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.

EA Principals Can Help

Dr. Steven Else and his company EA Principals have been providing EA training and consultation to government agencies for over 15 years. Dr. Else has trained over 5000 students in the Field of Enterprise Architecture and has served as:

• Chief Enterprise Architect at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Lead of the PMO’s EA team at the FDIC
• Senior ranking Enterprise Architect at CSC’s Federal Government Consulting Practice
• Enterprise Architect at the United Nations

EA Principals has trained thousands of students in the Field of Enterprise Architecture and:

• Specializes in FEAF training for government agencies
• Is located in the Washington DC area
• Specializes in TOGAF® for government agencies
• Specializes in adapting curriculum to meet your objectives

Check out our FEAF and TOGAF® course offerings today or contact us at: [email protected] or 703-333-6098

The Course

This course leverages a unique portfolio of tools that allow 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.

EA Principals has 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.

EA Principals 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.