As the Pentagon moves to implement open architecture solutions into acquisition programs, a senior official believes they should also be brought to bear while the technologies and systems are in the very early stages of research and development.
Katrina McFarland, the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, said there are no barriers as to where open architecture solutions can be applied, but she said it is increasingly critical that they be introduced as early as possible in the process.
“It should be constructed very early on at an early enterprise level that you lay that foundation upon,” McFarland said at the Naval Future Forces Science and Technology Expo Wednesday. The event was hosted the Office of Naval Research and American Society of Naval Engineers.
The Pentagon is increasingly seeing open architecture as key to the systems it buys because the approach is seen as enabling rapid technology upgrades, reducing program lifecycle costs and spurring innovation and competition.
The Pentagon has been looking for ways to create common standards throughout the acquisition community as well as common approaches and then build toward it, McFarland said, adding that it has proven challenging.
“We are having a real problem in thinking through an architectural view of how to build open systems and modular systems,” she said.
“We’ve got people out there who are thinking, but we really are trying now at the very front end of this innovation to set a standard architecture in place to think about,” she said.
One key challenge is capturing data rights. Industry has been reluctant to hand over the intellectual property rights the Pentagon needs to re-compete systems and drive down cost while getting the best possible solutions.
McFarland emphasized, however, that the goal of the Pentagon is not to go after industry, nor after the propriety solutions in their “black box,” but instead to understand the interfacing of the components to enable the introduction of new technologies quickly through competition.
“This is not an attack on industry IP–intellectual property,” she said. “This is an attack on how we do business to keep ready for the threat and to be able to address the insertion of technologies across our entire enterprise and do it quickly and efficiently.”