Booz Allen Wins One of the First-Ever Enterprise Architecture Achievement Awards
The DoD and Association for Enterprise Integration honor people and programs that leverage the power of architecture in enterprise management.
On April 24, 2008, Booz Allen Hamilton was presented with a Department of Defense (DoD) Enterprise Architecture Achievement (DEAA) award—a first from the DoD.
The award recognizes the firm’s significant contributions in advancing enterprise architecture (EA) for the DoD, and commends vice president Tom Greenspon and his team for their work supporting the Department of Navy (DON) Architecture Federation Pilot project. Brant Frey accepted the award on behalf of the firm.
“We’re honored to be the first to receive this award,” says Greenspon. “It speaks well of Booz Allen’s interaction with our clients and our expertise in the strategic planning discipline. It’s an example of our thought leadership, which goes beyond helping clients comply with directives to providing the support so they can tackle large-scale challenges and make sense of their environment. Our team also gets a lot of intellectual reward and psychic income from doing something that’s meaningful.”
The DEAA awards were presented at the DoD Enterprise Architecture Conference, hosted by the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI). The annual conference brings together EA professionals from the military services, defense organizations, industry, academia, and other federal agencies. The DoD Office of the Deputy CIO, in conjunction with AFEI, instituted the awards.
EA is a methodology that helps organizations manage complexity by mapping the relationships between business processes and the data, hardware, software, and IT infrastructure that support them.
Senior associate Frank Brady is a member of the team that won the award. “Organizations are comprised of business lines that execute sequenced activities, called processes,” he explains. “Automation and technology are added to processes to increase the organization’s efficiency or competitiveness. Most organizations execute dozens of complex processes simultaneously, often using hundreds of systems.”
Booz Allen’s EA approach rapidly organizes an enterprise by capturing a snapshot of its current processes and systems, identifying the target state, and crafting a transition strategy to move towards the target. EA can improve process efficiency, eliminate redundant information systems, align organizations to maximize processes and technology, and reduce costs.
“EA shows how things work and how they contribute to business success by providing a cohesive, holistic view of an organization’s processes and the information that supports them,” Greenspon explains. “Booz Allen partnered with DON to provide clarity around complexity.”
“Booz Allen leverages our staff network to find creative perspectives on client problems,” says Brady. “We also have extensive experience working with DoD and an understanding of their unique challenges. Our efforts on the DON project ultimately impact the effectiveness of our armed forces and the security of the U.S. This drives our commitment to ensure superior results for our clients.”
AFEI is an industry association that advances the sharing, integration, management, and protection of information, provides a framework for collaboration between government and industry, and acts as a conduit for the DoD CIO for industry policy and strategy input.
“The Wave of the Future”
Booz Allen customized the Global Information Grid (GIG) Architecture Federation Strategy for DON to win the award. The strategy provides a minimum set of rules and standards from DoD and allows for maximum flexibility so that each service that uses it can tailor its own implementation plan.
Greenspon calls the federation strategy “the wave of the future.”
“The federation approach recognizes that the responsibility for architecture development is shared at several tiers of an organization,” Brady says. “The approach maps down to a minimum amount of detail at each tier and establishes ‘touch points’ between tiers. This concept sets the stage for dividing the enterprise into manageable components.”
The Booz Allen team, consisting of Brady, senior associate Meg Giordano, and principal Robert Thompson, developed DON’s implementation of the federation strategy by creating a repeatable process that, when applied to any number of architectures, produces a consistent result. They also created an implementation guide to support the development of the larger DON architecture environment.
“Few outside this community can appreciate the dedication and perseverance required to achieve these results,” said Brian Wilczynski, chief of staff of the Architecture and Interoperability Directorate, about the DEAA awards. “The quality of work exhibited is exceptional.”
The project concluded in January 2008, but the team continues to support DON and DoD in institutionalizing the federation process and educating the client as to how it works.
story posted May 27, 2008
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