 The
Architecture and Planning Group (APG) in the
Office of the Chief Information Officer, Bureau of Information
Services, serves as the RRB’s management advisor and senior
consultant regarding corporate information architecture, Information
Technology standards, and information systems planning activities.
These efforts directly support the RRB's and Federal Government’s
ability to share information through open-systems interoperability.
This entails providing agency-wide guidance, expert advice,
oversight and leadership in developing, promoting, and maintaining
an information architecture framework to meet the RRB's current and
future business needs.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a "blueprint" of an
organization's business processes and the information systems and
technology needed to perform those processes efficiently. The
EA is being facilitated by OMB using a collection of interrelated "reference models"
designed to facilitate cross-agency analysis and the identification
of duplicative investments, gaps, and opportunities for
collaboration with in and across Federal agencies. These
models are defined as:
- Performance Reference Model (PRM)
- Business Reference Model (BRM)
- Service Reference Model (SRM)
- Data Reference Model (DRM)
- Technical Reference Model (TRM)
The RRB Enterprise Framework that
provides a visual guide of the steps and processes that compose the
agency's architecture. The RRB's Enterprise Architecture is
contained in a series of documents.
The Common Information
Technology Requirements Vision
 defines a
set of common cohesive enterprise-level requirements to achieve the
agency's business strategies.
The Conceptual Architecture
Guiding Principles
provides a
stable foundation upon which the RRB's information technology staff
can make important IT system design and implementation decisions.
The Conceptual Architecture drives the design and
implementation of the domain architectures and provides logical
consistency across those domain architectures. The agency has
identified the following eight Domain Architectures.
|
Application Development & Acquisition
|
The Application Development
and Acquisition domain has a two-fold purpose. Its mission
includes the definition of high-level principles to be used to
evaluate solutions to support business processes. This include
the following components: · To define principles used to guide
us in making a decision whether to build, acquire or enhance an
application system in response to existing or new business
requirements. · To define principles we will follow to acquire
(i.e., buy or lease) and implement packaged (COTS) solutions. It
also is responsible for defining the principles, technologies,
standards and guidelines for how applications interact and are
designed, developed. This enables a high level of system
integration, reuse of components, rapid deployment of
applications and high responsiveness to changing business
requirements. |
| Data/ Object
|
The Data/Object Domain
defines the mechanics for managing, securing and maintaining the
integrity of the data. It provides high-quality,
consistent data where it is needed to support business and
transactional systems. It requires that data be accurate and
easily accessible. It provides standards and guidelines for
accessing data for decision support and analytical processing.
The life-cycle of data includes data entry, transactional,
operational, decision support, and archived data. |
| Middleware
|
The Enterprise Portal or
Middleware Domain defines the components that create an
integration environment between the user and legacy and server
environment to improve overall usability of the distributed
infrastructure. It provides robust, standardized
mechanisms by which applications can communicate over the
network. Middleware sits between the application and network
communication mechanisms. It provides the infrastructure
for collaboration and sharing of information electronically,
regardless of geographically location or network and platform
technologies. |
| Network
|
Network Architecture defines
the logical and physical infrastructure that provides
connectivity among the various information platforms and/or
services (data, voice, and video) thus enabling information
sharing among our employees, customers, and business partners.
It shall enable access to information regardless of the location
of the client. The network shall be highly available and
adaptable to changing technologies and capacity needs. |
| Platform
|
The Platform Domain
Architecture defines the technical hardware computing components
of the desktop, mainframe and server infrastructure and their
operating systems. It also includes hardware devices used
by employees and constituents. |
| Security /Privacy
|
The purpose of the Security
Architecture Domain is to ensure the protection of assets,
including information and protect the privacy of constituent
information. It identifies criteria and techniques
associated with protecting and providing access to information
resources. It facilitates identification, authentication,
authorization, administration, audit, and naming services. |
| Distributed Operations
Management
|
Distributed Operations
Management Architecture is the framework that identifies the
components and technologies required for managing and supporting
the distributed computing environment to support and enhance the
productivity of its automated business systems. It
incorporates procedures for managing information assets,
including information, data, hardware and software with the
implementation of controls and processes in all environments,
which will be tracked and audited. |
| Web Services
|
The Web Services domain
describes the technologies, standards, and guidelines used in
the support, development, enabling and management of web-based
applications for the agency's intranet and internet sites. |
The purpose of the domain architectures is to define
the "reusable building blocks" of the technology infrastructure.
These building blocks influence the process of selecting and
applying industry standards, selecting standard products, and
designing standard configurations. Product selection and
configuration is NOT the part of this process. Rather the
purpose is to provide the guidance for product selection and
configuration.
RRB’s Governance Process
is intended to successfully ensure that
projects are in compliance to the enterprise architecture (EA).
On a broad level, the purpose of governance is to develop and
manage EA activities, and control and monitor progress. On a
more detailed project level, governance is the basic
principles and policies to follow to ensure Information Technology
(IT) projects are in compliance with EA. It institutes a
method for corrective and adaptive action. The governance
process supplements the existing processes for new projects,
contracts, and revisions to existing systems. It is an
overview of the organizational structures, roles and processes that
guide and monitor the compliance of projects to the RRB’s Enterprise
Architecture. In addition, governance establishes an
architectural approval process and how compliance processes are
integrated within the agency’s System Development Life Cycle (SDLC),
Procurement, and Capital Planning Investment Control (CPIC)
processes.
The
RRB Enterprise Architecture Strategic Plan
describes the Bureau of Information Services'
vision to develop an agency-wide information strategy that reflects
our architectural goals of fostering information sharing effectively
and economically across BIS and the communities it serves.
Furthermore, it identifies the technologies that will be employed to
improve the agency’s efficiency. The accomplishment of
this objective will position BIS to more successful address skill
and staffing needs. |
