Network-Centric Consensus

MIT 2009 Volume: 13 Issue: 8 (September)

The more than 90 members of NCOIC include 1,900 people from 19 nations. They represent large and small defense companies, system integrators, information technology and service providers, government agencies and academic institutions. Although many member companies are traditional marketplace competitors, they dedicate more than 1,000 technical experts to NCOIC’s quest for interoperability. Their work is the engine of the organization’s achievement.

“NCOIC’s delicate alchemy fosters true collaboration among global companies that are often fierce business competitors,” according to Nicolas Berthet of Thales Group, who chairs NCOIC’s Technical Council. “Their efforts to resolve customers’ interoperability issues recently resulted in the publication of NCOIC’s Interoperability Framework, a set of guiding principles for developers of network-centric systems, products and services.”

NCOIC’s deliverables—tools, frameworks, patterns and best practices—address customers’ key concerns and help them identify opportunities to:

• Ensure that a new or emerging system will be interoperable with other systems;
• Determine how legacy systems can bridge the gap between current capability and a customer’s desired level of netcentricity; and
• Adapt systems to meet evolving mission requirements and to easily accept emerging technology.

COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT

“People who operate in one market segment adopt a model about how the world works, and that can lead to a mental rut,” said Hans Polzer, a Lockheed Martin fellow and chair of NCOIC’s Network Centric Attributes Functional Team. “NCOIC members come from many sectors and have opinions that don’t always agree with your own. Within the context of such a collaborative environment, diverse thinking can be a catalyst for innovation.”

The path from innovation to consensus can be thorny. Yet in NCOIC’s unique, noncompetitive environment, member technologists do share their ideas, knowledge, best practices, and even intellectual property. They attack the technical challenges, evaluate alternatives and teach each other.

Ultimately, they reach consensus and propose “voice of industry” recommendations that can leverage the power of network centricity to help customers achieve greater success in domains such as command, control and communications; maritime; aviation; cybersecurity; sense and respond logistics; and net-enabled emergency response.

“Many people think that consensus leads to a lowest common denominator,” said Terry Morgan of Cisco, who serves as NCOIC’s executive chairman. “In fact, NCOIC’s process frequently leads to agreements that are better than the piece parts of the dialog. This happens because a forum of talented, experienced and secure experts present and defend their ideas and propositions, knowing that the wisdom of talented and experienced collaborators can improve upon any idea.”

“Where else can we learn how to operate better, faster and more securely?” asked Air Force Lieutenant General Harry Raduege (Ret.), now chairman of Deloitte’s Center for Cyber Innovation. “Where else can we see how other companies address the issues and collaborate on technology like service-oriented architectures, cloud computing and interoperability patterns? We are overwhelmed with opportunities in the way network-centric operations can shape the future.”

Whether representing their own companies or the consortium, NCOIC leaders advocate that net-centric systems can bring interoperability to allied and coalition forces. As a result, the U.S. government, several coalition governments and NATO have invited the NCOIC to prove the effectiveness of its tools and processes in military field exercises, demonstrations and training sessions.

“They want to see for themselves how NCOIC’s deliverables work,” said Boeing’s Ken Cureton, vice chair of the consortium’s Technical Council. “They want answers to essential questions like how much NCO is enough for my mission, will our current plans get us there, how will I know when we are there, and what will it take to make us interoperable with others?”

NCOIC listens to the needs of global defense departments and ministries of defense. Its deliverables are designed to help leaders determine the levels of network centricity they require to meet their unique national missions; provide the tools to diagnose current and planned systems’ capabilities; and assess whether the systems do or can meet their required performance levels. In this way it offers recommendations that can remove potential barriers to success. Agencies and governments have invited NCOIC to assess their strategies, concepts of operation and major programs with an eye toward their ability to support networkcentric operations and interoperability.

ACQUISITION PROCESS

One recent example of how NCOIC is helping customers achieve interoperability involves training military and industry officials in Australia, which may become the first country to apply the consortium’s net-centric tools to the military acquisition process.

In May, at Australia’s Canberra Rapid Prototyping, Development and Evaluation facility, a team of NCOIC technical experts led officials from the Department of Defence and the Australian Defence Information and Electronic Systems Association (ADIESA) through a training session designed to show how NCOIC’s interoperability tools might meet the country’s unique needs. Their discussions also centered on ways to apply the tools to Australia’s defense capability development and procurement processes.

“The Australian Department of Defence is a keen supporter of NCOIC, its principles and tools,” said Air Commodore John McGarry. “During 2009 we aim to apply NCOIC products to the acquisition process to better define interoperability requirements and improve through-life systems integration prospects.”

Although Australia’s population is relatively small (23 million people), it has the 14th largest defense budget in the world. It employs military forces in 11 theaters overseas and at home to protect the country and its national interests. Australia is a middle power in global terms, meaning that it maintains complex relationships with close allies, coalition partners and regional nations.

