Passing information from one government agency to another—and then another—is like participating in a relay race. The winners excel in their individual laps and exchange the baton smoothly and crisply. This is the goal of multi-agency modernization programs, because "dropping the baton" could mean mission failure.

In any inter-agency activity, many individuals perform their assignments and collect and manage critical information related to the overall mission. Consider this scenario in international trade: When cargo leaves Marseilles bound for the Port of Baltimore, a U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) agent checks the shipment prior to loading. Crew members must acquire visas from the State Department to allow them to disembark at their American ports of call. While the ship's on the ocean, the Department of Defense (DOD) needs to know that it's indeed just a freighter from a friendly country, not an enemy vessel. The Coast Guard (USCG) monitors the boat as it reaches U.S. waters and may conduct an inspection. In port, Customs officials inspect the cargo again, and the crew members' visas must be verified by immigration officials. If the freight contains meat, produce, or live plants, an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will be standing by. And if an agent discovers narcotics or other suspicious materials, the Drug Enforcement Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation gets involved. The Department of Energy is alert to the potential threats of nuclear materials.

One shipment of goods from overseas may involve the efforts of five or more individual agencies; throughout the journey, the agency with primary accountability changes along the way. Exchanging the right information and handing off responsibility at the right time has never been more complex—or, in a post-September 11 world, more important.

Consider the $2 trillion of annual imports to and exports from the United States and one sees the magnitude of the problem and of the opportunities in multi-agency collaboration. MITRE—with its longstanding experience in mission planning, information systems, and systems architectures—is performing research into methods of planning and managing modernization programs to improve the performance of multi-agency missions and operations.

"New challenges to the nation require an increased level of multi-agency collaboration, but there are currently many impediments—both technical and organizational," says Kenneth Hoffman, a MITRE systems engineer. Hoffman is principal investigator for the research project "Multi-Agency Modernization Planning," a mouthful of a name in keeping with the complexity of the problem. The project is funded by MITRE, directed from our Center for Enterprise Modernization (CEM), and involves researchers from across MITRE.

An Architecture-Based Approach

To address the complex problem of multi-agency modernization, Hoffman and his team members are focusing on agencies' business and mission activities, as well as their supporting information technology programs, which are built into organizations' enterprise architectures (EA). An EA is a kind of technology roadmap for the improvement of business and mission operations and information systems within complex organizations—such as the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Homeland Defense, or DOD.

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, in conformance with the Clinger-Cohen Act, requires that all government agencies requesting large-scale IT budget allocations develop EAs and OMB is publishing a series of reference models for guidance. These architectures support the capital planning process and help manage and direct the flow of knowledge (both inside and outside the agency) so that business missions and goals can be achieved as efficiently as possible. EAs also help managers understand who needs what information and why. While EAs, which represent an enormous investment in money and staff, are used extensively in support of the IT capital planning process, they are not used as effectively as they could be for overall enterprise strategic and modernization planning.

Using an international trade scenario much like the one described earlier, as a test case, Hoffman and his colleagues are working to develop tools and methods for modernization across agencies, using information in the enterprise architectures and other resources within each agency.

"We're modeling the end-to-end event sequence of critical multi-agency operations—for example, tracking the international flow of cargo, passengers, and money," he says. "Once we know how such an event sequence works, we can then develop appropriate tools for making sound decisions about technologies, investments, resource allocation, and personnel allocation to get the best end-to-end performance."

Cross-Agency Collaboration a Mandate

There are several challenges to integrating information across agencies for the purpose of multi-agency modernization. For instance, most government agencies are in some stage of developing their own enterprise architectures, each with its own scope, content, and requirements. This includes the organizations that participate in multi-agency missions, such as the Departments of Defense, Treasury, Justice, State, Commerce, and Homeland Security, state and local agencies, and foreign governments.

It takes a lot of time and effort to develop single EAs; it's even more difficult for agencies to find efficient ways to get together to plan multi-agency missions. However, it's critical to do so. If vital information inside one agency's computers seems innocuous when another agency's computers would send up red flags about that same information, important activities might not be performed.

"Multiple agencies need to plan and function together to accomplish complex joint missions and avoid information gaps, redundancies, inconsistencies, and constraints on interoperability," Hoffman says. The government is consequently looking for ways to help agencies cooperate.

One way it's doing this is by developing the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), a framework for creating federally compliant EAs that specifically promotes "cross-agency collaboration, transformation, and government-wide improvement."

MITRE has a long history of working on many of the major enterprise architecture frameworks used by both the civilian and military branches of government, including the FEA, the Treasury EA Framework, and the Department of Defense Architecture Framework. It's not surprising that Hoffman's work has attracted the attention of many of MITRE's customers, who deal with exactly the kinds of problems the project tackles.

"Many of our ideas are being fed into MITRE programs, particularly CEM programs," he says. "To understand the customers' concerns and needs, we've had discussions with them, as well as with the Office of Management and Budget and the federal EA folks. We believe that our work also applies to large individual agencies with complex sets of missions."

