DISA Ties Strengthen Net-Centric Strategy

MIT 2009 Volume: 13 Issue: 9 (October)

(Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of updates from the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC), an organization dedicated to network-centric operations (NCO) and the interoperability that NCO can bring to its customers. See MIT, September 2009, Volume 13 Issue 8, page 38.)

The relationship between NCOIC and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which goes back to the earliest days of the organization as an idea in the minds of its founders, has flourished and brought important benefits to both organizations. It continues today via an expanded partnership with the agency’s parent, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration/Department of Defense Chief Information Officer (ASD (NII)/DoD CIO), which now serves as the portal for DoD’s involvement in NCOIC’s work.

NCOIC incorporated in the fall of 2004, with Boeing’s Carl O’Berry as its founding chairman. Leading up to that legal move, however, there had been an extensive series of discussions that explored government’s desire to forge a novel relationship with industry. It also tested industry’s willingness to shed traditional competitor roles so that, working in concert, companies could reach consensus about creating interoperability solutions for customers.

One of these landmark conversations occurred in 2003, during a meeting between O’Berry and DISA Director Lieutenant General Harry Raduege. In the process of pulsing government leaders for opinions about the potential value of an industry consortium dedicated to NCO, O’Berry arrived at Raduege’s office with four charts and a vision about network-centric operations. But it turned out Raduege also had four charts, and his own vision about improving DISA’s acquisition process, systems engineering, communication and DoD-wide enterprise network services. As the men swapped charts their thoughts converged and their visions intersected.

O’Berry outlined his vision of an organization that would advance global interoperability and enable industry to produce better results for the government. The idea, he explained, was that companies would agree on network-centric standards and protocols, but continue to compete on the applications and capabilities. They would share their ideas and come to consensus without giving away company secrets.

Raduege expressed interest in the idea, especially if it would spare government acquisition communities the horror of proprietary software and new capabilities that do not interoperate properly with current capabilities. Using open standards and protocols, he suggested, could reduce the cost of delivering things to government activities unable to fully describe what they really wanted from industry.

Even in those early days, Raduege and O’Berry shared a vision of a strong industry alliance that would advance NCO by identifying appropriate standards and developing tools, interfaces and protocols to support them. Even then they foresaw NCOIC’s ultimate goal: that procurement agencies would one day include NCOIC’s open, net-centric solutions in their requirements.

So began the formative DISA-NCOIC collaboration. And, in 2006, Raduege retired from the Air Force, joined Deloitte Touche and became NCOIC’s Executive Council chairman.

DISA’S VIEW TODAY

As a DoD combat support agency, DISA is responsible for planning, engineering, acquiring, fielding and supporting global net-centric solutions to serve the needs of the president, vice president, the secretary of defense, combatant commanders, and other DoD components, under all conditions of peace and war. In support of ASD (NII)/ DoD CIO’s information technology activities, DISA seeks the coherent integration of military capabilities with other elements of national and allied power.

DISA envisions that collective engagement with NCOIC will help the agency to:

• Advance DISA’s combat support mission in a wide range of current and emerging areas
• Inform DoD’s requirements for netcentric operations
• Identify and stimulate industry’s support of technologies and standards that are, or should be, developed by commercial or nongovernmental standards bodies
• Benefit from industry’s tools and technology forecasts for future capabilities
• Harvest industry’s advice about enhancing military operations, now and in the future.
 

In the spring of 2007, DISA entered into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with NCOIC. The purpose was to enhance understanding, development and refinement of network centric operations principles and practices that closely touch both organizations’ interests and missions. “DISA is designated as DoD’s executive agent for information technology standards,” said Dave Brown, DISA Standards Engineering branch chief. “We use CRADAs as mechanisms to permit us to work more closely with industry organizations such as NCOIC, and to share information and intellectual property that facilitates consistent understanding of military net-centric operational and technical requirements.”

Under the CRADA, NCOIC members have access to certain government information, but can use it only within the context of its Technical Council and functional teams’ activities. For example, NCOIC’s Cloud Computing Working Group leverages the CRADA as a vehicle for collaboration on the development of new cloud computing capability patterns.

The effort was launched during NCOIC’s September 2009 plenary meeting during briefings by Henry Sienkiewicz of DISA’s Computing Services Division and Rob Vietmeyer, DISA’s Forge.mil project director, according to Kevin Jackson, vice president of DataLine and leader of NCOIC’s cloud computing workshop.

