Federal enterprise architecture

A federal enterprise architecture framework (FEAF) is the U.S. reference enterprise architecture of a federal government. It provides a common approach for the integration of strategic, business and technology management as part of organization design and performance improvement.

The most familiar federal enterprise architecture is the enterprise architecture of the Federal government of the United States, the U.S. "Federal Enterprise Architecture" (FEA) and the corresponding U.S. "Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework" (FEAF). This lemma will focus on this particular enterprise architecture and enterprise architecture framework.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a management best practice for aligning business and technology resources to achieve strategic outcomes, improve organizational performance and guide federal agencies to better execute their core missions. An EA describes the current and future state of the agency, and lays out a plan for transitioning from the current state to the desired future state. A federal enterprise architecture is a work in progress to achieve these goals.

The U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is an initiative of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Office of E-Government and IT, that aims to realize the value of enterprise architecture within the U.S. Federal Government. Enterprise Architecture became a recognized strategic and management best practice in U.S. Federal Government with the passage of the Clinger-Cohen Act in 1996.

There are numerous benefits that accrue from implementing and using an enterprise architecture within the U.S. Federal Government. Among them is to provide a common approach for IT acquisition in the United States federal government. It is also designed to ease sharing of information and resources across federal agencies, reduce costs, and improve citizen services.

In September 1999, the Federal CIO Council published the "Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework" (FEAF) Version 1.1 for developing an Enterprise Architecture (EA) within any Federal Agency for a system that transcends multiple inter-agency boundaries. It builds on common business practices and designs that cross organizational boundaries, among others the NIST Enterprise Architecture Model. The FEAF provides an enduring standard for developing and documenting architecture descriptions of high-priority areas. It provides guidance in describing architectures for multi-organizational functional segments of the Federal Government. At the time of release, the Government's IT focus on Y2K issues and then the events of September 2001 diverted attention from EA implementation, though its practice in advance and subsequent to this may have ameliorated the impact of these events. As part of the President's Management Agenda, in August 2001, the E-Government Task Force project was initiated (unofficially called Project Quicksilver). A key finding in that strategy was that the substantial overlap and redundant agency systems constrained the ability to achieve the Bush administration strategy of making the government "citizen centered". The Task Force recommended the creation a Federal Enterprise Architecture Project and the creation of the FEA Office at OMB. This was a shift from the FEAF focus on Information Engineering, to a J2EE object re-use approach using reference models comprising taxonomies that linked performance outcomes to lines of business, process services components, types of data, and technology components. Interim releases since that time have provided successive increases in definition for the core reference models (see below), as well as a very robust methodology for actually developing an architecture in a series of templates forming the Federal Segment Architecture Methodology (FSAM) and its next generation replacement, the Collaborative Planning Methodology (CPM), which was designed to be more flexible, more widely applicable, and more inclusive of the larger set of planning disciplines.

These federal architectural segments collectively constitute the federal enterprise architecture. In 2001, the Federal Architecture Working Group (FAWG) was sponsoring the development of Enterprise Architecture products for trade and grant Federal architecture segments. Method—s prescribed way of approaching a particular problem. As shown in the figure, the FEAF partitions a given architecture into business, data, applications, and technology architectures. The FEAF overall framework created at that time (see image) includes the first three columns of the Zachman Framework and the Spewak's Enterprise Architecture Planning methodology.

In May 2012 OMB published a full new guide, the "Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture". Released as part of the federal CIO's policy guidance and management tools for increasing shared approaches to IT service delivery, the guide presents an overall approach to developing and using Enterprise Architecture in the Federal Government. The Common Approach promotes increased levels of mission effectiveness by standardizing the development and use of architectures within and between Federal Agencies. This includes principles for using EA to help agencies eliminate waste and duplication, increase shared services, close performance gaps, and promote engagement among government, industry, and citizens.