Agencies are making only limited progress in managing their
enterprise architectures (the blueprint for how they plan
to modernize), the General Accounting Office has said
following a comparison of survey results from 2001 and 2003,
using a five-stage framework to assess the relative maturity
of an agency’s EA management program.
Even though a few agencies reached stage three and the
Executive Office of the President is at stage five, not
much changed from 2001 to 2003, said GAO, citing a limited
understanding of EA among agency executives as well as a
scarcity of skilled architecture staff as problems.
The Office of Management and Budget has also been working
to get agencies to prioritize EAs, said GAO, by collecting
and analyzing the EAs of major departments and requiring
big IT investments to comply with them. It also said OMB
has begun to require agency EAs to be mapped to those of a
general, government wide EA as part of the budget review
process, but noted that a significant portion of agencies
were dissatisfied with OMB’s efforts.
GAO said EA improvement is needed to increase the government’s
ability to effectively invest in IT.