CDC enterprise architect to detail digital transformation at HIMSS26 – MobiHealthNews

Photo courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Ryan M. Harrison, acting chief enterprise architect at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), previews his upcoming talk at the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exposition in March, where he will discuss how large public health organizations drive public health impact through digital transformation and technology modernization.
MobiHealthNews: Can you tell our readers about your talk?
Ryan M. Harrison: I am going to cover one aspect of CDC’s technology modernization journey: codifying IT standards from across the agency into a unified Technical Reference Architecture (TRA).
The talk is designed for two distinct audiences:
For IT leaders, I want to share an end-to-end case study of one approach to creating unified
standards across an agency. These standards cover both enterprise-wide sub-architectures, such as data and applications, as well as segment-architectures, which are specific to public health areas like genomics and laboratories. I will cover how we built the TRA and then integrated it into our existing governance processes.
In my own career as a developer, I’ve seen the disconnect between building individual systems and understanding the design and planning that happens across an entire enterprise. Enterprise or segment architecture really is the “water” a developer swims in. It has so many baked-in assumptions and norms that it’s easy to forget the broader “environment” that your specific solution is part of, that is often designed by a team you’ve likely never met.
When I was an individual contributor, I focused on delivering specific functionality to specific users. I honestly didn’t understand or think much about the value of enterprise- and segment-architectures. Frankly, it didn’t seem important. But going through the process of developing unified standards — even something as simple as “these are the preferred software repositories, and if you use one of them, you don’t have to worry about these dozens of controls,” it is extremely valuable. 
My hope is that by seeing the process and understanding how it can make their lives easier, developers are more likely to consult their enterprise and segment architectures before starting to build.
MHN: What problems did CDC’s TRA solve for system designers and decision-makers, and how does making standards visible at the start of a project change outcomes? 
Harrison: The unified standards and approach of CDC’s Technical Reference Architecture make the development process easier at every level. 
As a system designer, you make hundreds of choices: architecture patterns, database selection, cloud tagging conventions, etc. For example, say you need a software repository; there are dozens of commercial off-the-self options. What TRA offers is that instead of being paralyzed by the numberless options out there, designers and programmers can focus on the solutions and products already available within the agency. These solutions are identified, evaluated and approved by the Enterprise Architecture team in collaboration with system owners, technical experts and major stakeholders. 
Back to the software repository example, a developer following our TRA would be guided towards GitHub/CDCGov. Using this repository would make their work discoverable alongside hundreds of other open-source software packages and is compliant with requirements like the Share IT Act.
Another important role of the CDC TRA is to outline CDC’s current architecture. For example, the CDC TRA includes a data sub-architecture. System designers can see, at a glance, CDC’s two general purpose data platforms: One CDC Data Platform (1CDP) and Enterprise Data Analytics and Visualization (EDAV). For many use cases, systems designers don’t need much custom code to handle data storage, access control and visualization because it’s provided out of the box by these enterprise data platforms. 
Taken together, the TRA allows a CDC developer or system designer to take high-level conceptual architectures, apply them to their specific needs or project, and then navigate to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and onboarding docs.
MHN: What do you hope the audience learns from this discussion?
Harrison: I hope attendees leave with a concrete understanding of what enterprise architecture is and why it is important. Enterprise Architecture can sound very abstract, but it can be understood through three core activities: creating inventories, articulating current and target state, and then managing change through governance.
For IT leadership, codifying IT standards across your entire organization can seem daunting, but it’s not insurmountable. It does take committed leadership, and ideally a dedicated project manager. Most of the work is in finding, acknowledging and consolidating existing pockets of excellence within your organization.
For developers, enterprise and segment architecture have real value and can save you significant time and frustration at all stages of a project and lead to more useful, long-lived applications and projects.
Ryan M. Harrison’s session “Architecting Federal Public Health with the CDC Technical Reference Architecture” is scheduled for Thursday, March 12th, from 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. in Palazzo M I Level 5 at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas. 
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