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Our Enterprise Architecture (EA) Approach

February 22, 2007

Our Enterprise Management Consulting Group recognizes that managers need more detail about their operations to demonstrate the appropriate allocation of resources and to identify where additional resources are needed.  Our EA Framework utilizes an adaptive enterprise architecture approach that effectively supports the business of government, enables information sharing across traditional barriers, enhances government’s ability to deliver effective and timely services, and supports agencies in their efforts to improve government functions and services. Adaptive enterprise architecture increases the government’s ability to deliver effective and timely services and to support agencies in their efforts to improve the overall functioning of government. Sharing information, maximizing resource investment, increasing technology reuse opportunities, and meeting the public’s ever-increasing expectations for electronic access to government information and services are major motivating factors driving the need for implementation of common enterprise architecture and standards.

Our approach to EA provides a holistic view that goes beyond enterprise-wide technical architecture models once believed to be solutions in the federal market place. We utilize EA as part of a suite of tools to enable rapid change in business processes and in the applications and infrastructure that enable them.  In order to address complex government needs, we employ a performance enhancing suite of solutions that, in addition to EA, include: 

  • IT Governance—the design of leadership elements, structure, and processes that facilitate effective control and management of IT related functions.
  • IT Strategic Planning—the definition of IT strategies, goals, methods and performance criteria for meeting an organization’s strategic objectives.
  • IT Portfolio Management—an integrated approach to managing IT investments that provides continuous analyses of cost and benefit. Portfolio Management ensures a strong link between the Enterprise Strategic Plan, the Enterprise Architecture, and specific program management initiatives.
  • Project/Program Management—the executing function for Capital Investments.  Program Management is both driven by and responsive to the Portfolio Management process.
  • Change Management—a  key enabler to ensure the long term success of any process or technological improvement initiative.  The Change Management process aligns the enterprise’s culture to the strategic business and IT goals. 

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Our first introductory blog entry

February 22, 2007

The Enterprise Consulting (EC) practice provides strategic planning, performance management, and risk management services. We leverage our experience in enterprise architecture to provide our clients with value-added services. Our blog will provide new and innovative ideas to our customers, perspective customers, and other interested parties across government agencies. Today’s blog will focus on three areas; a brief introduction to our EC practice, a view on the state of enterprise architecture, and a discussion on upcoming blog topics.

The EC practice provides management consulting services to all levels of Our Approach

government agencies. We are a practice within the larger Strategic Enterprise Solutions, Inc. (SE) and can be found on the web at www.sesolutions.com. Our practice focuses on providing value-added services each and every-time we work with a client. Our core belief is a focus on impactful solutions that drive value for our customers. Our subject matter experts hit the ground running on day one and can be expected to immediately provide value.

One of our primary tools for helping our clients deliver results faster is the use of enterprise architecture (EA). We believe EA is a tool that can be used to improve an organization’s ability to achieve its mission. Although many in the EA community would agree with this statement, they quickly lose sight of the objective of architecture. Many practitioners of EA jump into creating models and views without having a clear understanding of the organizations mission and the problem (s) that EA is intended to help solve. Our operational approach to EA differs from the existing EA community in that it focuses on using EA as a tool to solve customer issues and satisfy their needs rather than using EA as a search and discovery effort of creating models and views that are “supposed” to provide answers at some point. We advocate that all practioners of EA begin to re-focus their efforts away from creating pure EA work products and focus on using EA as a tool to identify and solve client problems. We propose, for example, that instead of just creating a business architecture (i.e. set of business processes, functions, and activities across an organization) that an architect use the business architecture to help an client analyze their compliance with legislative, policy, and regulatory requirements. Clients find more value in a business architecture when it helps them make decisions and manage their business instead of just documenting the enterprise and hanging on the wall. In future episodes of this blog we will continue to explore how we believe EA used be used to help organizations identify and solve real problems.

Future episodes of this blog will focus on how to make an enterprise architecture operational, our experience with critical infrastructure protection, new approaches to strategic and performance planning, and our experience implementing portfolio management within the Department of Defense. Please feel free to leave us comments and ideas for future blog content.

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Hello world!

January 13, 2007

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!