Department of Education (U.S.): SOA Helps Align IT and Business Needs

More and more enterprises are using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a means of improving business operations, not only in the private sector, but also in the federal government. A team of CSC integrators developed the SOA Framework, which has helped the U.S. Department of Education (ED) simplify its enterprise architecture and align its IT portfolio with its business needs. Spanning both technology and business architectures, the SOA Framework is providing a common language that facilitates communication between the business and technology communities, which is helping the agency manage its budget by establishing a clear line of sight between IT investments and strategic objectives.

Supporting business goals

In general, Enterprise Architecture (EA) is applied to help enterprises reuse business processes and improve the interconnectivity among existing business and IT assets. In the case of the Department of Education, the agency not only needed a tool to help manage its IT portfolio, but also needed a way to reposition its portfolio to more directly support its business goals. The SOA Framework serves as the infrastructure for EA and is helping the agency increase its knowledge management capabilities.

The White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has imposed requirements on government agencies to establish and use EA to align agency IT investments with strategic goals and objectives. CSC's Gordon Babcock, Rich Reba and Gerald Loev guided the development and deployment of ED's Enterprise Architecture by incorporating the SOA Framework into the agency's way of understanding and managing IT. As a result, ED went from having one of the lowest-rated EA's as ranked by the OMB to being rated in the top four among all federal agencies. The development and implementation of the SOA Framework has resulted in the team being named as one of the recipients of the 2006 CSC Award for Technical Excellence.

Bridging the gap

CSC's Babcock, Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Education's EDNet program, says one of the biggest dilemmas facing the agency was a lack of understanding between business and IT. "The problem was that the business people would use a language they can understand. Then they would throw it over the wall to the technology staff, who, in turn, would attempt to interpret the business needs in their own way. As with any type of strained communication, the resulting IT solutions frequently fell short of the intended business needs. The absence of a common 'language' inhibited the clear flow of information between the business and technology communities."

Loev, the Program Director for CSC's EA program at ED, notes that the SOA Framework is helping do much more than facilitate communication. "It is serving as a way to help the department undertake fundamental change without engendering the type of stakeholder resistance that transformational change normally encounters," he says. "The SOA Framework creates a way for all parts of the organization to see and understand the natural roles and relationships of various parts of the enterprise. By adopting a 'service' perspective, business areas see that what they want and need are services that meet definable performance levels within acceptable time and cost constraints. This diffuses the traditional turf protection that usually inhibits change. That is, the 'service' perspective helps stakeholders focus on what they are doing, producing results, rather than preserving empires."

Reba says the solution was to develop an SOA Framework that uses a business-based, universal language to describe both the business and technology aspects of the agency's enterprise architecture. "This has simplified the architecture and more clearly defined key lines of business, making it easier for all parties to communicate and has given them a better understanding what the other needs to get the job done," he says. "The end result has been significant improvements in the agency's business/IT alignment and service delivery capabilities."

One essential ingredient to the success of SOA Framework was a simplified visual representation of the agency's service delivery process, developed by CSC's Reba. He says, "Visual language is the same whether you're a businessperson or a technology person. It has the ease of understanding where you can reflect the entire business, from the business goals all the way down to the individual components of the business. It makes it really clear. Both business people and technical people have the same kind of language to speak."

Increased efficiency

The concept of SOA is not new, but it has become more prominent in the business world in recent years because technologies such as XML and Web services have made it easier to implement. One key business benefit is that through the use of an effective SOA, enterprises can increase efficiency by reusing and reassembling IT and business services, processes, and applications, instead of building them from scratch.

As businesses go, the Department of Education is huge, with an annual budget of close to $90 billion, much of that devoted to student loans and educational grants. Loev says, "At the outset of the project, the first thing we did was define and develop the lines of business." One result of the improved communication and understanding between the agency's IT and business players was the decision by ED management to build a data warehouse.

The agency's EA is now being used as a strategic management tool by the ED's executive team. Babcock says the agency can now more easily prioritize investments by identifying what functions are most critical to the operation of the business. The CSC team introduced a Value Framework in conjunction with its SOA work to link IT investments to the performance goals and objectives of the hierarchy of services that each investment supports. The line of sight made possible through the SOA Framework is helping the agency make the tough investment priority choices given significant cutbacks in IT funding in recent years.

In the end, a key benefit brought about by SOA Framework is that the Department of Education now runs more like a private enterprise. "People are surprised when we talk about the federal government as a business, but they very much look at themselves as a business," concludes Babcock.

For More Information

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