[Request]: Consider including some notes about "enterprise architecture" or general practices in the De-risking Guide's Buying custom software development services section

[ameliaswong]

A description of the work

This was an idea from TTS director Ann Lewis, after she read the guide during the approval process. This ticket is paraphrased from an email she sent the FFS team:

Consider including some information about 'enterprise architecture' or general practices aimed at helping a program manager who is building, buying, or integrating a product think about that decision within the larger context of systems and data that the new product will be deployed into. There are often silos of information and siloed systems. Even well-built products will degrade over time if they exist as islands in a disconnected sea of other less modern systems. Eventually the patterns and practices of the containing ecosystem will overtake the new product and reduce its value through forced integrations and monitoring actions. It's helpful to plan for this. Including best practices about how best to integrate systems developed in modern ways could be helpful in this regard.

Context: When the FFS Team revised the De-risking Guide, it kept a list of backlog items for possibly addressing in future iterations. As the project lead during close-out, I transferred that list to the Guides repo.

Point of contact on this issue

Amelia Wong

Reproduction steps (if necessary)

No response

Skills Needed

• Any Human
• Design
• Content
• Engineering
• Acquisition
• Product
• Other

Does this need to happen in the next 2 weeks?

• Yes
• No

How much time do you anticipate this work taking?

A month

Acceptance Criteria

This ticket would involve:

• assessing the utility of the requested content by having conversations with relevant 18F staff (starting with Acq, Engineering, and Product) to decide if content on this topic should be developed/added (or if an existing resource could be linked to from the DRG)
• if no, you're done.
• if yes, the next step is figuring out what should be said or linked to with relevant 18F staff input
• if new content is needed, writing/editing content
• notifying TTS Outreach of changes to see if new content requires going through GSA concurrence
• going through GSA concurrence, if needed
• publishing