government agencies can no longer afford to keep building isolated information systems for every new government program. The days of isolated islands of information and application stovepipes that can't be reused are over. In today's world of shrinking budgets and high expectations of citizens and elected officials, agencies are looking for improved systems integration and performance. IT investments must be closely linked to an agency's business needs and core mission. That's why an increasing number of governments are adopting the enterprise architecture (EA) planning process. Enterprise architecture helps agencies re-engineer their business processes and design the necessary information systems to support evolving business needs. Here's an overview of enterprise architecture and how Microsoft can help your agency adopt this planning process. Overview of enterprise architecture An enterprise architecture describes how all parts of a department or the entire government—including employees, external partners, business processes, data, and technology—work together to achieve its goals and missions. Enterprise architecture is a conceptual tool that assists an organization with the understanding of its current structure and the way it works, and how it would like to work in the future. It provides a roadmap of the enterprise and a route planner for government modernization and change. The U.S. federal government requires agencies to synchronize their IT investments with the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). This helps identify current and future opportunities for collaborate, consolidation, and integration across the federal government and with state and local governments. Functions that are performed by multiple agencies are now clearly delineated, and opportunities for cross-agency collaboration are more apparent. This was accomplished using a Business Reference Model (BRM), which serves as the foundation for the FEA by describing the government's operations independent of the agencies that perform them. The Microsoft concept of enterprise architectureThe information in the enterprise architecture can be viewed from many perspectives and it can satisfy many needs. Architectural users include business managers and analysts, system architects and designers, workflow and procedures analysts, logistics specialists, organizational analysts. These people require high-level summary information, detailed data, and all levels in between. These demands are met through the creation of conceptual views, logical analyses, and physical implementations. At Microsoft, we find that four general perspectives are important and are commonly used. These are the business, application, information, and technology perspectives. The Business perspectiveThis describes how a government or agency works. It includes broad strategies along with plans for moving the organization from its current state to an envisaged future state. It typically includes an organization's mission and goals, the business processes carried out by the entire organization, the functions performed and major organizational structures. The application perspective This defines an agency's application portfolio and is typically citizen-centered. This view usually includes descriptions of automated services that support business processes, descriptions of the interaction and interdependencies (interfaces) of the organization's application systems, and plans for developing new applications and revising old applications based on government objectives and evolving technology platforms. The application perspective may represent cross-organization services, information, and functionality, linking users of different skills and job functions in order to achieve common goals. The information perspective This describes what an organization needs to know to run its processes and operations. It includes standard data models, data management policies, descriptions of the patterns of information production and consumption in the organization. The information perspective also describes how data is bound into the work flow, including structured data stores such as databases, and unstructured data stores such as documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that exist throughout the organization. The technology perspectiveThis perspective lays out the hardware and software supporting the organization. It provides a logical, vendor-independent description of infrastructure and system components that are necessary to support the application and information perspectives. It defines the set of technology standards and services needed to execute the agency's mission. Next StepsMicrosoft and its partners are helping governments around the world adopt enterprise architecture planning processes. The following technology solutions are designed to help improve enterprise business processes:
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