Enterprise Shared Solutions (ESS)

USDA is transforming itself to deliver its information and services around common lines of business and customer expectations. With two primary goals in mind, USDA created the Enterprise Shared Services (ESS) to facilitate this transformation:

• Deliver information and services around customers.
• Leverage investment in information technology to eliminate duplication.

USDA is moving toward the use of common architectural solutions that enable USDA agencies to build their own applications while minimizing the costs associated with infrastructure and operations. By leveraging ESS, USDA will reduce application development and operational costs by leveraging economies of scale, product standardization, and avoidance of redundant effort and cost reduction.

USDA developed the ESS business, technology, and data principles with the end goal of helping agencies maximize efficiency and reduce cost, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

Business Principles

Integrated, coordinated, and standardized business processes allow USDA to deliver improved service to its customers. ESS enables greater cross-agency collaboration, use of shared solutions and best practices. The business principles of USDA's Enterprise Architecture are:

• Simplify and unify business processes spanning multiple agencies.
• Provide common technical architecture for USDA operations and services.
• Increase collaboration among agencies and staff offices.
• Create a knowledge and resource sharing environment.
• Leverage agency expertise to support common lines of business.
• Avoid unnecessary duplication, complexity and costs.
• Enable agency resources to focus on performance of agency mission.

Technology Principles

Technology principles have been put into place to promote consolidation and standardization of technology where appropriate. This results in significant increases in efficiency, while reducing costs to USDA. The technology principles of USDA's Enterprise Architecture are:

• Consolidate agency-specific systems into single, enterprise systems serving multiple agencies.
• Implement data standards to enable sharing and re-use.
• Provide and support common application development platforms.
• Reduce future application development and maintenance time.
• Reduce system integration and consolidation costs.
• Avoid unnecessary duplication, complexity and costs.
• Reduce cost on software and hardware spending, application hosting, and business application development.

Data Principles

A set of data principles supports the collection, storage, and use of data at USDA. By following these data principles, USDA is able to maximize data sharing and minimize costs associated with duplicate data management efforts. The data principles of USDA's Enterprise Architecture are:

• Use security requirements, network requirements, and cost to determine the physical location of data.
• Data supporting agency mission delivery is to be managed by the owning entity.
• Share data when possible to provide new and/or enhanced services to customers.
• Create common data standards across the enterprise to enable sharing and reuse and cut system integration and consolidation costs.
• Create databases "of record" when possible to eliminate redundancy and enhance the quality of data.

The ESS implementation process is comprised of five (5) phases that an agency team steps through to design and implement information systems using any ESS Platforms.

The five (5) phases are:

• Education and Dialog - Introduction to ESS concepts, information resources and strategies for your application. Includes a kickoff meeting for agencies new to the ESS implementation process.
• Application Scoping and Planning - Assessment of project details and requirements to create a completed acceptance package. The acceptance package is used by the ESS and agency teams to appropriately procure development software licenses, set up development/test/administrator accounts, set up developer access to the ESS environments, scale ESS technology, and schedule ESS administrators to accommodate application needs.
• Startup and Developer Setup - Setup of development workstations, access to development environments, orientation to development aids available and introduction to agency teams working on similar projects.
• Build and Deploy - Development, test, and deployment of the application. Also includes execution of application integration tasks.
• Operational / On-Going Support - Go-live and steady state support of an application.

Please contact Bruce A. Pacot, Marketing Program Manager, at 888-USE-NITC or send an email to NITCESS@usda.gov for additional information requests and inquiries. The NITC website, www.ocio.usda.gov/nitc , provides additional information about enterprise solutions. NITC is prepared to support your IT business needs and requirements for today, tomorrow, and the future.

http://www.ocio.usda.gov/nitc/ess_web.html
Last Modified: 06/20/2008