Effort to create architecture lexicon on hold, Burk says
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Richard Burk, the Office of Management and Budget's chief architect, said last week that the effort to harmonize terms and build consensus among agencies is on hiatus until the group can decide on the context of the terms.
The Chief Architects Forum has put on hold their attempt to establish a common glossary for the Federal Enterprise Architecture after coming up with four or five definitions for 120 terms.
Richard Burk, the Office of Management and Budget's chief architect, said last week that the effort to harmonize terms and build consensus among agencies is on hiatus until the group can decide on the context of the terms.
'The term 'transition plan' may mean one thing for current-state architecture and another thing for 'to-be' architecture,' Burk said during a luncheon sponsored by the Industry Advisory Council in Washington. 'There is a fair amount of loosey-goosey terminology floating around. This is the problem we are trying to solve.'
While the Chief Architects are working on a common set of terms, OMB is finalizing a service component-based architecture white paper'the first of nine volumes, according to a presentation given at the Chief Architects Forum meeting last week. The white paper is a guide for agencies to implement distributed and reusable services and components. The white paper also will integrate service-oriented architecture (SOA), reflect the evolution of the FEA and incorporate agency feedback, according to the presentation.
The other volumes will include capital planning and investment control and EA integration, SOA strategy, service-component governance and using governmentwide profiles and the Lines of Business.
OMB and the CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee also accepted suggestions to the FEA Reference Model Maintenance Framework through Jan. 30. Burk said OMB and the committee will update the framework by March 31 and again by Sept. 30. The General Services Administration's Rick Murphy is leading this effort.
'The framework will frame existing policies so agencies can easily recognize and incorporate elements of the cross-agency initiatives into their future state architectures,' Burk said.
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