GAO Survey: Office of the President at Level 5 of EA Maturity Model

Government Computer News reports that the Office of the President is the only agency of those surveyed by the GAO to meet its requirements for Stage 5 as defined in version 1.1 of the audit agency's Maturity model.

"The IT team for EOP—which includes approximately 2,800 employees in 14 separate organizations such as the Office of Management and Budget, National Security Council and the Office of the Trade Representative—credits the architecture with helping it set a plan for consolidating four disparate e-mail systems by spring.

The plan also led the White House team to modify an electronic records management system that it already was implementing rather than buy a potentially duplicative one.

“We felt we met enough provisions to be in Stage 5, but we weren’t sure if we would make it,” CIO Carlos Solari said. “It is a matter of getting people to participate and understanding the importance of this. There is nothing fancy about it but good executive level support and staying focused.”"

The level of immaturity of most agencies' enterprise architecture activities is perhaps the real story: 76 of 93 agencies are at stage 1 of the maturity model:

"“I was surprised there wasn’t more progress,” given the Office of Management and Budget’s emphasize on the architectures and the money that agencies have pumped into these efforts, said Randy Hite, GAO’s director of IT architecture and systems issues.

The problem is that the work is spotty, GAO found, noting that agencies have met some of the requirements of the latter stages but not enough of the requirements to push their plans up the maturity scale. GAO said about 80 percent of agencies were performing eight core elements of stages 2 and 3, according to the report, Information Technology: Leadership Remains Key to Agencies Making Progress on Enterprise Architecture Efforts."