Effectively Managing the Air Force Enterprise Architecture

The Air Force is developing and implementing an enterprise architecture to meet the Clinger-Cohen Act's requirement that all federal agencies use an architecture to guide their IT investments. However, this act does not provide guidance on how to effectively manage an enterprise architecture. Prior research applied maturity models and competency stages to manage an enterprise architecture by defining layers of enterprise architecture management maturity. However, these efforts tend to view enterprise architecture development as a one-time planning process rather than an iterative progression. Enterprise architecture is not a one-time exercise, but rather it is an on-going effort within the organization to rationalize, integrate, and optimize the IT capability within an organization across many projects and business units. Hence, the critical success factors to effectively manage an enterprise architecture must be identified to ensure the structure, processes, and governing mechanisms are established within the organization for maintaining an enterprise architecture.