Using Interoperable Process Models in a Multi-agency Planning Toolkit for
Enterprise and C4ISR Architecture Analysis
September 2003
David Payne, The MITRE Corporation
Kenneth Hoffman, The MITRE Corporation
Kangmin Zheng, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
The Center for Enterprise Modernization, the civil-agency center of the MITRE
Corporation, is performing continuing research to explore the issues surrounding enterprise modernization
planning in a multi agency environment. The objective is to support integrated mission and information
technology planning covering enterprise strategic plans, performance management, investment plans, and
information resource management plans through more detailed representations of mission and business
processes that are coupled to the Enterprise Architecture. Increasingly, government initiatives such as e-
Government, along with new governmental challenges such as homeland security, require groups of
agencies to interoperate at the mission activity and organizational levels, as well as at the information
system support level. The collaborating agencies typically have incompatible architectures at varied stages
of development and sophistication. Additionally, key aspects of successful interagency collaboration
depend also on the interplay of human and IT and non-IT systems forming a work flow or activity network.
Issues include timing, synchronization, priorities, bandwidth, systems compatibility, and agency-unique
syntaxes. The syntax issues exist at both the data and information exchange levels, with information
exchange syntax differences impacting both human and machine information exchanges. The Multi agency
Planning Toolkit effort includes use of process models developed in several commercial process modeling
environments, as well as static information architecture products conforming to defined architecture
frameworks. One research goal is to find ways to easily move architectural and process information
between the static architecture environments and the dynamic process model environments. A second goal
is to explore environment to environment level interoperability of the process models built in different
COTS environments. This later capability will support use of existing models from individual agencies as
active components of a larger multi agency planning environment.
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Additional Search Keywords
Enterprise Architecture, Multi Agency, Architecture Analysis, Architecture Modeling, Process Models,
Interoperability
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