FEA Principles

FEA principles

These principles are broadly ranked from highest to lowest priority.

1. The Trust principle – Trust in government will be strengthened.
2. The Sovereignty principle – New Zealand’s sovereignty and national identity will be supported and maintained.
3. The Asset principle – Information will be recognised as an asset that has value to the government and will be managed accordingly.
4. The Accessibility principle – Information and services will be made available easily, widely and equitably for the benefit of the people of New Zealand.
5. The Consistency principle – A common-and-consistent approach will be followed.
6. The Agility principle – Approaches that increase agility will be adopted.
7. The User-centric principle – Services and processes will be designed from the perspective of the service user.
8. The Harm-minimisation principle – Harmful effects of change will be minimised.
9. The Value-for-money principle – Decisions will be made to provide optimal benefit to the government as a whole.

Using the FEA principles

Architecture principles are used to capture the fundamental truths about how the enterprise will use and deploy its resources and assets. The principles are used in a number of different ways:

• To provide a framework within which the enterprise can start to make conscious decisions
• As a guide to establishing relevant evaluation criteria, thus exerting strong influence on the selection of products or product architectures in the later stages of managing compliance to the enterprise architecture
• As drivers for defining the functional requirements of the enterprise architecture
• As an input to assessing both existing systems and the future strategic portfolio, for compliance with the defined architectures. These assessments will provide valuable insights into the transition activities needed to implement an architecture, in support of business goals and priorities
• The Rationale statements highlight the value of the architecture to the enterprise, and therefore provide a basis for justifying architecture activities
• The Implications statements provide an outline of the key tasks, resources, and potential costs to the enterprise of following the principle; they also provide valuable inputs to future transition initiative and planning activities
• Support the architecture governance activities in terms of:
  • Providing a "back-stop" for the standard architecture compliance assessments where some interpretation is allowed or required
  • Supporting the decision to initiate a dispensation request where the implications of a particular architecture amendment cannot be resolved within local operating procedure

Principles are inter-related, and need to be applied as a set.

Principles will sometimes compete; for example, the principles of "accessibility" and "security" tend towards conflicting decisions. Each principle must be considered in the context of "all other things being equal".

At times, a decision will be required as to which information principle will take precedence on a particular issue. The rationale for such decisions should always be documented.

A common reaction on first reading of a principle is "this is motherhood", but the fact that a principle seems self-evident does not mean that the principle is actually observed in an organisation, even when there are verbal acknowledgements of the principle.

Although specific penalties are not prescribed in a declaration of principles, violations of principles generally cause operational problems and inhibit the ability of the organisation to fulfil its mission.

Footnote

[i. An architecture framework is a tool which can be used for developing a broad range of different architectures. It describes a method for designing an information system in terms of a set of building blocks, and for showing how the building blocks fit together. It contains a set of tools and provides a common vocabulary. It also includes a list of recommended standards and compliant products that can be used to implement the building blocks. – TOGAG 8.1.1 and e-GIF Management Committee.]