An Enterprise Architecture (EA) establishes the Agency-wide roadmap to achieve an Agency's mission through optimal performance of its core business processes within an efficient information technology (IT) environment. Simply stated, enterprise architectures are "blueprints" for systematically and completely defining an organization's current (baseline) or desired (target) environment. Enterprise Architectures are essential for evolving information systems, developing new systems, and inserting emerging technologies that optimize their mission value.

The essential reasons for developing an EA include:

• Alignment - Ensuring the reality of the implemented enterprise is aligned with management's intent.

• Integration - Realizing that the business rules are consistent across the organization, that the data and its uses are immutable, interfaces and information flows are standardized, and the connectivity and interoperability are managed across the enterprise.

• Change - Facilitating and managing change to any aspect of the enterprise.

• Time-To-Market - Reducing systems development, applications generation, modernization timeframes, and resource requirements.

• Convergence - Striving toward a standard IT product portfolio as contained in the Technical Reference Model (TRM).

The tangible benefits to the enterprise and those responsible for developing the enterprise include:

• Capture facts about the mission, functions, and business foundation in an understandable manner to promote better planning and decision making.

• Improve communication among the business organizations and IT organizations within the enterprise through a standardized vocabulary.

• Provide architectural views that help communicate the complexity of large systems and facilitate management of extensive, complex environments.

• Focus on the strategic use of emerging technologies to better manage the enterprise's information and consistently insert those technologies into the enterprise.

• Improve consistency, accuracy, timeliness, integrity, quality, availability, access, and sharing of IT-managed information across the enterprise.

• Support the CPIC processes by providing a tool for assessment of benefits, impacts, and capital investment measurements and supporting analyses of alternatives, risks, and trade offs.

• Highlight opportunities for building greater quality and flexibility into applications without increasing cost.

• Achieve economies of scale by providing mechanisms for sharing services across the enterprise.

• Expedite integration of legacy, migration, and new systems.

• Ensure legal and regulatory compliance.

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