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'It is no longer a challenge to convince the senior management that architecture is important,' Air Force CIO John Gilligan says.<br>
'It is no longer a challenge to convince the senior management that architecture is important,' Air Force CIO John Gilligan says.
With the Office of Management and Budget and the President's Management Agenda promoting the use of enterprise architectures, CIOs are finding they get more support from management, Gilligan and other feds said yesterday at an enterprise architecture conference in Vienna, Va.
For instance, Air Force secretary James G. Roche has chartered a new group to develop an enterprise architecture for the service's business practices, Gilligan said. The group, with assistance from IBM Corp., was given 60 days, or until the end of this month, to draft an initial framework, he said. It will mesh with the Defense Department's Business Enterprise Architecture.
Working fast has also been a hallmark of architecture efforts, said Amy Wheelock, co-chairwoman of the Homeland Security Department's Architecture Working Group. For her crew, creating an initial Homeland Security enterprise architecture in just months was a daunting challenge, she said. DHS unveiled its first version [see story] of the architecture this month.
'Clearly, we did ourselves a favor by having something to start the conversation with,' Wheelock said, referring to the work done by the White House Homeland Security transition team.
Meanwhile, DOD has released the final draft of its Architecture Framework 1.0, said Fatma Dandashi, a researcher with the Mitre Corp. The Bedford, Mass., company helped DOD craft the framework.
The framework, which replaces the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Core Architecture Data Model, comes with a so-called deskbook of supplementary guidance, Dandashi said.
The framework has a new emphasis on capability-based analysis, she said. In other words, DOD officials will define the tasks they want to achieve and then look for the systems that will support those goals, instead of the other way around.
The Open Group of San Francisco, a vendor consortium that promotes Unix interoperability standards, sponsored the conference.