Enterprise Architecture

Background

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission needed to develop an Enterprise Architecture (EA) to comply with Office of Managenment and Budget (OMB) mandates. More importantly, the EA was needed to help streamline business processes, integrate enterprise-level systems, migrate mission-critical legacy systems to the web, and develop modern web-based applications.

The Challenge

The NRC, like many government agencies, is an organization with numerous functions, and hence, many disparate IT systems. As a result, the project involved both cultural aspects to educate key stakeholders on the importance of the EA initiative, and technical expertise to actually develop the EA.

Prior to the project's launch, the NRC had started an EA initiative, but had no central EA repository. There was no simple way to access the collected information, which existed mainly in Word, WordPerfect and Excel documents. As the consolidation of this information in a formal EA repository was key to the development of the EA, Webworld assisted NRC stakeholders to come together and develop a set of models using proven techniques and methodologies.

The Solution

Webworld utilized a practical approach to EA development that focused on the creation of context models for the enterprise. These models were developed to show the key interactions between systems. The subsequent analysis revealed that these interactions were part of the agency's core business process that was shared among the various program offices.

As part of this effort, Webworld first conducted an analysis of the cost and benefits of the existing EA tools, and scored them on a numerical scale. System Architect was selected as it was the most flexible and widely used tool at the time. Webworld then used a subset of methodologies and techniques to facilitate the creation of the repository. These included: Entity Relationship Modeling, Data Element Categorization, Data Reverse Engineering, Process Modeling, and the creation of the OMB TRM, PRM, BRM and DRM.

Webworld subsequently collected, analyzed and organized the legacy NRC documents, and used System Architect to capture the relevant information in the Zachman EA framework that Webworld had customized to meet NRC requirements. Numerous interviews were also conducted with key stakeholders and system owners to gather information on the use of the systems and their interfaces.

In order to enable agency program managers to easily query the EA repository, Webworld designed and developed an add-on reporting tool for System Architect. The development of this tool required the import and simplification of System Architect's complex data structure to one that faciliated rapid online queries and the production of comprehensive but understandable reports. The idea here was simply to make the information easy to access by those who needed it to make informed IT purchasing decisions. This effort required a thorough understanding of NRC’s data requirements and the business needs.

Webworld also created business process diagrams (using the Business Process Modeling Notation—BPMN—standard) of key NRC business processes. These process diagrams were based on information from extensive one-on-one interviews with NRC staff. Webworld subsequently used this analysis as a basis for further research and recommendations to NRC on how the business processes could be improved with available commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software.

The Results

Webworld provided the NRC with an Enterprise Architecture repository containing detailed information on its IT systems. This information can now be used by agency program managers to help them make more informed and intelligent IT investment decisions.