OMB, CIO Council issue architecture principles

The Office of Management and Budget and the CIO Council released today a new framework that underpins many of the Bush administration’s core management tenets.

The Architecture Principles for the U.S. Government defines what is important to the administration, said Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for e-government and information technology.

“These principles balance department and agency mandates on the one hand and governmentwide interests on the other,” wrote Evans, also the council’s director, and Dave Wennergren, Defense Department deputy chief information officer and vice chairman of the council, in an e-mail message to CIOs. “Clear, well-understood and sanctioned principles, combined with an executive commitment to enforce them, help drive change across disparate departments and programs, and also within agencies.”

Richard Burk, OMB’s chief architect, who helped develop these principles during the past year, said that although the values may seem simplistic on the surface, the implications are deeper.

The principles include:

• The federal government focuses on people
• The federal government is a single unified enterprise
• Federal agencies collaborate with other governments and people
• The federal architecture is mission-driven
• Security, privacy and protecting information are core government needs
• Information is a national asset
• The federal architecture simplifies government operations

Using these high-level principles as guidance, agency program and technical officials are expected to adopt these principles and identify agency-specific ones that express the same shared focus, Evans and Wennergren wrote.

Burk added that the principles show they are about not only technology but also how agencies deliver services to people.

-Jason Miller, FCW.com

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