Enterprise Architecture on the move?

The message to the US Congress is that the US federal enterprise architecture program and agency enterprise architecture initiatives are beginning to achieve strong results, but still, significant work remains to achieve the full potential existing with the federal enterprise architecture. Karen Evans and others sound optimistic, others don’t.

Mark Forman, the former US federal CIO, also argues that the Federal Enterprise Architecture “needs to move to a service-oriented architecture and away from one that focuses on symmetrical multiprocessor concepts”. To get to service-oriented architecture, Forman says that agencies must do the following:

• Use commodity instead of proprietary hardware and software.
• Move from silo to shared resources where agencies build for component reuse and integration.
• Stop building monolithic applications and apply the shared service approach.
• Automate more IT services to improve their quality.

This is very much in line with the Danish strategy.

Last week, FCW quoted one of my bosses:

In Denmark, nonelectronic and e-government services are designed to be provided governmentwide. Officials are even changing their political structure to provide better service, said Mikkel Hemmingsen, deputy director general of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. He spoke last week at the META Group Inc.’s Government Enterprise Architectures Conference in Arlington, Va.

The country has 14 counties and 274 municipalities of varying sizes, but a wide-scale reform effort will include consolidating those to five counties and 100 municipalities. Once that reform is complete, the goal is to “have a political structure that is suited to the services we want to deliver,” Hemmingsen said.

Denmark’s enterprise architecture process, which focuses on everything from Extensible Markup Language to document management systems, is designed to include input from the private sector on every issue, he said. Although citizens are not involved, this process ensures that no government technology or IT policy goes forward without public input, he said.