Richard A. Spires, CEO, Resilient Network Systems, Inc., and former CIO of the US Department of Homeland Security, will be delivering the opening Keynote presentation at the DGI: Digital Government Institute’s Enterprise Architecture Conference & Expo, the morning of April 30, 2015 (8:30am-3:00pm EDT) at the Ronald Reagan Building’s Pavilion Room (1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC). This event is for government professionals and private industry to learn how to keep their enterprise architecture plans relevant and effective for today’s challenges.
Event Synopsis
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has become one of the pillars of the federal IT world to help make operations run smoothly, seamlessly and maneuver easily. No matter what technology is touted, or how service oriented and agile the applications are — especially cloud-based or SAAS environments — technology systems must be designed and implemented to support the business or mission and enable processes. If integrated IT systems don’t work or fail, the business or mission may be in jeopardy. The only insurance any enterprise or organization has is a fully articulated and robust EA program.
EA is about understanding the business, the mission and how to maintain, improve, fix or transform it, often involving IT as a transformational mechanism. It helps an agency understand inter-relationships between investments, minimize duplication, improve interoperability and compatibility between systems, and is essential to any agency’s modernization. Every agency has an EA now, but it is not something that can be deployed and forgotten. EA must be kept current and every agency must regularly evaluate how it is working, in order to avoid damaging the enterprise or jeopardizing secure network systems.