Business Transformation in Action

The US government has embraced enterprise architecture principles in a big way to better manage its sprawling IT resources. A recent example that has just surfaced is a US Air Force unit, which adopted an enterprise modeling tool as part of its mission to supply well-integrated computer solutions to other parts of the Air Force across the globe.

The modeling solution, described in DefenseSystems.com, enables Air Force enterprise architects develop a comprehensive enterprise architecture blueprint and conduct a business analysis. The unit, the Electronic Systems Squadron's Enterprise Architecture Group, was concerned with interoperability between applications, as well as impacts of removing and replacing applications.

The resulting analysis opened up a lot of eyes, Brian Chaney, director of IT strategy and architecture at Copper River IT, is quoted as saying:

"As we started to model the different IT systems and their business processes that support it, we started to see true duplication. Everybody thought there was duplication in system functions. But we started to understand where overlaps were occurring, and that started to give us an idea of how we could move forward in the future."

The squadron is also using the tool to make sure systems conform to a service-oriented architecture, the report adds. "For example, one large program is described as tightly coupled to two systems, but its databases actually connect to two systems: an Air Force system and another DOD system," Chaney said."We are using the architecture and the ProVision simulation piece to see what effect the decoupling of the two IT systems is going to have against the business processes."