Introduction
Federally mandated enterprise architectures (EA) are a strategically-based means for the departments of Defense and the Navy (DON) to capitalize on their vast technological assets and make sound decisions about investments in new technology that will support the warfighter.
The DON is a complex organization with disparate architecture development efforts and finite resources. Effective, cross-departmental decision making in today's environment relies upon information technology as a fundamental enabler, yet the DON information infrastructure is quite complex and subject to continual change. Herein lies the requirement for a DON EA that would create the framework for effective, real-time, decision making and policy implementation across multiple DON departments. The DON EA's success is dependent upon its relevance and value to DON decision makers.
As the chief architect, the DON Chief Information Officer (CIO) is leading the effort to design and develop a single DON EA, using a strategy that federates with external partners and incorporates an integrated, coordinated, flexible and long-term strategically focused approach. The DON EA describes the processes, information flows, solutions, data descriptions, technical infrastructure and standards that are integrated to achieve current and future DON strategic goals and objectives.
The DON EA assists decision makers in the execution of major decision processes such as the Defense Acquisition System, Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution, and the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System.
The creation and implementation of a DON EA will support naval transformation in delivering value by:
• Creating IT Agility. Create the foundation for planning future capabilities and adapting to changing environments.
• Reducing Complexity. Minimize duplication of technology in the infrastructure by consolidating products and tools providing similar functionality. Enable Information Technology/National Security Systems (IT/NSS) to consolidate expertise around fewer technologies.
• Lowering Operational Costs. Reduce the cost of business operations by optimizing IT/NSS acquisition, support, maintenance and training costs. Enable reusability and drive standard technologies.
• Enhancing Portfolio Management. Eliminate duplicative investments; re-prioritize investments — invest once — use many.
EA Strategy: External Federation and Internal Integration
Since the release of the Global Information Grid (GIG) Federation Strategy in August 2007, the DON CIO has tailored the federated approach in developing and managing the DON EA. The DON EA will federate with DoD and other external partners.
Federation is defined as "a process for relating disparate architectures that allows for uniqueness and autonomy while maintaining line-of-sight to strategic objectives. This process focuses on aligning architecture to a high-level taxonomy. The aligned architectures and their architecture information are then located and linked via the employment of an architecture management service using a standard set of metadata to allow for consistent search and discovery."
Federation techniques allow disparate architectures to be meaningfully related and permit acceleration of new architecture efforts across the DoD community to support decision makers.
The DON EA provides an integrated approach that uses common architecture descriptions and data elements across all architecture products and views. An architecture is considered an integrated architecture when models and their constituent architectural data elements are developed such that architecture data elements defined in one view are the same (i.e., same names, definitions and values) as architecture data elements referenced in models in another view. For more information, refer t