By Geoff Fein
Through a variety of national, international and industrial groups, the Department of Defense (DoD) is working to develop policies and guidelines for open standards that could be also be used across the federal government, a DoD official said.
“A basic policy for standards in DoD is that we want to embrace the industrial standards and we specifically want to embrace open architecture (OA) industrial standards, Walter Okon, senior architect engineer for DoD at the chief architect’s roundtable for information sharing, recently told Defense Daily.
Okon said the DoD does that through membership in each of the international, national industrial and scientific standards communities. “We have membership in those communities, we have members attending those organizational meetings, participating in them and voting in them.”
The reason why DoD would embrace commercial industrial standards, he added, is because those organizations invest a tremendous amount of efforts in developing specifications for open standards.
“They test those standards almost to the nth degree, and then they go through a critiquing and testing adjudication effort on every one of them,” Okon explained.
For example, at the Object Management Group (OMG) it takes 18 months to two years to get through their program with a specification, from writing a request for proposal to delivering and publishing a standard, Okon said.
The time it takes to publish a standard is to ensure that that specification will deliver the right data clearly and accurately to another system, he added.
That is evidenced, Okon added, by looking at one of DoD’s mission concerns, as far as OA is concerned–information exchange.
“If we are going to say we want interoperability, then architecture exchange or information exchange is paramount,” he said. “That information exchange has to be accurate and it has to be visual…information must be exchanged/shared from one organization to another using real data that is useable and understandable.”
For example, if the Air Force picked an architecture tool and the Navy picked an architecture tool and they happened to be different, up to now information exchange was not easy and is disparate, Okon said.
“That’s not very open architecture. But who hampered that, who was the impediment to that exchange? Certainly not DoD. It was the tool vendors,” Okon said. “And we have been asking the tool vendors ‘when are you going to be able to do exchange between tools?'”
The DoD is not in the business of building its own set of tools and running its own company for architecture tools, Okon added. “That’s not our mission.”
In the end, the tool vendors came together, under the umbrella of OMG, and have agreed to develop a specification, an architecture exchange specification, he said.
“This new standard for exchange is called UPDM, the Unified Profile for DoDAF and MoDAF,” Okon added.
The biggest architecture frameworks (AF) in the world that are data centric are the DoDAF and MoDAF (United Kingdom Ministry of Defense AF), Okon noted. MoDAF is built on using all the constructs in the DoDAF.
“When the vendors came to us and said ‘we’ve decided to provide a specification, what should we base it on,’ we said base it on [the DoDAF and MoDAF]. So the U.K. MoD and DoD signed a joint letter of support,” Okon said. “We actually worked with the UPDM developmental engineers and shared with them what the construct of (DoDAF) 1.5 and (MoDAF) 1.2 were.”
The tool vendors wrote a commercial specification, DoD supported it through the OMG working group. After development and testing of the specifications, they were approved in June 2009 at an OMG technical meeting, Okon said.
Final distribution and release occurred in September 2009 at an OMG meeting, he added.
“The commercial community of vendors that do all of the architecture tool work that enable our architecture developers and writers to exchange information have agreed to a specification that will work,” Okon said.
While work was being done by tool vendors on developing commercial specifications, DoD was working on upgrading the DoDAF from 1.5 to 2.0, Okon added.
“This is a major paradigm shift, a major upgrade. The reason it is so important is that it is entirely based now on the ability of our architect and systems engineers to put actual real data into data meta models, into the architecture so that it could be real…executable,” he said.
DoDAF 2.0 was released earlier this year.
In August, DoD conducted a DoDAF plenary meeting where engineers from DoD and industry provided information and training for all the services and industry, Okon said.
“The DoDAF 2.0 enables architectures to have real information and from that real data information, systems engineers can design to a rule based decision metric–information that can be put on the desktop of decision makers,” he explained. “This is a major breakthrough in enabling real-time information to decision makers so that they can make timely decisions.”
With the ability to define architectures in a net centric engineering way and with the policies supporting it, DoD now has all the tools necessary, Okon said. “You have to implement…through implementation and dissemination, that is your architecture education and training. We are doing that, we are pushing that.”
In August, Okon attended an enterprise architecture coalition meeting, a federal-level effort that supports the federal CIO council under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
“DoD, through its governance tool, through its policy and our partners, is now informing OMB that ‘here is something wonderful. If you embrace this you’ll embrace it for the entire federal government,'” Okon said.
“We are talking about enabling the information sharing environment and DoD’s leading that through open architecture information sharing across the federal departments,” Okon added. “We are working with [the Department of] State, DHS, DoJ, efforts in UCORP (University Committee on Research Policy)…enabling information sharing and interoperability.”