The following is an article that appeared in the September-November 2002 edition of CSC World.

By John Dodd & Chander Ramchandani

Aligning information technology with business has been a private sector goal for many years. Business corporations have found alignment to be an elusive goal, and government agencies are now making the same discovery.

One of the reasons business has found alignment so difficult to achieve is that it is a moving target - business and technology keep changing. That became very evident when companies launched e-business initiatives in the 1990s. Many of these initiatives were no more than "bolt-ons" to legacy systems, and the same thing happened in government.

Modernizing those systems often did not improve matters because they did not integrate the new front-ends with the IT back-ends. Although the "e" prefix announced that these initiatives were explicitly based on IT, e-government and IT tended to go off in different directions.

If e-government is to attain the goal of better service to citizens, it cannot go off in a different direction from IT. An agency’s enterprise architecture should be designed to close the gap between IT services and the mission needs they serve. The right kind of enterprise architecture puts strategy first by putting IT where it belongs: at the service of the mission.

Getting IT under control

The US government has found it particularly difficult to achieve alignment because the divergence between IT and mission needs was, however unintentionally, written into law.

In the mid-1990s, Congress became very upset about the poor return government agencies seemed to be getting for their IT investments. The legislators focused most of their attention on the largest case, the Internal Revenue Service’s multibillion dollar failure to modernize its sprawling, creaky system. But people from other agencies who were asked to testify before Congress seemed to have no clear idea what IT projects were underway and what improvements those projects were expected to bring about.

Legislators knew that private sector organizations had chief information officers who were responsible for capital planning. They also knew that these CIOs had to get their projects approved by boards of directors. The result was the Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1996, which is better known as the Clinger-Cohen Act, after its sponsors. Clinger-Cohen required agencies to appoint CIOs, and required CIOs to develop and implement enterprise architectures for the agencies’ IT systems.

Two years later, Congress told the agencies to get busy on e-government. The Government Paperwork Elimination Act set a 2003 deadline for putting government forms online so that citizens and organizations can conduct transactions with government electronically.

Now IT modernization and e-government each had its own congressional mandate. In some agencies, the two initiatives were led by different people. A law requiring agencies to link the two initiatives together is still in the works.

Going from Web sites to Web services delivery

When the Web became popular in the early and mid-1990s, many agencies set up their own sites. Like those set up by private companies in the same years, these were mostly billboard sites that did no more than disseminate information to citizens and organizations. Also like private companies, these billboard sites were set up with little or no integration with back-end systems.

The new e-government initiatives, however, will require much more from Web sites than simply posting information or even putting forms online. They are focused on delivering Web services to citizens, business partners, and other government agencies, as well as improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of government operations.

Congress’ goal in passing the Paperwork Elimination Act - and the goal of e-government initiatives around the world - is not only to allow citizens to download forms and send hard copies through the post office but to transform government service. The goal is to allow citizens and organizations to use the Web for conducting services electronically with the government, with minimal human intervention.

These new initiatives require the integration of front-end Web access capabilities with back-end systems. Having to devise enterprise architectures and Web service delivery approaches at the same time has brought government CIOs face to face with the need to link the two initiatives.

Architectural frameworks support transformation

Some agencies are forging ahead with their own plans for linking enterprise architecture with e-government. They are taking a top-down approach, asking, "How does Internet technology support our mission?" This approach needs to be the accepted practice rather than the exception - no agency can afford to run the two initiatives independently of each other. Agencies need to adopt a top-down approach to managing the totality of their IT assets, by including e-government requirements in their IT strategy.

The real challenge starts once an agency has an integrated IT strategy that incorporates e-government needs: integrating e-government services into the enterprise architecture.

Agencies have a large investment in legacy systems, and budget constraints preclude their extensive replacement anytime soon. So they need an approach that enables rapid, flexible integration of front-end and back-end systems in a manner that preserves investment in the agency’s workhorse systems, and will enable their replacement when IT dollars are available.

The right kind of enterprise architecture can accomplish that integration without expensive and time-consuming replacement projects. The right kind of architecture frameworks will enable integrated electronic service delivery approaches that integrate and hide organizational elements, and focus on the delivery of services with a consistent and easily navigated approach. The framework must separate out areas that change frequently, using layers and adapters and creating bridges to legacy systems.

This architectural framework must be ready to accept new technologies at the pace the customer wants. It must be able to accommodate new developments in portals, business process management, enterprise application integration, and other technologies that are incubating in labs and standards groups.

Developing an architectural framework that manages e-government integration smoothly and incrementally, while leveraging the investment in legacy systems, will permit the systematic integration of new technologies. This will reduce risk, provide new capabilities more quickly, and future-proof the environment. Planning this kind of framework today will enable government services to be transformed cost-effectively in the future.

John Dodd and Chander Ramchandani work in CSC Federal Sector’s Strategic Initiatives Office.

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