Maintaining Trusted Business Architecture Across Enterprise Systems 

For large federal organizations, business architecture serves as the foundation for strategic planning, operational alignment, and informed decision-making. When business models evolve independently across multiple systems, maintaining a single, trusted view of the enterprise becomes increasingly difficult. Without visibility into those changes, organizations risk inconsistencies that can affect governance, reporting, and enterprise planning. 

The VA CDO maintains the Business Reference Model (BRM) within the National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics (NCVAS) Palantir Foundry-based data platform. The BRM is intended to represent the full range of business functions across the department and serve as the central reference point for related business models.

In practice, however, many business models are managed by separate teams and systems. As those models evolve independently, updates are not always coordinated with the BRM. Over time, this creates inconsistencies that reduce confidence in enterprise business architecture and make it more difficult to understand how changes affect the broader organization.

To address this challenge, ReefPoint Group developed a framework that enables business models to be transformed into structured data objects within the Common Operating Platform. This approach creates a consistent foundation for comparing models and understanding how updates affect their relationship to the BRM.  

The team selected the Veterans Health Administration Business Functional Framework (VHA BFF) as the pilot model. After bringing the model into the platform, ReefPoint Group designed a data pipeline that cleansed, enriched, and prepared the data before converting it into a reusable business object capable of interacting with the BRM.  

While developing the framework, ReefPoint Group identified another opportunity to improve enterprise governance: tracking changes between versions of a business model. 

The solution incorporated a historical logging process that captures each version of the VHA BFF and records additions, modifications, and removals over time. By maintaining an incremental history of changes, the platform provides users with a clear understanding of how business models evolve and how those changes influence their connections to the BRM.  

This historical perspective supports more informed governance decisions while helping organizations identify changes before inconsistencies spread across interconnected business architecture assets.  

Drawing on its deep familiarity with the VA's business architecture and the capabilities of the Common Operating Platform, ReefPoint Group designed and developed a business model comparison tool that mirrors the platform's native user experience. 

The interactive tool enables users to: 

• View relationships between the VHA Business Functional Framework and the Business Reference Model.  

• Identify additions, modifications, and removals between model versions.  

• Understand how changes affect business architecture linkages.  

• Support ongoing governance and maintenance of enterprise business models.  

The resulting framework established a repeatable process for bringing additional business models into the NCVAS Platform and comparing them against the Business Reference Model. Following the successful pilot, the approach has been extended to other VA business models, including the VA Policy Library and Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF) datasets.  

By providing greater transparency into business model changes and strengthening connections across enterprise architecture assets, ReefPoint Group helped the VA improve the governance, consistency, and long-term sustainability of its business architecture ecosystem.  

Effective enterprise architecture depends on accurate, connected, and well-governed information. As organizations continue modernizing their data environments, maintaining alignment across business models becomes increasingly important for supporting operational excellence and strategic decision-making. 

ReefPoint Group partners with federal agencies to develop scalable data management, governance, and enterprise architecture solutions that improve visibility, strengthen decision support, and enable long-term modernization success.