EA-based review of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development

By Dimitar Georgiev

In March 2012, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued testimony about the increasing imbalance between the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) growing mission and its IT environment capabilities. GAO identified a lack of sound management controls such as IT strategic planning, investment management, enterprise architecture and human capital planning. Although between 2009 and 2012, HUD has made noticeable progress, some problems remain poorly addressed.

This paper takes a step further, looking at the GAO’s findings in more depth, in an attempt to extract and analyze more specific issues. This includes stove-piped, nonintegrated IT systems, a technology stack polluted with antiquated technologies, lack of architecture governance and controls, and lack of adequate metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).