Delivering Business Value through Agile EA

This feedback, combined with feedback from the GSA community about minor data fixes, has resulted in data accuracy of 90 to 95 percent.

More than 2,300 employees at GSA have accessed GEAR since October of 2015, when the team started tracking metrics. This indicates that the interest is not just from IT users, but also business line/ mission oriented users who are able to use the data for decision making purposes. Because these users want to take ownership of their data, a major benefit to the EA Program is having such visibility of the EA data across the enterprise. The EA Program grants access to specific data sets within the EA database so that both business and technical POCs take ownership of maintaining the information. Relying on the true subject matter experts to maintain their own data allows the EA Program to stay lean, increases participation across GSA, and instills confidence that the data is accurate.



GEAR also provides the visibility into the alignment between GSA applications and the FEAF Business Reference Model. This model further extends to identify the GSA¬specific capabilities in a hierarchical format. However, it improves on a typical capability hierarchy model because a business leader or program analyst can quickly find a capability, such as “Payments,” and see which and how many applications support that business function. This also identifies the four year strategic roadmap for each application associated to the capability to inform the user if the application will be tolerated, invested, migrated or eliminated over the next four years. In a fiscally constrained environment, this is an important first step in determining which current or planned expenditures may be duplicative.

The EA team also utilizes a methodology called application rationalization to conduct analysis on portfolios of applications. Application rationalization provides a consistent approach to common language conversations between business and IT stakeholders to discuss the strategic direction for GSA’s IT investments. This approach helps these business and IT leaders decide to retire, consolidate, replace or modernize the Agency’s applications. Application rationalization at GSA is a business-focused, data driven methodology to analyze the IT application portfolio, resulting in both qualitative and quantitative benefits.



A component of application rationalization is a deep dive assessment on every application within the portfolio. These interviews allow the EA team to rapidly and consistently collect business and technical data on every application. This information gets fed into the EA repository, and updates the GEAR site nightly. This agile data processing benefits the business by data centralization, improved end user experience, data driven governance decisions and improved allocation of resources. It also benefits the EA team, who is now able to provide up to date and reliable information almost instantly. This agile and business friendly approach to EA allows for data collection, without making it feel like a data collection exercise.

GSA’s innovative approach and thought leadership for application rationalization and agile EA has garnered the attention of other government and industry leaders. GSA is committed to EA providing value to the organization in multiple ways. Application rationalization is used to assess entire portfolios of applications and determine which can be eliminated. The methodology ultimately provides a four-year strategic application roadmap which senior governance boards can use to make data driven decisions so that investments align with the strategic direction of the office. All these data and collection activities comprise a single dashboard which is used across the agency for informational and decisional purposes. Having that authoritative source of information ensures all staff are working from the same data set.