Burk: FEA could become an FEA

What goes under the rubric of federal enterprise architecture is not really an architecture, but the Office of Management and Budget is examining ways it might become one, said Dick Burk, chief architect.

“We are exploring the opportunity to develop a federal architecture,” he said following a speech he gave today at FCW Events’ Enterprise Architecture conference and exhibition in Washington, D.C.

The federal enterprise architecture of today is mostly a program overseeing agency architecture development and a means for initiating some cross-agency consolidation efforts. But many of the building blocks for creating an actual federal enterprise architecture are already in place, Burk said. For example, some lines-of-business initiatives are extending existing federal reference models to include more detail.

Turning the federal enterprise architecture into a real one would not require agencies to abandon their chosen tools and frameworks, Burk said. What will be necessary, however, is a translator between all the frameworks' terminology, he added. Architecture frameworks aren’t so different to make that task impossible, he said. “It’s a limited universe of ideas.”

An OMB-sponsored study of collaboration tools that might enable the federal enterprise architecture is nearly complete, Burk said. The study is examining possible future roles for Core.gov and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Management System. The E-Authentication e-government initiative is set to become next month the first reusable component in the Core.gov repository.

It’s unclear whether going forward there will be a single repository or multiple repositories, Burk added.