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into a more generic Reference Enterprise Architecture for Transit. The TEAP Framework's
enterprise architecture materials and tools were the focus of the Phase II evaluation and pilot
efforts by transit agencies.
Phase I Results
Phase I tasks consisted of preparing a research synthesis and developing the preliminary
TEAP Framework, guidance, and tools. Part of the Phase I research focused on understand-
ing the current state of the practice in transit, that is, how transit agencies and transportation
authorities currently understand, apply, and use each of the five disciplines that compose the
TEAP Framework. Building on the project research and best practices, the project fused
these disciplines into a coherent TEAP Framework that showed their interrelationships,
flows, and synergies. A wiki website was developed to store the project results. As guidance
for transit was developed, it was made available on the website, including a Guidance for
Transit Managers document. A summary of these Phase I results is included below.
Research Synthesis
The research included a task to identify best practices in the IT industry and the current
state of the practice for transit providers with respect to the five disciplines, as well as how
they fit together within an agency. A literature search was conducted, and surveys were
developed to interview transit professionals in a range of different transit agencies. To pro-
vide a reasonable sample of agencies for the telephone interviews, a group of 14 transit agen-
cies and three DOTs was selected for interviews. The results of the surveys are included in
Appendix B. In summary, the synthesis found that application of each of the five disciplines
is growing, but lags behind other vertical industries. Many large transit agencies are currently
developing more formal methods and procedures to implement all of the included disci-
plines. The most difficult of the five disciplines for agencies to implement is the enterprise
architecture, and very few agencies have the resources or time to implement even part of an
enterprise architecture.
TEAP Framework Overview
The Framework helps transit professionals understand the financial, operational, and man-
agement impacts of technologies, to help them better meet their enterprise business process
needs and corporate objectives. The Framework helps guide an agency's IT/ITS planning
process, improve its understanding of risks, better manage the project implementation effort,
validate and verify compliance with its needs, and measure results and benefits.
Specifically, the TEAP Framework guides transit in:
· Planning how information, services, and technology will connect across an enterprise to
support business processes, solve problems, and measure performance;
· Promoting information sharing across agency and institutional barriers;
· Ensuring that IT/ITS projects are defined and staged in a way that delivers the best value
and supports successful project implementation, operations, and maintenance;
· Ensuring that the benefits and costs of proposed IT/ITS projects are understood across the
project's lifecycle (including operations and maintenance) and that resources are available
to support the program;
· Specifying IT/ITS projects to maximize the IT/ITS investment decisions across the
organization;
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· Ensuring that IT/ITS projects meet stakeholder needs: requirements are explicitly described,
risks are identified and mitigated, and the system development process is managed to
ensure that correct operations and requirements are met; and
· Describing the leadership and processes that ensure that the organization's IT group
supports and extends corporate strategies and objectives.
The Framework is composed of five System Development disciplines as follows:
· Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP), which is used to model the organization's poli-
cies, structure, locations, business processes, information, applications, and technologies,
and their relationship to each other (i.e., the organization's blueprint);
· Business Case Methodology (BCM), which describes how well a project fits into the orga-
nization's stated priorities, as well as the risks, benefits and costs, and estimated return on
investment (ROI);
· Funding Implementation, which investigates alternative approaches for how to pay for
IT/ITS projects;
· Systems Engineering (SE), which is used to help design and manage an IT/ITS Project
implementation; and
· Post-Implementation Analysis (PIA), which provides a method to assess whether the
implementation met project and agency goals and achieved a meaningful (estimated) ROI
and to review the project implementation experience for lessons learned.
Figure 1 shows the flow of these five TEAP components.
TEAP Wiki
Outreach, transfer, and sustainability of the Framework depends on communicating and
sharing the best ideas and efforts with other transit professionals. Building on best practices
from the transit industry and other industries, a wiki, or collaborative website, was devel-
oped to document the recommendations for the Framework, as well as provide a forum and
space for transit professionals to share and exchange their approaches to implementing ele-
ments of the Framework. The resources collected during the synthesis tasks were made avail-
able on the wiki so that transit staff could find a collection of existing resources that explain
the multitude of approaches that are available through National Transit Institute (NTI),
American Public Transportation Association (APTA), Federal Transit Administration (FTA),
and other outreach efforts.
The medium that presented the TEAP Framework needed to address three major needs:
· Develop guidance on the TEAP that targeted multiple audiences (without intimidating any
of them by the size of the document).
· Present the material using a medium that was logical, easy to use, and allowed for seam-
less linkage to show the relationships between the elements (and external resources).
· Provide the industry with a site where collaboration and information navigation was intu-
itive and easy to use while preventing spamming and misuse of the site.
The research team populated the site with the Framework Guidance and EA/EAP Guide-
book. The site lays out the Framework Guidance in a systematic way, with sections target-
ing different audiences, from executives and senior managers to program managers and
technical practitioners (see Table 1 for details).
