Mashups for Real-Time Awareness
Written by Karen E. Thuermer
MIT 2011 Volume: 15 Issue: 10 (November)
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) was facing a challenge. It needed a secure real-time dashboard solution that would combine data in order to present situational information from hundreds of disparate services to commanders on secure Department of Defense networks.
In meeting its goal of providing the network, computing infrastructure and enterprise services to support information sharing and decision making no matter where the information is located or sourced, DISA needs to facilitate a seamless exchange of information that can be consumed anywhere on secure networks globally.
A particular challenge of aggregating disparate data sources across secure networks such as the NIPRNet, SIPRNet and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System involved the fact that the task required an extensive manual effort of gathering volumes of information from various departments and entities with varying security models.
DISA needed a way to support senior decision-makers during events of national significance with a rapid situational awareness solution.
Enterprise mashups—combinations of data from disparate systems that give decision-makers an actionable view of real-time operations—dramatically reduce the time and effort required to combine disparate data and provide a mechanism to easily share, customize and apply to like situations. A mashup is generally a web application that combines data or functionality from one source or more sources into a single, integrated application. The main characteristics of the mashup are combination, visualization and aggregations, which make existing data more useful.
A number of vendors offer mashup capabilities. However, the ranks of providers of enterprise-level mashup software are more limited, including IBM, with its Lotus Mashup tools, Serena Software, with its Business Mashups offering, and JackBe. JackBe is a real-time intelligence technology firm, and its secure dashboard solution is called Presto.
Secure Dashboard
DISA selected Presto because it works in conjunction with existing government off-theshelf infrastructure to create a secure dashboard solution supporting various mission threads and operational needs.
A key benefit of Presto is that the dashboard solution enables new insights in dynamic situations through visually rich, secure enterprise apps created from live data. According to JackBe, Presto allows decision-makers the flexibility to combine data from any enterprise application as well as data from the cloud regardless of its location. Users can compose apps and dashboards that are publishable to portals, the Web, spreadsheets and mobile devices.
In 2008, the DISA Chief Technology Office (CTO), in collaboration with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), made an investment in the JackBe Presto Enterprise Mashup Server software to meet a need to leverage exposed data through web service for use by senior leaders.
“This capability was used in support of the Joint Capability Technology Demonstrations (JCTD) effort called National Senior Leadership Decision Support Service (NSLDSS),” said Thomas F. Hazelwood, chief engineer, Advanced Concepts Office, CTO, DISA.
By taking an enterprisewide approach, DISA could offer the benefits of mashup technology to U.S. military personnel worldwide. It selected JackBe’s Presto, in conjunction with existing GOTS infrastructure, to create NSLDSS, a secure dashboard solution supporting various mission threads and operational needs.
The vision behind the NSLDSS is that senior leaders and watch officers will have real-time situational awareness directly tying into authoritative data and systems available across the various security domains that exist within the Department of Defense and intelligence community. “The JackBe technology enables users to evaluate information and make composite services dynamically,” Hazelwood explained.
As part of this effort, Hazelwood noted, the DISA CTO, in concert with the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (VCJCS) and J36 in the Pentagon, was able to use the JackBe mashup technology to combine and orchestrate services (information and function services) based on the DoD operators’ need and requirements.
“Also, this mashup technology allowed users to filter down the data based on a user preference so that only the information needed was provided by the available data services on the Global Information Grid (GIG),” he said. “In addition, the mashup capability enabled us to develop composite services by combining and orchestrating various services together while leveraging the NCES foundational services provided by the Program Executive Office-Global Information Grid Enterprise Services.”
The goal of NSLDSS was to create an ondemand environment using Web 2.0 standards and practices to allow it to be portable and centralized, and follow the very stringent governance policies of the data enclave.
“By reducing development time through mashup-driven connections to live authoritative systems and delivering dynamic visualizations in real-time, the solution resulted in improved military response times to mission critical events of national significance,” commented Chris Warner, vice president of marketing at JackBe. “This extensible and modernized Web 2.0 situational awareness environment can be leveraged by all agencies within DoD.”
