Enterprise Solutions: If not one, why not one?

When I worked at the United States Department of the Treasury in 2002, there was a real push by Secretary Paul O’Neil for enterprise solutions. In fact, he used to say, “if not one, why not one?”

At the time, Treasury was composed of 14 different and diverse bureaus and they did not have a history of collaborating well together. When management spoke about the relationship between the bureaus, they would call them a “loose confederation”. Well it was really quite loose, as enterprise solutions were more a rarity than a norm.

But Secretary O’Neil’s push for enterprise solutions was poignant, and I was heading up the enterprise-wide initiative to develop an architecture for a Treasury Integrated Document Management System (IDMS) for document management, records management, workflow, and so on.

This initiative turned out to be successful and I presented this at the Treasury Financial Systems Symposium as a model for enterprise solutions and collaboration that year.

Looking back, Secretary O’Neil’s questioning of “if not one, why not one?” has stayed with me and has become a cornerstone of what I believe user-centric EA is all about. That is, in developing target architecture and transition plans, enterprise solutions needs to be a cornerstone--simplifying, standardizing, and integrating our IT infrastructure and systems for the benefit of the organization and the end-users.

What obstacles do you encounter in developing enterprise solutions?