A long sought goal of the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) has been the creation of shared target architectures among federal agencies. The initial e-Government Initiatives and “Lines of Business” defined shared architectures for several business-specific areas, based on the then level of maturity of the FEA. The Federal Segment Architecture Methodology (FSAM) and the Enterprise Architecture Segment Reports (EASR) provide the tools for federal agencies to take the next step towards establishing shared target or “to-be” architectures for key, cross-boundary government functions.
Shared target segment architectures provide agencies with detailed guidance to use as they plan and architect the evolution of their IT Portfolio and their use of information to improve agency performance. Planning and architecting along these lines is critical to improving information sharing, increasing efficiency and effectiveness, tightening performance and strategy alignment, and securing Federal cyberspace. Agencies plan from their current, baseline “as is”, they make business decisions about how to propose to allocate capital via the Capital Planning and Investment Control process to evolve their IT portfolio using the shared target segment architectures as alignment targets.
