MARAD Manages Diverse Maritime Issues

The Maritime Administration (MARAD) improves and strengthens the marine transportation system to meet the country’s economic and security needs. It focuses on port development, intermodal water and land transportation, environmental activities, maritime security, and support of the shipbuilding industry. MARAD operates the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy to educate young men and women for service in the American merchant marine, the U.S. armed forces, and in the nation’s marine transportation system, and provides financial assistance to six state maritime academies. MARAD’s diverse activities range from deepwater port licensing to inland waterways research to cargo handling programs, and more.

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MEGA International is Choice for MARAD’s Enterprise Architecture Solution

The agency quickly established the criteria for the EA solution: data repository, secure model (many users, access), modeling tools, simulation, flexibility, and multiple and flexible access to data in the repository. MARAD evaluated potential solutions from various vendors.

“MEGA International was selected because it comprehensively addressed MARAD’s needs and provided the best value,” noted Jason Kruse, Stanley Associates, who supported MARAD’s IT management on this project.

The MEGA Modeling Suite, the industry’s leading and most comprehensive EA software, helps organizations analyze and plan their business so they can react to changes quickly and anticipate trends in their markets. The software modules provide a complete view of the processes of the organization, and the technology that supports it. It helps companies understand the effects of change before implementation, and reduces unknowns, delays, and costs.

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Agency Solves Challenges in Agriculture, the Environment, and Health

CSREES is an important agency within the USDA, the leading federal bureau on food, agriculture, and natural resources issues. CSREES advances knowledge for agriculture, the environment, human health, and communities by supporting research and education through a grants program of $1.2 billion each year. These grants go to thousands of recipients for research and education in some 60 program areas.

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Need to Understand and Manage Processes and Information

Because CSREES administers such a large grants program, it became more essential to fully document the entire process, which is quite complex. However, CSREES had a very basic enterprise architecture that did not provide a comprehensive picture of the agency’s efforts and most records were still on paper.

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EA Solution to Meet Stringent Criteria

With well-defined criteria, CSREES conducted an evaluation of EA software products from the major providers to federal government agencies. After the review, CSREES selected the MEGA Modeling Suite as its EA solution, to help the agency align its technical infrastructure and support systems with the functions and services provided to constituents. CSREES uses five of the modules from the MEGA Modeling Suite: MEGA Process, MEGA Architecture, MEGA Designer, MEGA Publisher, and MEGA Exchange.

CSREES selected MEGA International because of the company's ability to meet the defined criteria and provide a complete, cost-effective solution of software, training, and consulting, and the full breadth of EA modeling, reporting, and impact analysis.

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Health Plans Converge with Differing Systems

Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield is part of a $4 billion family of companies that finances and delivers health care services across upstate New York, including the major cities of Syracuse, Elmira, Rochester, Utica, and Buffalo. As New York state’s largest nonprofit health plan, the organization provides health insurance to more than 2 million people, and employs more than 6,000 New Yorkers.

It is the result of a merger of several health organizations serving upstate New York. Following the merger, Excellus found that there were few enterprise architecture (EA) standards embraced by all of the previously independent entities. The company formed a group within the IT department to focus on EA as it consolidated business and IT systems and reduced the amount of technical diversity within the organization. With multiple platforms and environments, it was extremely challenging to create smoothly running, cohesive business procedures, without a clear understanding of what processes and systems were serving each organization. Many of these legacy systems, some in place for 30+ years, didn’t have adequate documentation, so there were parts of the systems that were completely unknown.

“Before making sweeping policy or platform decisions, we recognized the importance of identifying all company functions and the processes used to implement them,” explained Eric Stephens, enterprise architect, Enterprise Architecture and Integration Team at Excellus. “This was the first step in our effort to reduce duplicate processes that were a normal result of the merger. We had to develop single systems for claims processing, provider contracting, member registration, and more, but could not do that until we fully understood and mapped the existing processes".

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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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