Tech Insider: Best-laid plans
Last week, a half dozen chief information officers of federal agencies gathered for dinner in the Concorde Room at Washington's Hay Adams Hotel-which sits just across Lafayette Square from the White House. Over a three-course meal with sorbet and wines, they discussed the White House's proposal to create a Homeland Security Department, and the indispensable role technology will play in bringing that department to life. Several of the agencies represented at the table would be merged into the new department.
The CIOs debated how they would transfer more than a dozen agencies and offices into the new organization. They felt emboldened to make suggestions because the new Homeland Security Department will use communications and information technologies as its bricks, mortar, pipes and roof. CIOs, the government's chief technology policy-makers, are itching for the chance to draw the blueprint.
When an organization tries to tie together disconnected databases or computers-as many agencies have tried for years-it must follow some kind of model or guide. For several years, the favorite model in the government has been enterprise architecture, a loose term that describes the overall plan or design for getting many disparate systems to cooperate and communicate.
The administration's Homeland Security proposal says the department will have an enterprise architecture, but it doesn't say how it will create one. Never have so many agencies been asked to form new missions and new operations that cut across so many jurisdictions and boundaries. Once the bureaucratic structure of the department is in place, making it all work together is the architect's job.
The General Accounting Office has studied agencies' enterprise architecture plans for more than a decade, and has found that most agencies don't have much to show for their efforts, said Joel Willemssen, GAO's managing director for information technology. "Most of them are at a stage of just creating awareness of what an enterprise architecture is and then beginning to develop some foundation…to make it happen."
The CIOs agreed that at the Homeland Security Department, someone will have to step up to the plate to create an enterprise architecture. But no one, including the CIOs, is really sure who that should be. The current buzz has it that Steve Cooper, the Office of Homeland Security's CIO, is pondering a Homeland Security architecture, and Office of Management and Budget officials have said they're waiting for Cooper to act. However, sources in the White House have said that Cooper is only an adviser, and the real architecture won't be plotted until a CIO is picked for the new department. Cooper wasn't available for an interview.
Of course, deciding who should devise and implement an enterprise architecture requires that you believe it's a good idea in the first place. There are few, if any, examples of a federal architecture actually succeeding as planned. A Homeland Security Department will already be burdened by bureaucratic infighting and unclear missions. Throwing a vague requirement for technology standards into the mix would be like trying to catch a greased pig with a paper bag and a pair of salad tongs.
But let's say, for now, that enterprise architecture is the right way to ensure that all the Homeland Security components communicate and share information with one another. What's the right plan? The best way to answer that is by asking what's not the right plan.
Many architectural experts agree that building a single Homeland Security database is the wrong thing to do. It would take too long, cost too much money and probably fail to improve the quality of collaboration. "If someone sets out with a notion that they're going to build the one big database in the sky, the job will never get done," said Renny DiPentima, a former deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who oversaw a $750 million annual technology budget. "It will be years and years and years and it will never get done."
Why? Consider the case of Social Security. Its oldest databases are written in a language that very few programmers understand today. Sucking out all that old data, making it readable and then putting it in a new database that's built to talk to others would probably take 10 to 15 years, according to several estimates.
CIOs are frustrated that lawmakers expect them to throw all their agencies' data into one big pot, thinking the exercise will prove useful. "I can turn a fire hose of data on .. . today, if that's what they want," said one CIO at the dinner, who asked to remain anonymous. But it wouldn't make any difference, he argued. "All that matters is what the information means."
Data means different things to different agencies. For instance, data housed in the systems of the Federal Emergency Management Agency isn't coded, or "tagged," so that it could be recognized by the search engine of, say, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Just melding two sets of data together without devising a common language would be like interweaving a Chinese and a Greek dictionary and calling the product English.
Searching tools must recognize some common language if the data they find is going to be of use to more than one organization. XML, the best-known of such languages, allows people to create a common way to describe a piece of data so that it looks the same on any Web site or in any database. Searching tools can scour those repositories for specific items, such as words or names, and then compare them to other pieces of data. If the Homeland Security Department could pull together the data of its constituent agencies using a common language, it might have reached nirvana. But that day is far away.
In the near term, DiPentima and others say, the Bush administration should adopt a "shared services" model. To picture how it would work, imagine you're building a personal profile of Tom Ridge. You'd get the most accurate information by calling upon a number of agencies, fetching his name and date of birth from Social Security, his earning history from the Internal Revenue Service and his most recent address from the Postal Service. Each of the agencies that would form the Homeland Security Department is an authority on at least one category of information. Getting access to only the most needed pieces would be easier than creating an enterprise architecture from scratch to house all of them.
Meanwhile, most federal officials seem more concerned that homeland security agencies will continue to go their own way and install incompatible systems. But many of those officials aren't questioning whether the enterprise architecture strategy is practical or even necessary. Considering its spotty history, these people seem to have forgotten the first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging.