INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: INS Needs to Better Manage the Development of Its Enterprise Architecture
Abstract
INS' Office of Information Resources Management(OIRM) has, in isolation from INS business owners, put together a bottom-up description of INS' current IT environment and it has mapped its software applications to INS' three major business areas. This is a reasonable start to describing INS' current architectural environment. However, important steps still need to be accomplished, such as linking the systems environment description to a decomposed view of INS' business areas, including each area's component business functions and subfunctions, and information needs and flows among functions and subfunctions. Doing this with any degree of reliability, however, requires business owners to validate the resultant linkages. Also, INS has not begun developing either a target architecture or a plan for sequencing between its current architecture and a target architecture. In lieu of the target architecture, OIRM is developing what it calls an initial target architecture is a 2-year plan for correcting known system-level problems. However, such an approach does not satisfy federal and private sector guidance on the origin, content, and purpose of a target architecture. Rather, this plan will basically describe near-term system maintenance efforts and will not provide a definition of the business and systems environments needed to optimize INS' mission performance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA382581
Entities
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office