The Employment Development Department's (EDD) success in the future depends on how well we manage administrative and business process change in response to external and internal business drivers. To position our information technology (IT) infrastructure to be adaptive and to enable business process change, the EDD IT Branch sponsored a strategic initiative to analyze our current and define our future information technology environment. This planning effort established the Business Driven Architecture (BDA) as the department's enterprise technical architecture. The BDA establishes a technology blueprint and standards framework based on:

• EDD business drivers and information requirements
• IT principles and best practices
• Technology design principles and standards
• Standard products and their configurations or "buy-lists."

Prior to initiating the Business Driven Architecture Project, the EDD did not have an enterprise technical architecture. There was no guiding framework to align IT with the line-of-business automation projects or to establish the technology direction and standards for IT initiatives. Consequently, the EDD was increasingly challenged to:

• Assess and respond to mandates in a timely manner
• Obtain information quickly
• Rapidly deploy business process changes
• Support a rapidly increasing range of technology products
• Support and effectively manage increasing IT complexity
• Maintain and add new IT skill sets.

To address these issues the EDD initiated the BDA architecture definition process based on META Group's Enterprise Architecture Strategies (EAS) service and methodology and architecture consulting services of Grant Thornton, LLP. The architecture process provides an IT governance and technology framework that:

• Is derived from the business drivers and information requirements
• Is understood and supported by the Department executives and lines of business
• Guides the engineering of the organization's information systems and technology infrastructure across the various information technology architectures
• Is based upon a logically consistent set of IT principles and best practices, and
• Is a template for minimizing the costs of deploying and supporting technology.

The BDA is broad, consisting of five information technology domains that represent a majority of the EDD's IT environment:

• Applications (includes Application Development, Groupware, Internet/intranet, Middle-ware and in the future Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP))
• Data (includes Transaction Data and Information)
• Infrastructure (includes Desktop Software, Networks, Platforms, Systems Management, and Telephony)
• Security (is based on the British Standard -7799 security framework)
• Governance (is based on executive IT principles, BDA developed best practices and supporting IT policies and processes).

The attached BDA Domain Model diagram depicts these five architectural domains.

The BDA defines an IT standards framework that supports:

• Better alignment of IT with business drivers and goals
• Increased flexibility to meet diverse administrative and business needs
• Leveraging of existing technology infrastructure and investments
• Lower total cost of ownership through reduced support costs and economies of scale
• More effective IT decisions and new technology investments
• Rapid response to administrative and business process changes
• Successful resolution of emerging business problems through new uses of technology
• A consistent IT framework for making future technology decisions thereby limiting time consuming and unproductive technology debates.

The enterprise architecture development process aligns future technology investments with EDD business needs. Participation of both business and IT personnel ensures that business drivers and information requirements, technology trends, and architecture principles each contribute to strengthening this alignment. The BDA technologies and standards provide a blueprint for current and future business applications development, infrastructure deployments, technology investigations and purchases. Technology advancements together with industry trends continuously affect the choices available, thus the BDA process is dynamic to ensure the technical architecture is adaptive to meet changes in business and IT. The EDD's Enterprise Architecture Team manages the architecture change process to ensure the architecture remains responsive and "evergreen."

The fully implemented Business Driven Architecture will enable the EDD to respond more quickly to business change, improve customer service, provide greater access to information and set standards for new technology integration. By bridging the gap between changing business needs and information technology capability, the Business Driven Architecture provides a shared enterprise vision for the deployment of information technology enabling EDD to work better, faster, and smarter.