Future NCOIC cloud computing endeavors will correlate lessons learned from the Rapid Access Computing Environment, GIG Content Delivery Service, and other DISA cloud computing efforts, to industry’s work on cloud computing standards. “We have seen good progress in NCOIC’s CRADA work on our standards and attributes tasks,” said Brown. “That work paves the way for validating some standards profiling that we’ve developed as technical guidance for the Global Information Grid [GIG] capabilities.”

NET-CENTRIC CHECKLIST

DoD CIO John Stenbit developed and promulgated a “net-centric checklist” in 2004. He believed that the GIG should exhibit attributes that aligned with its four essential elements— transport, data, services and information assurance. Separately, DoD developed an initial version of “net-centric attributes” to guide investments. The attributes evolved further and were made public in 2007.

An attribute is a quality or feature regarded as an inherent part of someone or something. So, a net-centric attribute is one that supports the principles of NCO. Explicitness—an entity’s characteristic of exposing all information about itself, without prior assumptions—is one example of a net-centric attribute. The goodness of attributes is that they can be measured to gauge net-centric behavior.

NCOIC’s work on attributes originated when the organization adopted DoD’s Net-Centric Checklist as the foundation of its original Network Centric Analysis Tool (NCAT), which developers now use to measure net-centricity in their products and systems. Over the years, NCAT has evolved and expanded to include sub-sets that reflect the special needs of NATO and the Australian military.

“NCOIC’s Network Centric Attributes Functional Team [NCA FT] is now reviewing the net-centric attributes document at DoD’s invitation and under the DISA CRADA,” said Jack Zavin, an associate director in the Office of the ASD (NII)/DoD CIO and vice chair of the NCA FT.

NCOIC will re-baseline the 2007 attributes list to determine whether it remains relevant and valid. NCA FT members will address questions such as: are the elements correctly identified; are the original suppositions still on target; how can they evolve over time; and how can they improve system performance, cost and delivery speed? Based on its findings, the consortium will deliver “voice of industry” recommendations to the U.S. DoD.

In terms of obtaining meaningful industry input, Zavin believes that NCOIC has four characteristics that taken together make the organization unique. It is solely dedicated to NCO and interoperability; has a global membership that generates an international discussion; is vendor neutral; and has a cadre of technical experts available to do its work. In these respects, Zavin believes, DoD collaboration with NCOIC’s subject matter experts delivers value beyond the cost of its membership dues.

NCOIC subject matter expert Hans Polzer recently offered his “Net-centric Attributes 101.”

“NCOIC is merging the SCOPE model attributes into NCAT 3 content so that customers can determine how much netcentricity they need, and measure the level of net-centricity that they have,” said Polzer, Lockheed Martin fellow and NCA FT chair.

“NCAT 3 can help them determine whether they got the requirements right, assess how well their design met those requirements and inform their selection of attributes for their specific context.”

Polzer went on to say that NCAT attributes are oriented toward design and implementation, whereas SCOPE attributes are more focused on operations and requirements scope. He advised developers to apply SCOPE at the requirements definition stage and set target NCAT attribute values after the requirements are established. “You want to use a tool like NCAT to allow flexible tailoring of attributes to specific program types and contexts,” said Polzer.

ATTRIBUTE SELECTION

In selecting attributes, NCOIC experts emphasize the following factors:

• Selecting appropriate net-centric attributes depends on a particular system’s problem domain and its operational scope. Attributes need to be appropriate to a system’s operational effectiveness measures, not to its degree of net-centricity, per se.
• To determine which net-centric attributes are germane to a particular system:

• Enhanced NCAT 3 gives users new flexibility in selecting questions for their evaluation. Also, users can add new questions or new domaindependent questions appropriate to their operational domain. This enables them to extend the set of net-centric attributes and contribute new attributes to the community.

Organizations are urged to begin with three steps:

• Recognize that the definition of netcentricity differs from one organization to another—from Australia to NATO to the U.S., and even within and among its federal agencies.
• Select attributes based on how netcentricity can provide optimal benefits for the specific capability in question. Here the term “optimal” requires a customer’s value judgment.
• Participate in an NCAT/ SCOPE workshop, or engage with an NCOIC integrated project team.
 

NCOIC invites global government and industry representatives to join its quest for interoperability via network-centric operations. To learn more about engagement in NCOIC’s technical and working groups, contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; for cloud computing, kevin.jackson@dataline. com; for the CRADA, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . ♦

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