The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) created the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) as a mechanism to identify duplication of assets, within and outside of each US Government agency. FEAF 2 provides a Collaborative Planning Method (CPM) to guide agencies in understanding investment needs, making sure that the need satisfies a government goal, investigating to see if another agency or department already has a service or product that satisfies the need, and submitting a plan for creating a new investment or reusing an existing one.
Introduction
The US Federal Government consists of over 300 organizational entities of differing size, scope, and complexity – all good-sized businesses by common measure. The US Federal Government employs over 2.6 billion employees and has (at the time of writing) an annual budget of over $80 billion for Information Technology (IT).
FEAF 2 was created by the OMB to prevent duplication of spending for technology and service assets across agencies and departments within and across agencies. Before investing in a new service or IT product, an agency must determine if the service or product can be provided by another department or agency.
FEAF 2 helps government planners implement the “Common Approach to Enterprise Architecture” policy guidance. FEAF 2 enables:
▪Identification of duplicative investments (inter and intra agency) using a common language of reference models.
▪Alignment of investments with overall strategic goals.
▪Governance of requiring departments to discover and investigate potential existing solutions.
▪Standardization on the investigative data needed to propose an investment.
FEAF 2 improves upon FEAF 1 in aligning architectures and investments with overall government strategic goals. The FEAF 2 structure relies on a performance reference model which contains a set of goals that the government is trying to achieve. OMB expects that if an agency or department is going to invest money, it will be furthering at least one goal. Agencies are required to identify the primary goal that an investment is trying to achieve.
Collaborative Planning Method
If an agency is going to do an investment, OMB requires that it go through a discovery process to identify the distinct solution, and make sure the solution is not already available in another agency or department. FEAF 2 standardizes the process for establishing the need, gathering investigative data, building the report that must be created, and establishing the executive review of what the needs are at each federated level.