Meeting the Needs of the President's Management Agenda One guide in the Planner's Workbench deals specifically with governance issues. The President's Management Agenda provides directions for top-down governance and focuses on five initiatives, all supported by Workbench tools as indicated: 1. Managing human capital—accounting for all staff engaged in multi-agency business/mission activities. 2. Integrating budget and performance—using activity based cost and performance models related to specific multi-agency missions. 3. Improving financial management—using common activity definitions in mission description and financial accounts for performance measurement. 4. Adding E-Government solutions—across agencies and in services to the citizen. 5. Developing competitive sourcing of business services and IT components—described as services and components in the set of agency EAs and related to the multi-agency mission.

Tools for the Job

Hoffman's group started working on real multi-agency missions (such as commercial trade and passenger flow) to test their concepts, with the goal of offering the results of their research to EA designers in the near term. One of these potential solutions is the Planner's Workbench, currently in prototype form, which organizes and integrates a variety of analytical tools and methods including geographic information systems, simulation models, and decision-support systems. The Workbench integrates this multifaceted toolkit of mainly commercial-off-the-shelf software applications, enabling organizations to better use their architectural and process information to move between different architecture environments.

The Workbench will eventually contain a data repository engine to store and exchange architecture information. Using software tools called "translators," the Planner's Workbench is designed to foster interoperability between and among different agencies, linking inconsistent data formats, different technologies, and assorted enterprise architecture models for the multi-agency planning environment. Integrated in the Planners Workbench, these tools and methods provide the capability for Simulation-Based Modernization.

"We understand that no single architecture style fits everyone's needs," Hoffman says. "You need different tools to do homeland security missions versus joint DOD missions versus e-government virtualization. They're very different mission types, and we're trying to find unique tools that apply to each and allow groups to share information with one another. So we're pushing ahead on a broad front to come up with comprehensive tools and methodologies for people to apply to their specific situations."

Good Governance Is Key to the Modernization Challenges

Hoffman explains that the Planner's Workbench can't meet all the challenges of inter-agency collaboration. For one thing, the people factor is critical in any successful multi-agency endeavor.

"Collaboration takes a two-track approach—management and technical," he says. "At a basic level, it means getting IT folks to really talk with the business and mission folks. In a large agency, the cost accountants, strategic planners, and IT people all talk different languages. We want to help establish a common language with common definitions of business/mission activities. But barriers to distributed collaboration are still there. Unfortunately, the old 'data-center' mentality still exists in many places."

Another tricky issue: multi-agency EAs: require top-down governance—a guiding hand from the major players—even more than most enterprise architectures do. "It's hard to bubble something like this up from the bottom," Hoffman says. "Executives at the highest level have to commit to getting people together. This is especially important because the governance model needs to integrate budget and performance."

However, that top-down governance doesn't negate the importance of bottom-up detail: "The content of the architectures must come from all levels. Otherwise it's easy to lose sight of the specific business goals—the work to be accomplished.

"There's a tremendous amount of information in EAs: business processes, business activities, organization, infrastructures, data diagrams, and all the accompanying IT systems," he says. "EAs are a very diverse and rich source of information. Agencies haven't capitalized on the abundance of information available within EAs. They could use the data to figure out how to work together to share information. When you deal with the complexity of multi-agency missions, you have to get into the details."

Hoffman praises the Department of Defense's EA framework for taking an effective mission-oriented approach. "Often, civilian agencies are organized on an organization-centered basis, instead of a mission-centered one," he says. "We've learned a lot from the DOD, and we can transfer that knowledge to the civil side."

Seeing the Whole Picture

Although the challenges posed by inter-agency cooperation won't be solved quickly, Hoffman plans to get his team's ideas out to government leaders in the next year, both in the form of the Planner's Workbench and in management discussions with various agencies. He and his team also hope to publish a handbook on multi-agency planning in the future.

"To make the tools and methods effective, there really has to be an agency-wide and multi-agency commitment to doing it, and that's a governance—a top-down and collaborative—issue," he says. "But we also realize that we can help make the content of single agency EAs more useful and get a greater payback from those large investments. Every EA is filled with the details and decision-support capabilities from the bottom up that can be captured for effective use in multi-agency mission models.

"Then, when you see the whole picture, you can start to ask: 'Where would additional staffing and/or reallocation of resources be most effective? Where is the greatest technology payoff to improve the total performance?' Whether you're talking about cooperation between civil and military organizations in a crisis, a joint military mission, or the single seizure of illegal narcotics from a ship docking in an American port, this is pretty important stuff."

—by Alison Stern-Dunyak

Related Information

Technical Papers

• Using Interoperable Process Models in a Multi-agency Planning Toolkit for Enterprise and C4ISR Architecture Analysis

Websites

• Executive Office of the President: Office of Management and Budget

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