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CHIPS Articles: Department of the Navy Enterprise Architecture: Providing Value to Stakeholders

Department of the Navy Enterprise Architecture: Providing Value to Stakeholders
By Victor Ecarma and Fumie Wingo - January-March 2011
The Department of the Navy Enterprise Architecture (DON EA) continues to provide stakeholder value and support DON transformation. Since its initial release in July 2009, the DON EA has been focused on two overarching goals: • Guiding the department's Information Technology, including National Security Systems (IT/NSS), investments toward achieving departmental goals and objectives. This is done by including actionable content in the DON EA, such as those artifacts associated with data at rest (DAR) encryption, fielding only supported commercial off-the-shelf software, and DON NIPRNET public key enablement (PKE).
• Assisting DON program managers in the development of "solution architectures," as mandated by the Joint Capabilities and Integration Development System and Defense Acquisition System processes. This is done by providing program managers "plug-and-play" DON EA products to be used as a foundation for their architectures. All DON IT/NSS systems are assessed on an annual basis for compliance with the DON EA. The need to perform an assessment is triggered by one of the following events: • A DON Information Management/Information Technology (IM/IT) Investment Annual Review. As of Oct. 1, 2010, the IM/IT Investment Annual Review process was expanded to include all four mission areas: Business Mission Area (BMA), Enterprise Information Environment Mission Area (EIEMA), Warfighting Mission Area (WMA) and Defense Intelligence Mission Area (DIMA).
• A Title 40/Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA) Confirmation. Title 40/CCA Confirmations are required for all Information Technology/National Security Systems, prior to each formal acquisition milestone, contract award and deployment and fielding decision.
• A DON NIPRNET public key enablement (PKE) waiver request. The DON EA is an integrated architecture, as depicted in Figure 1, which is made up of enterprise-level architecture content, as well as the solution architectures of the DON. The enterprise-level content provides program managers with foundational information to be used in the development of their program-specific solution architectures. It helps to minimize the need for solution architects to recreate portions of the enterprise architecture that are not specific to their individual program. In addition, the solution architectures, developed by individual DON programs, are one of the key mechanisms used to expand and mature the DON EA content. The DON EA enterprise-level content also provides authoritative requirements, which program managers must comply with, to ensure their particular solution is aligned with achieving departmental goals and objectives.

With the release of DON EA v2.0.000 in July 2010, the architecture content was expanded to include traditional DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) products such as the Capability Taxonomies (CV-2), Organizational Hierarchies (OV-4), Operational Activities (OV-5), Technical Standards (StdV-1), Technical Standards Forecast (StdV-2), and architecture common element lists. DON EA v2.0.000 requires acquisition category (ACAT) programs to document their solution architectures in a particular way and/or to make use of DON EA artifacts as their starting point. In addition, DON EA v2.0.000 included new and updated laws, regulations, policies and guidance (LRPG) artifacts, which are based on existing DoD and DON policy and strategy, such as requirements associated with Navy conditioned based maintenance.

The DON EA compliance and waiver processes are the mechanisms used to ensure that existing policy and strategy (i.e., LRPG), and other contents of DON EA, are properly executed by DON programs. Effective Oct. 1, 2010, compliance assertion, waiver requests and review processes have been fully automated in the DON variant of the DoD Information Technology Portfolio Repository (DITPR)-DON.

Each DON EA waiver requested represents an individual

TAGS: EA
DON EA Capstone
DON EA Capstone
CHIPS is an official U.S. Navy website sponsored by the Department of the Navy (DON) Chief Information Officer, the Department of Defense Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) and the DON's ESI Software Product Manager Team at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific.

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