Aerospace eBusiness

DoD soldiers on with exemplary Enterprise Architecture efforts May 15, 2009

Posted by ludozone in Conference, eBusiness Applications/Services.
Tags: AFEI, DOD, Enterprise Architecture
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A fundamental attribute of Aerospace & Defense companies today is they must be dynamic. Enabling a net-centric data strategy – decoupling applications and data – combined with the emphasis on communities of interest and project areas, point towards a future enterprise model composed of socially networked dynamic groups, forming, disbanding and re-forming as opportunity needs dictate. The corporation’s information architecture in this environment must be responsive, extremely agile, and able to cope with the unanticipated to provide the business leaders and innovators the speed they need to succeed. Ensuring timely and trusted information is available where it is needed, when it is needed, and to those who need it, is at the heart of the future enterprise and an effective, federated, and dynamic approach to IT architecture is absolutely required.

As DoD transforms to become a Net-Centric force, information becomes one of its greatest sources of power to achieve an information advantage for its people and mission partners. As such, the DOD has lead the way in establishing standards, guidelines, and architecture interchange best practices to achieve information superiority. The DoDAF 2.0 (Department of Defense Architectural Framework) provides guidance on planning, developing, managing, maintaining, and governing architectures through a coherent semantic and structural metamodel. In addition, DOD is embracing commercial enterprise integration standards developed by the Object Management Group among others to be able to implement technology faster with its IT vendors as well as share information outside the enterprise (e.g. UPDM with the UK MoD).

DoD mission partners and A&D companies as a whole could learn a lot from the work undertaken by the DOD in this field. One place to get caught up will be the DOD Enterprise Architecture Conference to be held in St Louis, MO on June 1 to 4. This event is is sponsored by the Director of Architecture and Interoperability (a DoDAF 2.0 guru), Office of the Deputy CIO and hosted by the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI). Below is a quick highlight of some of the technical subjects that will be covered at the event from Walt Okon, a DOD Senior Enterprise Architect.