A Practical Guide to Federal Enterprise Architecture

The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to Federal Agencies in initiating, developing, using, and maintaining an enterprise architecture (EA). This guide offers an end-to end process to initiate, implement, and sustain an EA program, and describes the necessary roles and associated responsibilities for a successful EA program. An EA establishes the Agency-wide roadmap to achieve an Agency's mission through optimal performance of its core business processes within an efficient information technology (IT) environment. Simply stated, enterprise architectures are "blueprints" for systematically and completely defining an organization's current (baseline) or desired (target) environment. Enterprise architectures are essential for evolving information systems, developing new systems, and inserting emerging technologies that optimize their mission value. While some agencies have enterprise architectures in place, others do not. For agencies that already have an EA in place, this guide should be tailored to fit these Agencies' needs. For smaller agencies, a streamlined version of the guide should be created to support the needs of the Agency.

This guide is intended primarily for Federal Agency architects tasked with the generation and institutionalization of EAs. This document provides guidance to Agencies that currently do not have EAs and those that can benefit from improvements in their EA methods for development and maintenance. For Agencies without an EA, this document provides useful guidance to the Agency Head and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for educating and obtaining key stakeholder commitment in establishing an effective EA. This guide is also aimed at capital planning and investment control (CPIC) process participants [e.g., investment review boards, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)], as well as enterprise engineering and program management process participants (e.g., program/project managers, systems engineers, application architects, systems developers, configuration managers, risk managers, and security engineers).