Enterprise Architecture For Dod Acquisition

Acquisition Review Quarterly, Spring, 2000 by David P. Brown

The Department of Defense (DOD) could achieve substantially higher acquisition cost savings by following the lead of industry in applying systems engineering theory to organizational structure, to develop an enterprise architecture for DoD acquisition.

The Department of Defense has made great strides within the past five years in moving defense acquisition processes toward successful business practices. Despite the undeniable successes achieved, acquisition reform has the potential to achieve substantially more costs savings than have to date been realized. These potential savings must be achieved if the services are to be able to modernize for tomorrow's operational demands.

Much of the equipment used by our warfighters is old, and gets older each day. The costs associated with supporting these systems are increasing with time. Although it appears that continued reductions in defense procurement budgets may level off and may actually increase in the coming years, more procurement dollars will be needed to meet the needs of the services. Jacques Gansler, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (USD [AT&L]), has continually spoken of the need to generate the dollars necessary to modernize forces while continuing to meet the operations and maintenance demands of high operational tempos.

Where will these funds come from? The premise of this article is that DoD could achieve substantially higher acquisition cost savings by following the lead of industry in developing an enterprise architecture for DoD acquisition. Commercial corporations have discovered that efficient business processes must be carried out within streamlined, seamless organizational structures. To achieve higher cost savings, DoD must reengineer its organizational structure. This will require a change in focus from optimizing individual departments and functions toward a top-down approach that focuses on optimizing the DoD acquisition system at the highest (enterprise) level.

The proposed solution is the development of an enterprise architecture for DoD acquisition. Enterprise architecting is the application of proven systems engineering principles for integrating complex systems applied toward integrating complex organizations. Most large corporations have realized that they cannot be effective and survive the commercial marketplace unless they develop an architecture for their organization that provides a seamless integration between different elements of the corporation. The larger and more complex the organization, the more critical this is. When subsystems of either a physical or organizational system are not designed to be interoperable with seamless operation across the interface, an "architectural mismatch" occurs and poor system level performance results.

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

What is an enterprise architecture? By the definition of John Zachman, "Architecture is that set of design artifacts, or descriptive representations, that are relevant for describing an object such that it can be produced to requirements (quality) as well as maintained over the period of its useful life (change)" (Zachman, 1991, P. 4). An enterprise architecture is developed by applying this concept to the organizational, or enterprise, level of a company or organization. This can be accomplished by applying many of the tools of systems engineering to the engineering of an organizational structure.

The discipline of systems engineering came about as industry began to develop complex systems and products. Engineers realized that having specialists first design and build optimized components and then attempt to integrate them resulted in poorly performing systems. This method was also time-consuming and expensive as many components required extensive redesign and rework to get them to be interoperable. Furthermore, the voice of the customer was often lost in the pursuit of optimum performance at the subsystem level.

Systems engineering was developed as a process to design systems from the top down. The system level architecture is defined first. Subsystems and components are then designed to support the system requirements and to be interoperable with other components and subsystems. In many cases, this requires that the individual subsystems or components be suboptimized. However, the result is a better overall system that can be developed faster and at a lower cost.

Many large, complex corporations have realized that this same principle applies to the architecture of an organization. Most corporations have traditionally been organized around functional areas such as marketing, accounting, engineering, and public relations. Inmost cases, these functional departments were designed to be the most efficient at the functional task they performed. This has led to efficient departments that combine to produce dysfunctional organizations.

The epitome of this type of structure is satirized in the cartoon strip "Dilbert." Dilbert attempts to do his job amidst insurmountable trials and tribulations: Research won't give him the product requirements, accounting reduces his budget, his boss tells him to get started without the requirements so he looks busy to upper management, and on and on. Why is the "Dilbert" cartoon strip so popular? Probably because so many of us can relate to these issues in our daily jobs.