The Business Transformation Agency (BTA) annually releases the Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA) for the Department of Defense (DoD) Business Mission Area (BMA) to help defense business system owners and program managers make informed decisions in support of the Department. The latest official annual release of the BEA – BEA 6.0 was delivered on March 13, 2009.

Starting in July 2009, the BTA introduced informational releases⁽¹⁾.  Informational releases reflect interim content updates to allow stakeholders to accelerate the implementation of requirements outside of the official release schedule, while obtaining insight into other ongoing BEA updates. BEA 6.1 was the first of the informational releases and was released on July 29. BEA 6.2, released on October 28, is the second of these releases. It represents two primary areas of improvement: visualization enhancements and updates to the End-to-End (E2E) business flows.

BEA 6.2 Visualization Enhancements

The BEA 6.2 visualization enhancements focus on the improvement of the E2E discovery and re-use capabilities as required by the integration of the E2E in BEA.

The E2E Homepage, located within the DoDAF Products section of the BEA web site, contains numerous stakeholder-driven updates:

1. Display of originating/supporting relationships and hierarchy of BPM Processes in E2E in alphabetical order by originating process and then by supporting process
2. Display of multiple indentations of the BPM processes, in instances where there are related supporting processes

BEA 6.2 Structural Changes and Content Update

The OV-5 Node Tree was restructured to ensure congruence in the Operational Activity numbering schemes between the OV-5 Operational Activity Models and OV-5 Node Tree. In order to correct the conflict between the two products, the activities that appear only in the OV-5 Node Tree were placed on the right side at the appropriate level of decomposition. As a result, previous issues related to both DITPR and the BEA Compliance process will be resolved.

Subject matter experts from the Department’s Core Business Missions (CBM) collaborated with the BTA Enterprise Integration (EI) Directorate to define and map E2E business flows to the BEA. The mapping was accomplished by defining and linking related Level 1 E2E business flows to the appropriate process steps in the BEA OV-6c. Through this linkage, the BEA provides the applicable definitions, business rules, LRPs, and information exchanges related to the E2Es.

BEA 6.2 includes mappings to the OV-6c processes for the final two E2Es – "Market-to-Prospect" and "Prospect-to-Order". This completes the inclusion of the 15 E2E business flows in the BEA.

Because BEA 6.2 is an informational release, the associated changes were not updated in the AV-1. In its place, the BEA 6.1 BEA Improvement Proposal (BIP), documenting proposed changes that were completed in BEA 6.2, is being delivered.

Because the BEA 6.2 primarily focused on defining and mapping E2E processes and restructuring the OV-5 Node Tree, no other DoDAF products were updated. However, in the next annual release, the following DoDAF products are scheduled to be modified based upon approved BEA 7.0 BIPs: AV-1, OV-2, OV-3, OV-5, OV-6c, OV-6a, OV-7, SV-1, SvcV-1, SV-5, SvcV-5, SV-6, and TV-1.

BEA 6.2 Site Updates

A link to the DoD Strategic Management Plan (SMP) was added to the homepage under BEA Information. The SMP describes the steps DoD will take to better align business transformation with our strategic planning and decision processes. It also supports improved definition and management of requisite performance measures. In the future, the BEA and the DoD Enterprise Transition Plan will be more tightly coupled to reflect the goals, measures, and initiatives listed in the SMP.

Also, the 2009 ETP was published on October 23, 2009 and is available at http://www.bta.mil/products/etp.html. Only official annual BEA releases will align to the major annual releases of the ETP. Therefore, BEA 6.2 will continue to align to the September 2008 ETP, with links to the 2009 ETP being contained within BEA 7.0.

Other changes made to the BEA web site include the Portfolio Management reports under the Business Capabilities Lifecycle (BCL) Support page. Updates to these reports reflect the latest DITPR content as of October 14, 2009.

The BEA can be accessed by visiting http://www.bta.mil/products/bea.html. For more information on the BEA, please contact AskBEA@bta.mil.

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⁽¹⁾ Informational releases are published for informational purposes only and will not be used to assert compliance or update the DoD Information Technology Portfolio Repository (DITPR). The next official annual release, BEA 7.0, is scheduled for March 12, 2010.