Enterprise Architecture For Dod Acquisition

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

The Zachman framework provides an excellent template for developing the architecture of just about anything. However, Zachman left out one important aspect of systems engineering in his framework that would be essential to implementing an enterprise architecture in DoD.Metrics is an important element of tracking progress toward achieving a goal in any endeavor. I would therefore recommend that one additional column be added to the framework labeled "progress." This would be the metric that provides the key measure of success toward achieving the "what" of column one.

APPLYING THE ZACHMAN FRAMEWORK TO DoD

The Zachman framework can make important contributions to acquisition reform. Policy makers have focused on the what, how, where, and when of what has to be done. They have done little to identify the who or the why. A key part of the systems engineering process is the assignment of responsibility and metrics to track progress toward achievement of the goals. Another key is providing the motivation of column 6 to accomplish the goal.

In a recent speech at the Defense Systems Management College, Vicky Farrow, chief learning officer of Lucent Technologies, Inc., described how demanding good personal performance on the job was a major part of Lucent's rise from singledigit growth as a part of AT&T to growth rates in the 20th percentile as an independent company (1999). She described how one employee was interviewed and asked what her job was. The woman explained that her job was to go to job fairs and to talk to students about working at Lucent. When asked how many students to which she had spoken put in applications, she said she had no idea.

Commercial industry has realized that each person must understand the goals of the company and the part their particular job plays in the achievement of those goals. To make sure that these individual linkages are defined, top companies provide personal incentives to their workers. These can take the form of bonuses for exceptional achievement or removal for consistent substandard performance. How many DoD employees do we have that are like this woman? They go to work every day and perform their work with little or no understanding of the relationship between their jobs and the higher level goals of supporting the warfighter or achieving the goals of acquisition reform.

Establishing motivation is more difficult in DoD because of many rules for paying and firing government employees. But there are certainly some personal motivations that could be put in place under existing law. For example, to reduce development time, OSD might assign responsibility to a senior executive service (SES) employee to reduce the time to get through a milestone decision by 50 percent over three years. Times would be measured and tracked and the SES's bonus would be directly tied to the achievement of the intermediate goals for each year.

DEVELOPING AN ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

An overview of the enterprise architecture planning process is presented in Figure 1. Following the top-down approach of systems engineering, this process layers out four phases of planning for the implementation of an enterprise architecture. The four steps of planning corresponding to the four levels above ask (Spewak, 1993, p. 14):