Real Property Connects Enterprise Architecture, E-Government and the PMA

Your colleagues on the IT side of your organization are hard at work on their quarterly Enterprise Architecture (EA) progress reports, due February 28th. You might still have time to offer insight into how real property relates to the business processes that must be integrated with this reporting – and improve your agency’s e-Government scorecard ranking as a result.

Under the reporting guidelines for Federal Enterprise Architecture, quarterly EA progress reports must be submitted to OMB simultaneously with other agency quarterly IT reports, including E-Gov Implementation Plan Updates. The deadline for delivery of the progress for Q2 of the fiscal year is March 1.

In March and April, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will review agency EA artifacts and perform annual assessment and scoring. OMB must review and score agency’s EA progress report for milestones for the current quarter at the same time.

The results of the agency’s quarterly EA progress reports will affect the agency’s EA “Progress in Implementing” score for the E-Government scorecard initiative of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA). The results will not affect the agency’s EA “Current Status” score, however.

If your agency has not considered the impact of your facilities and real property holdings on your Federal Enterprise Architecture strategies, you might be missing a key component of this President’s Management Agenda initiative.

Enterprise architecture is a design framework that manages business processes, software and hardware, local- and wide-area networks, people, operations, and projects with the organization’s overall strategy. As with real property asset management, successful enterprise architecture planning means understanding an organization’s mission and people, where these individuals are located, the capacity of the locations in which they work, and the tasks they perform to support mission fulfillment.

According to the OMB Enterprise Assessment Framework 2.0, an agency’s enterprise architecture must contain “an inventory of agency business processes . . . linked to layers of the agency enterprise architecture and used to inform investment decision-making. ”An effective enterprise architecture, according to OMB, must be “business-driven,” requiring links between the IT architecture and business processes.

To be fully compliant with the OMB framework, an agency must understand the impact of its facilities on its business practices. This relationship is critical to creating an enterprise architecture transition strategy.

No agency can create an acceptable enterprise architecture transitional plan by OMB standards without understanding how its business processes are influenced and affected by the facilities it owns or leases, functions of the people working in those facilities, and security levels and secure infrastructures required for those functions. Without this understanding, none of the “artifacts” required of the activities at each practice level can be adequately addressed.

Because an agency’s budget is tied to its compliance with this part of the PMA, it must make capital requests in the context of these operational conditions.

Make sure your agency ties its enterprise architecture transitional plan to your facilities, mission and business practices. Otherwise, you might risk a lower grade on your PMA scorecard.

Visit Federal Enterprise Architecture quarterly reporting guidelines for complete information