Information Technology

An enterprise architecture serves as an institutional systems blueprint that defines the terms of the organization's current and target operating environments and provides a road map for moving between the two. Although the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year in information technology (IT), it has only recently begun to develop an enterprise architecture. A current architecture description is not complete, and a definition of a target architecture has not begun. So far, INS has focused on the technology layers of the architecture (hardware and system software computing platforms, data structures and schemas, software applications). A top-down process, which begins with the institution's mission and a business concept of operations and continues with the definition of supporting business functions, processes, and information needs and flows, is advocated by both federal and private sector architecture guidance. Moreover, INS' architecture development efforts are not managed as a formal program. No meaningful plans that provide a detailed breakdown of the work and associated schedules, resource needs, and performance measures are included.

GAO noted that: (1) INS recognizes that it does not have an enterprise architecture and has taken some limited steps to develop one; (2) however, it has considerable work left to accomplish before it will have a complete, and thus useful, enterprise architecture; (3) moreover, its approach to managing the development of its architecture lacks fundamental controls; (4) specifically, INS' Office of Information Resources Management (OIRM), which is the organization responsible for managing INS' information technology (IT), functions and assets, has, in isolation from INS business owners, put together a bottom-up description of INS' IT environment and it has mapped its software applications to INS' three major business areas; (5) this is a reasonable start to describing INS' architectural environment; (6) however, important steps still need to be accomplished, such as linking the systems environment description to a decomposed view of INS' business areas, including each area's component business functions and subfunctions, and information needs and flows among functions and subfunctions; (7) doing this with any degree of reliability, however, requires business owners to validate the resultant linkages; (8) also, INS has not begun developing either a target architecture or a plan for sequencing between its current architecture and a target architecture; (9) in lieu of the target architecture, OIRM is developing what it calls an "initial" target architecture that, according to the architecture team leader, is a 2-year plan for correcting known system-level problems; (10) this plan will basically describe near-term system maintenance efforts and will not provide a definition of the business and systems environments needed to optimize INS' mission performance; (11) INS' limited steps to date to develop an enterprise architecture are due to the absence of certain fundamental management structures and processes associated with successful architecture development; (12) INS has focused on the technology layers of enterprise architecture, rather than on an agency-wide effort that includes participation by INS business owners; (13) INS' architecture development efforts are not being managed as a formal program; (14) also, these efforts do not include performance measures and progress reporting requirements to ensure that the effort is progressing satisfactorily; and (15) without these management controls, it is unlikely that INS will produce a complete and useful enterprise architecture.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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