About Enterprise Architecture (AboutEA.com) - An Information Technology Weblog

SAIC Working The Phase 2 EA for DHS

SAIC's Center for Enterprise Architecture gets a nice write-up in Washington Technology's article today, "Enterprise architecture: Where do we go from here?",

"We had to come up with a description of the 'as-is' components of 22 agencies coming into the department, an initial 'to-be' architecture, and a technology and project transition plan," said Lee Holcomb, chief technology officer at DHS. "In terms of applications alone, we discovered more than 2,000 that we needed to better manage at the department level."

DHS hired Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego to help create its architecture. SAIC experts, who had worked with several of the department's legacy agencies, analyzed IT systems across DHS' more than 700 disparate computing systems and identified several areas for consolidation.

SAIC found, for example, that DHS had at least eight programs to manage ports of entry and 14 for issuing credentials.

DHS completed the first version of its architecture in September 2003 in what Holcomb called "record time." To put that in perspective, it took a year to develop one portion of the Defense Department's business enterprise architecture.