Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA)

Kshemendra Paul presented an overview on the Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA) to a packed SOA Consortium meeting in March. He began with an overview on why SOA is important to the Federal government, key issues and success criteria. He briefly touched on two areas where standards are making an impact, including the Federal Transition Framework and the Records Management standards, both collaborations between the OMG and various government agencies. Kshemendra mostly talks about the PGFSOA and the challenges, opportunities and benefits of Federal SOA. He discusses the benefits including the ability to share solutions, services, best practices and acquisition power across organizations and says that SOA is the key from moving from a vertical to a horizontal viewpoint. During his overview on Federal enterprise architecture, he stresses the need to view the use of

IT from a business perspective and to expand the concept of reuse beyond components to entire architectures and solutions. He also talks about the need for bottom-up change and the goal of building a community, which is part of the rationale behind the PGFSOA wiki. Kshemendra concludes his presentation with a tour of the PGFSOA wiki.

About the Speaker:

Kshemendra Paul is Chief Architect, Office of Management & Budget, Executive Office of the President. In this role, Kshemendra is responsible for leading efforts around the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). In this role, Kshemendra defines policy, guidance, and processes for agency enterprise architecture (EA); mentors and coaches agencies in their efforts; conducts oversight and assessment of agency completion, use, and results from their EA; works closely with the Federal CIO Council and in particular its Architecture and Infrastructure Committee; and provides the bridge at OMB between the FEA and information technology management and oversight, overall mission performance management, policy, and resource allocation. The scope of this role is the entire Federal Government with an annual IT spend plan of approximately seventy billion dollars. The purpose of the FEA is to ensure that our Federal IT investments are as transformative as possible in terms of being the critical enabler of a result-oriented, citizen-centered, and market-based Federal government.

Previously, Kshemendra served as Chief Architect for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and was also the Program Executive for the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). In this role he led efforts around data standards and inter-operability across Federal, State and Local stakeholders. In particular, Kshemendra took a leadership role with the counter-terrorism, law enforcement, and homeland security Information Sharing Environment (ISE) and the development of its architectural framework and profile. This resulted in the adoption of NIEM as the basis for ISE information sharing.

Kshemendra also served as the Co-Chair of the Services Subcommittee of the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee, where he was part of the team leading the development of the Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture.

Kshemendra was honored with the Federal 100 award for his leadership with NIEM. This award recognizes the top executives from government, industry and academia having the greatest impact on the government information systems community. He and the other Federal members of the NIEM management team were also recognized with the Collaboration Award by the DOJ Justice Management Division.

Mr. Paul has over 23 years of experience in strategic planning, enterprise architecture, organizational management and systems development. Before joining the civil service in 2005, Mr. Paul was Group Architect and Product Manager with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (previously NASD). Prior to that, he was an active entrepreneur, co-founding LocalEyes (sold to AOL) and founding Andelina (sold to FoundryOne). He has participated as a member of senior management for a variety of other technology product and service companies.

He holds both Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Electrical Engineering, and an additional Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, from the University of Maryland, College Park.

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