Survey: Federal Agencies To Increase VAR Partnerships

Enterprise architecture (EA) plans are not optimized for growth, according to a recent survey of 155 federal IT decision makers conducted by Fairfax-based Market Connections and commissioned by Cisco Systems. In the survey, 65 percent respondents from 40 defense and civilian agencies said (EA) plans only support the current mission but were not forward-looking.

While nearly half of respondents said they'd look to the private sector to help develop an end-to-end plan for EA solutions, many say that vendors and solution providers could improve efforts to meet the specific needs of the agency.

On Feb. 6, 2002, the Office of Management and Budget developed plans for a Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) that would simplify processes and unify work across agencies for a more citizen-centered, customer-focused government. According to the road map, agencies were to transition to target architectures and implement common solutions by 2006, and realize governmentwide transformation by 2008. Actual efforts, however, have been slower to move for a variety of reasons.

"Agencies often have trouble coming up with the funding to move forward with solutions; either they can't get the money allocated, or they have to deal with competing priorities within the agency," says Aaron Hefron, vice president at Market Connections. Other challenged include maintaining security during the transition and finding adequate internal staff.

As a result, most agencies are still in the stage of consolidating IT infrastructures and enabling cross-agency collaboration; about half of the respondents said efforts to document citizen-government interactions, map investments to the FEA reference model or optimize e-records management expenditures have not even started.

That's where the channel can come in. More than half of the respondents said their agencies collaborate with contractors or vendors for planning and implementation, and that partnerships will likely increase as efforts ramp up. In particular, agencies will look to the private sector to help develop solutions that consider the long term. While plans are in place for implementing immediate EA solutions, respondents question whether they'll suffice moving forward; between 60 percent and 70 percent expect consolidation and collaboration efforts to become more challenging.

"There's a clear need for the service-oriented framework to be embedded in their infrastructures," says Chris Shenefiel, federal government industry solution manager at Cisco Systems. To help solution providers respond to that need, Cisco announced the Cisco Communities of Interest solution -- a commercial, off-the-shelf offering that helps enable collaboration and data sharing among civilian and military communities while leveraging their existing infrastructures. The solution is part of Cisco's overall Connected Government road map to advance intra- and interagency collaboration and information-sharing using Cisco's Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA).

"They expect [an] enterprise architecture to drive business strategies, but they need help with competencies, tools, and implementation," Shenefiel says. "Like security, you don't implement [an enterprise architecture] by incorporating a box."