SAIC Helps Build the Roadmap for Homeland Security

Today, there's the complex challenge of designing the IT foundation that will enable and support tomorrow's cutting-edge systems. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that means working to integrate and consolidate more than 700 computer systems that serve 180,000 DHS employees without interfering with their important day-to-day work. DHS Chief Information Officer Steven Cooper has likened the task to changing the tires on a car while it's traveling 70 miles an hour.

Cooper's partner in that endeavor: SAIC.

What are the results?

"We have accomplished something unique in Federal government: We designed and delivered a comprehensive — and immediately useful — target enterprise architecture in under four months," Cooper recently told a House of Representatives subcommittee.

That architecture lays out the roadmap for a massive integration effort: how to integrate and transform the business processes, data, and information technologies of 22 formerly separate agencies. DHS needed the architecture and a transition plan within four months in order to make IT investment decisions for the next budget cycle.

Responding to the challenge, Dr. Karl Kropp, director of SAIC's Center for Enterprise Architecture, knew he had the necessary ingredients to deliver what DHS officials needed.

Kropp already had a cadre of experienced professionals and a proven approach developed when SAIC created a successful enterprise architecture for a legacy agency (the Immigration & Naturalization Service). And having previously worked with most of the agencies that made up the new Department of Homeland Security, SAIC could help bring together the many stakeholders across DHS. Together, all of these capabilities enabled our team to deliver the fast turnaround our client needed.

Development of the DHS enterprise architecture was extremely challenging, due to the complexity and cultural diversity of the DHS organization, the size of the enterprise, and the short timeframe for completion. SAIC worked closely with the customer, and SAIC team members either canceled vacations or changed vacation plans around project deliverable to fully participate and continue being part of this exceptionally important effort.

According to Cooper, the comprehensive team effort resulted in high quality products that raised the bar for the development time and quality of enterprise architectures for other Federal agencies.

DHS is already using the SAIC architecture blueprint to jump-start several important efforts, such as establishing an information-sharing clearinghouse and better coordinating terrorist watch lists.

"Our EA (enterprise architecture) is enabling us to make decisions about our IT investments now, even as we continue the hard work of developing greater detail, reaching deeper to find more opportunities for consolidation, and beginning to develop new and improved mission support capabilities," Cooper said.

The SAIC team identified many areas for possible consolidation to improve efficiency. These included more than 300 applications for back-office functions, such as budgeting, financial management, recruiting, and human resources; and more than 1,000 servers and 1,000 telecommunications circuits. In addition, there are at least eight initiatives in various agencies that support port-of-entry management and 14 that support credentialing activities.

SAIC's Technical Approach

Standardized processes are essential to achieve reliable and repeatable performance. SAIC's Center for Enterprise Architecture consistently uses an integrated framework of processes, tools, and methodologies that enable effective enterprise management throughout the enterprise's lifecycle. This approach encompasses the three critical factors for achieving successful enterprise architectures.

Enterprise architectures must be:

• Top down — to achieve optimal transformational change across an enterprise
• Business focused — helping to solve the business problems of the enterprise
• Rapid — using documented repeatable processes to deliver actionable information in a timely manner

This approach enabled the SAIC team to quickly tailor its processes to meet the time constraints and to identify and define the products to be produced. The most notable effect of this tailoring process: the baseline characterization was developed in parallel with the target business model.

SAIC's Center for Enterprise Architecture works with other SAIC groups that have refined several analytical and planning methods to support enterprise architectures.

Improving Information Sharing

DHS requires an efficient means of handling data across the department to enable DHS and other entities to share timely, accurate, accessible, and reusable information. A data-usage matrix, referred to as CURE, is the cornerstone of SAIC's enterprise architecture planning.

For DHS, it helped to identify where data actually resides, who uses the data, where the data is used, and when the data must be available. That knowledge is invaluable in identifying common activities that can be automated and subsequently provided to many users. SAIC team members have refined the CURE process.

Using ESP

To better plan an enterprise's transition to a new infrastructure, SAIC has also developed an Enterprise Sequencing Process (ESP). As DHS decides which systems to keep, modify or discard, the process helps determine priorities, dependencies, relationships, sequences, and "quick hit" projects for a time-phased transition plan.

Related Information

• Homeland Security