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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Federal Transition Framework to help agencies organize cross-agency initiatives

"Agencies are drowning in the alphabet soup of cross-agency initiatives - from IPv6 to HSPD-12 to LOBs to e-government - trying to figure out how they fit in with their overall missions.

For the past four years, the Office of Management and Budget has pushed and prodded CIOs and their staffs to complete their enterprise architectures to show how their systems fit together, what technologies are being used and how the agency plans to improve their missions using new technology.

But somewhere amid the flood of administration mandates, the ability to combine them into their EAs either was lost or just didn't develop.

To solve the problem, OMB's Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office for the first time asked agencies to submit their transition plans for one cross-agency initiative - the move to IP version 6 - with their latest EA transition plan. Agencies submitted their latest versions of their modernization blueprints Feb. 28 and OMB finished evaluating them under assessment Version 2.0 March 31.

'Instead of doing them as one-offs, agencies incorporated the IPv6 transition plans into the plans they were already developing,' said Richard Burk, OMB's chief architect, at an EA conference in Washington earlier this month sponsored by the Digital Government Institute. 'This was very successful. Agencies just did one strategy in multiple parts. You can make sure people are talking and understanding what is going on. We want to reduce the burden on the agencies.'

Burk said IPv6 was a tryout and OMB plans to expand the approach to other cross-agency initiatives. "

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