Complex High-Technology Company Requires Enterprise Architecture Modeling

GeoEye specializes in advanced geospatial imagery processing capabilities, and maintains a robust image archive covering some 160 million square miles, and an international network of regional ground stations. With three earth imaging satellites, it gathers map-accurate imagery for national security, mapping, local government planning, and natural resources and environmental monitoring. Customers include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), foreign governments who use imagery for their own national and economic security, resellers, and even Microsoft, and Yahoo!, who purchase satellite imagery for online mapping services.

The acquisition of Colorado-based Space Imaging in early 2006, coupled with the new compliance regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley, made it increasingly important to document company processes and how people, functions, and departments interact. GeoEye did not want to rely on manual means and recollections of employees, or duplicate records and processes. While some functions were being performed at GeoEye, none were documented and there was no formal internal auditing. However, the acquisition of another company, with duplicate roles and responsibilities, and the evidence required by Sarbanes-Oxley, made it necessary to quickly develop a structure to support these efforts.

This became an opportunity to develop a corporate-wide enterprise architecture (EA), tailored to meet the needs of Sarbanes-Oxley and ISO compliance, and create a foundation to document other, future processes to increase the efficiency of company operations.

“We needed a solution that would allow us to represent roles and responsibilities, document operations, and portray risks, policy and operational controls, and control objectives,” explained Hugh Klipp, director of business process management. “We wanted to relate all of these together in a way that would address the unique portions of each and every process.”

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