Case Study
The client agency provides competitive and formula grants, and supports a national network of field offices that provides advice to grantees. The federal initiative to extend services to citizens through electronic government, in particular the federal electronic grants program, was going to change the way the agency conducted its operations. In addition, federal enterprise architecture initiatives were going to require a new approach to establishing business support systems. These changes motivated the agency to seek assistance to develop an enterprise architecture.

The HW&W team utilized the Office of Management and Budget’s Federal Enterprise Architecture structure to develop a business reference model. Using the lines of business and sub-functions allocated to the parent organization in the OMB model, the team made a selection of sub-functions that were appropriate to the client agency. For each of these sub-functions, the team developed business processes, sub-processes, and activities.

The resulting business reference model was presented to a group of senior managers from the organization’s program offices in a facilitated session. The program office managers validated the business reference model, verifying that the set of OMB lines of business and sub-functions were appropriate and sufficient to describe the business of the agency. The group validated the business processes that had been defined for each sub-function.

The validated business process model was used to develop a complete suite of models for the OMB business areas – information and applications in addition to processes. These models are high-level representations of the business processes, information, and applications. As such they reflect what is being done, as opposed to how it is done.

The data model depicts business information and business elements required by each business process step. In the high level representation, business elements may be either a class of business information or characteristics of a class. As an example, the element may be a university or a historically black college or university.

The applications model depicts the applications areas and applications services utilized by each business process step. This model uses terms that describe the type of service required rather than the names of computer systems or software. For instance, the model will use the term “contact management” rather than referencing a specific vendor’s database software.

The final step was to develop a composite model, aligning each business process step with all of the business information and application areas it requires. The composite model illustrates the high level picture of the business, information, and applications requirements. This model will be used for enterprise architecture analysis and development.

During the project, HW&W developed supporting papers addressing the interrelationship between the enterprise architecture, the strategic planning, and capital planning and investment control (CPIC) processes.

View Enterprise Architecture Expertise