1: Infrastructure Consolidation

Establish a basis for consolidated infrastructure to achieve interoperability and communication among operating divisions.

Other Information:

Infrastructure -- Improving IT Infrastructure:As cited in the Government Accountability Office report number 05-308 Federal Agencies Face Challenges in Implementing Initiatives to Improve Public Health Infrastructure, challenges facing HHS include: Integrating current initiatives into a national health IT strategy and federal architecture to reduce the risk of duplicative efforts; Developing and adopting consistent standards to encourage interoperability; Coordinating initiatives with states and local agencies to improve the public health infrastructure; and Overcoming federal IT management weaknesses to improve progress on IT Initiatives. IT Consolidation and Shared Infrastructure: A key strategy for cost effectiveness is the sharing and reuse of common, standards-based IT infrastructure. In the broadest sense, infrastructure can be viewed as a sharable IT investment that can be leveraged and standardized across an enterprise to prevent duplicate efforts, to leverage common investments, to standardize training and operational processes, and to lower IT cost as a benefit. Standards-based, common networks (i.e., local area, wide area) such as HHSNet are a common and simple application of these principles and opportunities for cost avoidance exist in virtually every layer of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model, from physical to shared data and application services. Such opportunities include the potential for improved quality of service (QoS) at lower cost through sharing services such as: - Physical: Networks, servers, help desks and support infrastructure - Operating System Services: Sharing common operating environments and services (e.g. file, print, and directory services) - Infrastructure Services: Leveraging services such as Public Key Infrastructure, Single-Sign-On, Enterprise Service Bus, etc. - Common Application Service: Workflow, Master Subject Index, Lexical/Semantic Services, Data Services, Messaging Services, Data Transformation, etc. A key initiative for HHS within the 2006-2010 timeframe will be a focus on IT consolidation, implementing and sharing common services, and leveraging these tools, infrastructure, and processes to improve integration and interoperability across the Department—at a lower cost. HHSIdentity: This initiative will integrate and implement key identity management and eAuthentication services across the Department in compliance with HSPD 12 and FIPS 201. These common security, identification, and authentication services will be integrated across the enterprise in support of enterprise initiatives such as Enterprise eMail, and will be leveraged by a variety of HHS systems and applications for authentication. This initiative will include the integration and implementation of key identified services including single sign-on, enterprise directory services, public key infrastructure, and biometrics services to meet defined operational objectives and functional requirements. Another part of the strategy will be to leverage a Federated Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach in the delivery of these services, consistent with our Shared Services and IT consolidation strategy described above. Service Orientated Architecture: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives are leading a revolution in enterprise business and IT integration. Many companies and government agencies are moving toward SOA projects, from limited scale efforts, to large strategic SOA rollouts at the enterprise level with supports from senior management in IT and sometimes business executives. SOA as an IT strategy has gained traction in the past year. SOA enables a business service layer on top of applications, which facilitates emphasis on business function support rather than hardware and software. The core business value of SOA is in delivering business agility. Industry best practices have demonstrated that the business benefit of SOA is in service reconfiguration flexibility, with changes done in days by business people, not in weeks by technical specialists. This means that the business and technical architectures must be aligned, which is not the case in most organizations today. Expressing existing application architecture in SOA terms is not enough. Services must be business-oriented if they are to be orchestrated by business people. SOA helps to streamline IT infrastructure, and helps to align IT investments with business goals, optimizing IT investments. The deployment of SOA in web service allows integration of business with current technologies. SOA can be evolved based on existing systems and infrastructure rather than requiring a full-scale re-build. Organizations will achieve benefits from SOA by focusing their development effort around the creation of services with using both new and existing components and technologies, combined with the component-based approach to software engineering and the enabling SOA infrastructure. The benefits of SOA include: Business agility: SOA facilitates business process improvement. It provides business users with an ideal environment for monitoring business operations. Process modeling is reflected in the business services. Process manipulation and the change of process flow can be achieved by the use of BPM (Business Process Modeling) tools integrated into the SOA infrastructure. Reuse and leverage existing assets : A business service can be constructed as an aggregation of existing components, using a suitable SOA infrastructure and made available to the enterprise. Legacy systems can be encapsulated and accessed via web service interfaces. Common infrastructure as commodity: SOA infrastructure is becoming a commodity that can be implemented by the use of COTS products. By enforcing standards, its development and deployment can be consistent across an enterprise. Existing components, newly-developed components, and components purchased from vendors can be consolidated within a well-defined SOA infrastructure. Reduced development cost: The reuse of existing service and components will reduce software development time and cost. Beyond SOA, and to align with the HHS enterprise structure, HHS will explore a Federated SOA solution, and this Federated SOA approach will be tightly integrated with, and a subset of the HHS Enterprise Architecture. In combination, this approach can be viewed as an HHS Federated, Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA). HHS will leverage SOA technologies for delivery of common services across the Department to support both enterprise IT initiatives as well as Mission Oriented IT investment (systems and applications) across the Department.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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