Federal Government and EA

As reported here, the federal government has seen such success with their EA programs that they have decided to increase the standards by which they evaluate agencies on their use of EA. In the past, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would score agencies high if they simply had an EA program, whereas now, they will be evaluating EA success based off of overall agency performance. Kshmendra Paul, Chief Architect at OMB's Office of E-Government and Information Technology stated

"The framework features three broad areas of emphasis. OMB will assess agencies’ process integration and the degree to which the integration of processes produces results in the management chain. That’s linked to strategic planning."

The Government’s Incremental Move Towards SOA

This latest post on the SOA Network details how the latest report from Input, a leader in the authority of government business, discusses that the government’s growing adoption of SOA practices will fundamentally change how it delivers internal citizen-facing services. The federal market can benefit from increased agility and better IT alignment that SOA brings to the table.

Deniece Peterson, senior analyst at INPUT mentions:

"SOA shifts the concept of the application into a highly dynamic and fluid marketplace of plug-and-play services. A function previously performed by one vendor's application could now be completed by a number of discrete services provided by a multitude of providers. The standardized environment required to make this happen could severely impact the provider who relies heavily on proprietary elements for competitive advantage."

It is still early in the process to see a dramatic change in the federal SOA market as SOA solutions are slowly being integrated into the customer’s environment. The findings from Input can be found here, “Service-Oriented Architecture: Implications for Government and Industry”.