Enterprise Architecture For Dod Acquisition

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

Major commercial companies are realizing that this type of functional behavior is inefficient and wasteful, and that it threatens their future survival in the global marketplace. They are developing enterprise architectures to integrate their organizations and provide a clear vision of where they are headed in the future.

A good analogy of the process involved in developing an enterprise architecture is a city planning commission. These commissions make zoning laws, review building plans and permits, manage building codes, and grant deviations on a case-by-case basis. They monitor demographics, economics, changes in technology, and attitudes in the community. For a city to operate effectively, the commission must balance the conflicting priorities and goals of diverse groups such as its citizens, builders, businesses, and employees. Interfaces between these conflicting groups must also be managed so that the best interests of the city as a system are achieved. The process must also be responsive to change.

Why does enterprise architecting play such a large role in commercial companies? In 1967,40 to 50 percent of the cost of a product was direct (touch) labor. Today that percentage is as low as 15 percent. At the same time, between 20 and 50 percent of all labor cost in the United States is now dedicated to gathering, storage, retrieval, reconciliation, and reporting of information used to run the company (Zachman, 1997, pp. 8-10).

Because of the functional organization of most companies, this task is being accomplished with horrible inefficiencies. Larry English of Information International has observed that 70 percent of computer printouts were used to enter the same data into a different database. Bill Smith of William G. Smith Associates has observed that 70 percent of the lines of code used by a company are doing nothing but moving data from system to system and 40 percent of machine cycles are expended moving data that produces no useful work. At a cost of $1 to $4 per line of code for Y2K correction and testing, the price tag to ensure that these programs are now working is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Statistically, the average data fact is stored 10.8 times within a company information structure (Zachman, 1997, pp. 8-10). Since DoD is heavily engaged in generating and using information (rather than producing physical products), our percentages are likely worse than our commercial counterparts.

Figures such as these are bound to capture the attention of any chief executive officer. As Doug Erickson remarked, "Where do you think management is going to get any more major chunks of cost reduction? It looks to me like these enormous costs of architectural discontinuities and redundancies are now the 'low hanging fruit' just waiting to be picked" (Zachman, 1997, p. 10). The best part of the enterprise architecture is that up-front investment is minimal compared to other cost-saving initiatives, such as automation. Like systems engineering, much of this is just a commonsense approach to doing business. The difficult part will be to smash down the walls of functional bureaucracy in implementing these changes.