In essence, the mashup technology is important to DISA in that it has provided military leaders with tools for decision making and assisted the Joint Staff and the VCJCS in embarking on an approach to transform the way asymmetric and symmetric events are handled by senior DoD leaders.
“This mashup technology changed the way information is managed, evaluated and provided to senior leaders during events occurring around the world,” said Hazelwood. “It also allowed users to expose various information assets to GIG users.”
In addition, the enterprise mashup technology provided the ability to share information and collaborate with combatant commanders across the various mission spaces when events required support by the National Military Command Center.
“This transformational effort leveraging the JackBe Presto mashup tool enabled users to orchestrate services, combine information and help operators make decisions based on critical data on the enterprise while reducing the amount of time to search for data in their individual commands,” he added. “This technology enabled senior leaders to leverage and reuse intellectual capital and intelligence collected across DoD. The mashup technology enabled us to support various missions like the Missile Events through Global Sensory Information Network at STRATCOM and the Operation Noble Eagle event out of NORTHCOM.”
Data Explosion
Today enterprise mashups are solving important issues facing DISA. That’s because the data required for operational decisions is growing at an explosive rate, both in terms of volume, velocity and the number of sources.
“As a result, operation decisions require today real-time access to data from many systems, and on an order of magnitude that we hadn’t seen just a few years ago,” Warner said. “Also, the time to make decisions is decreasing to the point where the only way to keep up with the demand is to have ‘self-service’ dashboard assembly and creation.” Warner sees the visual tools used for self-service mashup creation as a perfect solution to this multifaceted challenge.
“Enterprises that embrace mashups, and the things that can be built from those mashups (such as rich decision-support dashboards and visual analytics), will have many significant advantages over organizations (and enemies) that do not,” he said. Research has shown that a proactive, inclusive mashup solution can improve operational efficiency, optimize the sales pipeline, enhance customer satisfaction and drive profitability by as much as 17 times, Warner said. “Within government, mashups have positively impacted strategic areas such as citizen engagement and satisfaction, financial transparency, project oversight, regulatory compliance and legislated reporting.”
Going forward, DISA is seeking the implementation of StrategicWatch, a mashup-driven situational awareness solution for DoD. According to JackBe’s Warner, the StrategicWatch project is currently well underway.
“JackBe has provided the StrategicWatch Program Management Office with its real-time intelligence engine, Presto, to provide enterprise mashups to the StrategicWatch common operational picture,” he said. “Today Presto provides secure access to constantly changing data sources on military networks and allows operators to manipulate these data sources in order to allow for self-service creation of user defined operational picture.”
Based on demand from JackBe’s customers and partners, company executives expect to see four main areas of growth in mashups: self-service, collaboration, extreme dashboarding and analytics.
“All of these are due to one simple megatrend: Technology and workers’ technical aptitudes have converged, which means they can now do things themselves that previously required a team of developers and months of effort,” Warner explained. “By making connectivity and data mashing to secure, authoritative systems accessible to these tech-savvy, information-hungry people, we can radically increase productivity and reduce the time to value to just minutes and hours.”
This will provide analysts and knowledge workers at places such as DISA with the tools to better prepare and respond for unanticipated events, and help them make more effective decisions in complex, dynamic situations.
Meanwhile, the NSLDSS JCTD has been successfully completed and its technologies, including the mashup capability, are now being transitioned to sustainment.
“As such, we do not have a requirement for a follow-on competition at this time,” Hazelwood said. “However, as part of the DISA CTO task and mission, we continue to research and evaluate new technology and capabilities available from the commercial sector.”
The mashup capability is no different. The technology has come a long way and different venders are making strides in the mashup environment, which affords a robust future in DISA's continuing competition of those requirements.
“We are planning to go out with an RFI to gauge the commercial industry again in the next few months to evaluate how far the industry has come,” he indicated. ♦
