementation, and approve a management plan for support
activities.
GAO emphasized that senior management has to be on board for
an enterprise architecture program to work, and has observed
that attempts at major systems modernization programs without
one “often result in system implementations that are
duplicative, are not well integrated, require costly rework to
interface, and do not effectively optimize mission performance.”