By Calvin Biesecker

The Coast Guard has made progress in developing its enterprise architecture, specifically aligning it with the service’s strategic information technology (IT) plan and federal mandates, although challenges remain in terms of integrating the architecture and completing plans due to staffing shortages, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General (IG) says in a report released this week.

Among the accomplishments, according to the IG, the Coast Guard has its enterprise architecture framework, which provides a path forward for modernizing the services’ IT systems to meet future needs.

“This assurance can promote interoperability, reduce duplication, and optimize overall mission performance to allow the Coast Guard to respond rapidly, effectively, and positively to opportunities and challenges,” says the report, Review of U.S. Coast Guard Enterprise Architecture Implementation Process.

The service is almost finished with work on the architecture’s three levels of data detail, profile, model and inventory, which when completed means the enterprise architecture is fully integrated “and can then be used to provide valuable relationships among enterprise-level processes and IT,” the IG says.

The report also says that the Coast Guard, in particular citing program managers that are implementing technology projects, is referring to the architecture’s IT inventory when beginning new IT projects.

Moreover, the architecture also aligns with the service’s IT strategy and has met all the milestones in three of five goals set forth in the strategy, information, technology and governance. The other goals are organizational excellence and security.

The IG credits the Coast Guard’s progress on its enterprise architecture due to the support of the service’s management.

However, completing the architecture is not without its challenges, the IG says. The architecture is still not fully integrated, which “is needed to show how the data from various major information systems fits together,” the report says. It also says that plans and documentation are incomplete.

For example, future business practices and technical infrastructure have not been defined and the Coast Guard is still working on plans for how it will move from its current enterprise architecture to its future architecture.

An important limiter to completing the enterprise architecture planning is staff shortages, the report says. The service has eight full-time personnel working on the architecture although management has identified a need for a least 15 full-time, or contract support, staff, it says.

The report makes several recommendations to the Coast Guard Commandant for completing the enterprise architecture, among them finishing the required documentation and providing additional resources to complete the architecture work. According to the report the service has agreed to the recommendations.