FEAF V2: Federal Enterprise Architecture - Foundation

New Government Transformation Mandate Brings Immediate Value to FEAF, TOGAF®, and EA Training

The United States Office of Management and Budget is formulating a comprehensive Government-wide Reform Plan which will create a lean, accountable, more efficient government. This year, agencies will be required to develop analytical frameworks that look at the alignment of agency activities with the mission and role of the agency and the performance of individual functions. This new mandate to streamline government processes is also a mandate to jumpstart, revitalize, or revisit existing Enterprise Architecture practices within government agencies.

This course leverages an exclusive "Cloud EA" platform that allows students to do e-learning, discussions, chats, Mind Mapping, polling, worksheets for the Common Approach Methodology, and modeling with ArchiMate and BPMN. The discussion app also allows students to upload images and files to share. However, the truly compelling capability is the built-in architecture repository and the ability to store, retrieve, share and comment on each other's models.

The course features real-world challenges the Federal Government is facing and features group activities for about half the time of the course, which has been widely embraced, as have the intuitive Cloud EA apps. Students have an unparalled opportunity to collaborate on what turn out to often be common challenges. The class ends with a Capstone Group Architecture Project that allows the students to showcase how much they have learned about the FEA.

We have taken the EA training environment and made it actionable instead of having students endure reviewing stacks of PowerPoint slides for five days. The applied nature of the course is also an accelerator for EA teams, showing them that it is possible to ramp up quickly and provide output that is immediately relevant to their transformation jobs and responsibilities. Student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Follow-on EA courses after this one:

Advanced Applied FEAF and an individual practicum by each graduate of these first two courses—continue with the applied learning approach and environment.

Attendees will use proven and readily available methodologies to build architectures/models/artifacts and generate the products/output needed to answer key EA and business questions. The Practicum, which would lead to a status as a Board Certified Enterprise Architect in targeted areas of the student’s choosing, must be scoped appropriately for EA/FEAF with the help of an expert mentor. The majority of the students having completed the Foundation FEA Certification have expressed an interest to continue with more advanced courses.

The school encourages a diverse group of students across the organization to participate in this training, including Program Managers and application/system providers, so they can better understand and align to the EA being developed by the enterprise architects across the Federal government.

Course Goals:

Leverage overall information about EA and FEAF to begin building a cadre of architects and key stakeholders across enterprises with a strong foundation who can apply the knowledge they gain and teach it to others while helping to advance the use of EA to support better-informed decision-making;

Reinforce the sense of community among enterprise EAs and support networking with other architects and members of the transformation community cross enterprise;

Help develop more mature EAs who can work closely with the strategic planning community to use EA as an enabler of strategy to support the new executive focus on the importance of strategy driving budget vs. the other way around;

Support clients’ adoption of next generation technologies and approaches such as cloud computing, mobile computing/mobile apps, big data/data analytics platforms, IT as a service, new network technologies (do we use our own network or use the internet for transport?), and the increasing importance of security architecture, among other considerations;

Help students understand how data quality and data stewardship relate to better information architecture in particular and to EA overall; and

Help students to apply what they learned in a strategic and operational environment.

Course Outline:

Day 1

• Introduction
• Portal Resources
• About Us
• Brainstorming current EA Challenges
• Module 1 – Enterprise Architecture in Plain English
• Module 2 – What is an Enterprise?
• Module 3 – What is an Architecture?
• Module 4 – Why do EA

Day 2

• Module 5 – Evolution of Federal EA
• Module 6– Introduction to the Common Approach
• Module 7– Primary Outcomes of the Common Approach
• Module 8 – Levels of Scope
• Module 9 – Basic Elements of Federal EA
• Module 10 – Current Strategy across multiple enterprises
• Module 11 – Shared Services Strategy
• Module 12 – Common Approach Overview

Day 3

• Brainstorm EA Priorities
• Module 13 – CPM Step 1: Identify and Validate
• Module 14 – CPM Step 2: Research and Leverage
• Module 15 – Shared Services Strategy
• Module 15 – CPM Step 3: Define and Plan
• Module 16 – CPM Step 4: Invest and Execute
• Module 17 – CPM Step: Perform and Measure
• Module 18 – The 6 Reference Models

Day 4

• Module 19– The Sub Architecture Domains
• Module 20 –Strategy Sub Architecture Domain
• Module 21 –Business Sub Architecture Domain
• Module 22 –Data Sub Architecture Domain
• Module 23 –Application Sub Architecture Domain
• Module 24 –Infrastructure Sub Architecture Domain
• Module 25 –Security Sub Architecture Domain
• Module 26 – Enterprise Road Map
• Module 27 – IT Asset Inventory

Day 5

• EA Next Steps
• Discussion Board Reviews
• Course Summary
• End of Course Survey