Enterprise architectures at military departments remain mostly unrealized, with services typically only partially or not at all satisfying elements that make up a mature EA, says the Government Accountability Office.

For a report dated Sept. 26, the GAO compared military architectures against its EA maturity framework, which completed a major revision in 2010. The results, the report says, show that military departments have far more incomplete or only partially complete elements.

Most worryingly, they have not fully satisfied the elements associated with establishing the foundation for architecture management (including the development of a plan to manage the architecture program), completing and using initial architecture content, expanding and evolving the enterprise architecture, and continuously improving their architectures.

This pattern of only partial core element satisfaction means the departments "are at risk of achieving only limited benefits" from their EAs, the report says.

Military officials told GAO auditors about the challenge they've had in completing their architectures include overcoming cultural resistance, senior leaders who don't understand EA and a lack of funding.

The report treats the last claim skeptically, noting that the DoD "has been provided with considerable resources for its IT systems environment," more than $30 billion annually in recent years.

The report doesn't directly address lack of senior leadership understanding of EA--a condition that at most agencies is near universal, since the discipline can approach Scientology-like levels of bewildering jargon.

Enterprise architecture is a technology management discipline that seeks to match resources to business needs. At its most basic, EA is a snapshot of an agency's current IT infrastructure (known in enterprise architecture as the "as is" state) along with a vision of a more rationalized and modernized infrastructure (the "to be" state) and a plan for getting from here to there.

"Without an enterprise architecture, it is unlikely that an organization will be able to transform business processes and modernize supporting systems to minimize overlap and maximize interoperability," the GAO report notes.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-902 (.pdf)

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