The Office of Horizontal Government

He calls his office the Office of Horizontal Government.

Kshemendra Paul is the Chief Architect at OMB. And he is leading the broad-based adoption and advancement of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) capabilities throughout the federal government.

“I work in the Office of E-Government and Information Technology, but most days I think of it as the Office of Horizontal Government,” said Paul during the recent Federal Executive Forum on SOA.

Joining Paul on the Forum panel hosted by Jim Flyzik of the Flyzik Group, produced by the Trezza Media Group and broadcast on Federal News Radio were:

Vish Sankaran - Program Director, Federal Health Architecture, HHS

Scott Bernard - DCIO, Director of IT/ISSO, Federal Railroad Administration, DOT

Craig Muzilla - Vice President, Middleware Business Unit, Red Hat

Andy Hoskinson - Vice President & Partner, Technology Strategy and Consulting, Unisys Federal Systems 

For Paul, a major challenge for government is moving from being a vertical organization – steeped in silos - to one that thinks and acts horizontally. 

“We are organized by agencies, bureaus and programs. Money is appropriated that way, people grew up that way. Getting people to think across boundaries and being able to work across boundaries is really the key challenge.” 

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SOA: Health Care Enabler

SOA is at the heart of the health information exchange movement. The drive to electronic health records and the seamless sharing of patient information is on ongoing movement within the American healthcare community.

Even though the benefits are obvious, major challenges exist to make health information available online at the different stages of patient care.  That’s why we should be cheering the efforts of dedicated professionals such as Vish Sankaran, the program director for Federal Health Architecture at HHS.

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The goal of the Practical Guide to Federal Service-Oriented Architecture is to provide government with a road map to implementing SOA and has been developed to meet the unique challenges the federal IT community has to address. 

“The PGFSOA came out of a realization that SOA vocabulary, approaches, technologies, techniques are getting more mature,” said Kshemendra Paul Chief Architect at OMB. “But there are a lot of different approaches; there’s a lot of hype in the marketplace and a lot of things that are unique and not unique about the federal government,” explained Paul.

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Governance is the key ingredient of the Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture. As with any horizontal movement, getting consensus from the many stakeholders is never easy. With SOA it is no different; there needs to be governance processes in place that allows stakeholder input, but at the same time moves the various layers of an organization towards a common destination. 

“It’s a really crucial topic, an important topic for OMB especially in the E-Gov area,” declared Kshemendra Paul, Chief Architect at OMB.  

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Here's what the Forum's panel of experts had to say about the future of SOA.
 

Craig Muzilla, Vice President, Middleware Business Unit, Red Hat

“SOA is not new, it’s really a 20 year old concept, but I think the time is right, the time is appropriate for it to really make an impact on the world in terms of how it operates.

Because of SOA, you’ll see a lot more dynamic processes among agencies and businesses; you’ll see a lot more technology independence; and you’ll see a lot more collaboration. The concept, to give an example, in health care of a common patient record freely available is possible. I think you will begin to see that now because of this trend and I think it will have great benefits for everyone.”

Scott Bernard, DCIO, Director of IT/ISSO, Federal Railroad Administration, DOT

“I think SOA will continue to mature as a best practice both in driving a reorientation in thinking from programs and systems to services, as well as standards and products being harmonized more towards those services that are important to the agencies.

And the other thing is that EA as the overarching piece of governance is here to stay. Because as I said, I’ve lived through those bad old days when we had programs that were fighting for resources, systems that were duplicating functions, and we don’t want to go back to that.

EA is here to stay and it’s about much more than IT. It’s about strategy, business and technology planning, being integrated, the architecture being used and really EA is for CEOs I think as we move forward, and that’s an exciting proposition.”

Andy Hoskinson, Vice President & Partner, Technology Strategy and Consulting, Unisys Federal Systems

“I think a specific benefit that we will see in the next couple of years with SOA -- that will be huge and very popular with citizens -- will be more streamlined data collection that is more user friendly. 

And (you’ll see) better interagency information sharing. For example now if you go to the IRS you provide data, you fill out a lengthy form; you go to the Social Security Agency, you fill out a lengthy form. You provide a lot of the same kind of identity and profile information using different forms to different agencies. It takes a long time for citizens to fill out; and introduces the possibility of data collection errors.

I think what we are going to see with the successful implementation of SOA governmentwide; we’ll get to a place where a citizen might provide their profile in one spot and with the click of a mouse, the click of a button, decide which agency they want to submit it to depending on the particular activity they are performing.”

Kshemendra Paul, Chief Architect, OMB

“Well with the Federal Enterprise Architecture, what we are starting to see now is that there’s a maturity. We are seeing in the agencies, in the bureaus and the programs some of the different successes we’ve been talking about. We are starting to see a bottom-up target architecture start to coalesce, cross cutting segments like health IT or counter terrorism information sharing.

That view is becoming increasingly structured and allows us to provide feedback to the agencies on specific opportunities for collaboration. The original vision when this was started was something like this. You go back to the Quicksilver; the lines of business initiatives were done. What we are able to do now is to inform those kinds of analyses and activities with specific opportunities for collaboration and then drive that through the federal enterprise architecture.

I mentioned earlier the Federal Transition Framework. That becomes a key repository for that collaboration and reuse. It becomes the kind of thing where as agencies start what they are doing they are able to share architectures, share architectures around business services around enterprise service segments, for example identity management, or core mission segments like health IT. We are able to do that at plan time and to get to a coherent plan through the Federal Enterprise Architecture.”

Learn more about SOA. Go to www.egov.gov and www.CIO.gov. For information sharing activities go to www.NIEM.gov.

Here is what The Practical Guide To Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA) has to say about the challenges SOA faces.

The process of reconciling the Enterprise Architecture’s IT services portfolio, both intra-agency and cross-agency, frequently results in conflict when two or more programs have an interest in a given service type. Conflict is, in part, due to a lack of an enterprise-wide SOA framework and may be grouped into at least four major challenge categories (politics aside):

1. Lack of an operational or target model for federal enterprise-wide SOA environment;

2. Lack of understanding and experience in implementing SOA at the agency/department-level;

3. Lack of procedures/guidance for consuming enterprise services in lieu of local services; and

4. Lack of operational services management; particularly for cross-agency services once implemented.

Source: From the Practical Guide For Service Oriented Architecture, June 30, 2008.

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