“Getting information across the ‘last mile’ has always been the toughest challenge, yet we must see to it that future forces can access information as if they were in the middle of the network, rather than on the edge,” said Brett Biddington, ADIESA chairman. “If we adopt globally accepted standards and tools, then we can begin to build all sorts of relationships—between Asian, European, American and other forces —because we will all have the same glue.”

AIRSPACE TRANSFORMATION

The consortium and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), meanwhile, are taking a unique path to NextGen, in an initiative that represents a pioneering effort by FAA. On July 7, the agency and NCOIC entered a five-year agreement to advance the Enterprise Architecture of NextGen, FAA’s national airspace (NAS) transformation program. Under the agreement, NCOIC proposes to FAA net-centric standards, best practices and patterns that can lead to the achievement of NextGen’s 2025 milestones. Among other artifacts, NCOIC’s recommendations will utilize the Joint Program Development Office’s concept of operations for 2025 NextGen. The joint office’s Net-centric Task Force, which informs the CONOPS, is led by the U.S. Air Force.

“We anticipate that the standards, recommendations, best practices and netcentric pattern development derived from our collaboration will strengthen NextGen’s requirements,” said Morgan. “Our recommendations will be founded on the thoughts of multi-national, multi-industry leaders in net-centricity.”

Industry’s review of a major acquisition’s enterprise architecture—prior to developing proposal requirements—is a pioneering effort conceived by the FAA. Further, the agreement encourages industry to provide expertise to FAA throughout NextGen’s life cycle, from research through disposition.

The significance of implementing a NextGen enterprise architecture based on open standards—and designed to enable network-centric operations—includes delivering vital information to those who operate the NAS; speeding system development and reducing procurement cost through reuse of software, patterns and best practices; effectively bringing legacy systems into an interoperable enterprise; and supporting the seamless integration of rapidly emerging technology into NextGen.

The resulting benefit could be a technologically “evergreen” system that enhances controllers’ ability to manage traffic, increases passenger safety, reduces airport flight delays, and advances the airlines’ drive to achieve greener operations.

The NCOIC-FAA collaboration dates back several years. In 2008, the agency used the NCAT tool as part of its Network Enabled Operations demonstrations. In addition, the consortium’s Aviation Integrated Project Team is developing two patterns for global application—one for weather data dissemination and another for flight object data dissemination. The goal is interoperability in joint endeavors.

With the cumulative knowledge of its member organizations, NCOIC serves as an honest broker to provide broad industry perspectives on products, systems, tools and processes that could advance the major objective of network-centric operations: getting the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right format. In other words, it is to achieve interoperability among essential global military and civil forces.

More about NCOIC is available at www.ncoic.org. The NCOIC hosts plenary meetings three times a year, including one in late September in Fairfax, Va. Each includes a series of working sessions along with a general session in which government and industry leaders address topics germane to NCO. ♦

NCOIC Goals

• Increase interoperability within and among systems involved in interagency and multinational operations.
• Lower development costs and increase design commonality in future systems; apply tailored standards and best practices.
• Improve application readiness through more rapid fielding of network-centric systems; leverage technical lessons learned.
• Reduce systems cost and sustainability through reuse and commonality; facilitate ease of integration; upgrade and support network-centric environment.
• Reduce development risk by identifying the common components needed for the network-centric environment, and develop them where none exist.
• Improve application effectiveness through new, more focused development on domain-specific capabilities.
  

Customer Collaboration

• NCOIC trains Australian defense force and industry officials; nation may be first to apply consortium’s net-centric tools to acquisition process.
• FAA and NCOIC take unique path to NextGen; initiative represents pioneering effort by FAA.
• The U.S. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration and NCOIC collaborate to develop the time-phasing assessment of DoD net-centric attributes.
• U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency and NCOIC develop Standards Management Framework and Reference Implementation Model, and also collaborate on IPv6 work.
• NATO shares unclassified portion of its network enabled capability feasibility study report with NCOIC; the consortium evaluated operational concepts and requirements defined in the study.
• NCOIC leaders meet with Defense Science Board to exchange NCO visions and strategies.
  

NCOIC Deliverables

• Systems, Capabilities, Operations, Programs and Enterprises (SCOPE): characterizes commercial, civil and government requirements for interoperable systems; identifies system gaps and strengths.
• Net Centric Analysis Tool (NCAT): net-centric analysis of system architectures, including system-of-systems and federation-of-systems models; prescribes ways to close gaps and leverage system strengths.
• NCOIC Interoperability Framework (NIF): recommends open standards, provides patterns, guidance and success metrics for developing interoperable systems.
• Net-centric Pattern: three categories of patterns (mission-oriented, function-oriented and designoriented) describe standard practices, methodologies and technologies that can advance interoperability.
• Building Blocks: catalog of open standards-based COTS and GOTS products that comply with NIF recommendations.
• NCOIC Lexicon: glossary of terms and definitions that lay the foundation for meaningful discussions. Provides a common language for disparate ideas concerning key terms, including “NCO.”
• Systems engineering best practices and processes: includes tools, process and maturity models, modeling techniques, and collaborative environments for NCOIC integration.
• NCOIC deliverables are available free of charge at www.ncoic.org.

Back to Top