The Defense Department recognized that the current approach of attempting to develop monolithic integrated architectures has not worked well. Consequently, DoD has developed a concept of architecture federation...
The Defense Department knows that the structured analysis associated with architectures is essential to transform its platform-centric environment to a net-centric environment. This change will eliminate silos of data and information, thus making information visible and accessible to all authorized users.
However, the DoD recognized that the current approach of attempting to develop monolithic integrated architectures has not worked well. Consequently, DoD has developed a concept of architecture federation.
The Architecture and Interoperability Directorate of the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration/Department of Defense Chief Information Officer (ASD(NII)/DoD CIO) published the Global Information Grid (GIG) Architecture Federation Strategy version 1.2 in August 2007 (available on the Department of the Navy CIO Web site; search for Enterprise Architecture). It outlines the basic concepts and principles underlying architecture federation.
The DoD strategy has been kept at a high-level to allow each service to develop a tailored implementation plan. Allowing each component to tailor an implementation plan is consistent with the spirit of the federation approach. It endeavors to provide a minimum set of rules and standards from the higher echelons within the DoD while allowing maximum flexibility at subordinate echelons.
This article outlines a portion of the DON's implementation of the DoD federation strategy. It approaches DON architecture federation from the perspective of developing a repeatable process that, when applied to any number of architectures, produces a consistent result. The DON EA Federation Pilot Report 1.0, scheduled for release this summer, will outline processes, essential inputs to these processes, expected outcomes, and the rules required to achieve consistent success.
Architecture federation serves in part as a process for relating or aligning subordinate and parent architectures via the mapping of common architecture information. At the same time, federation provides an organizing construct that allows uniqueness and autonomy throughout the enterprise. These aligned architectures are subsequently located and linked through an architecture management service, allowing consistent search and discovery.
This alignment and discovery provide critical insight into the enterprise, improving interoperability and reducing overlaps and gaps. The ability to maintain line-of-sight for strategic missions and goals to the systems that instantiate those objectives is achieved. This enhances not only the ability to view duplicative or overlapping systems, but also the ability to identify those systems that need to be developed to fulfill a desired capability gap.
The DON views architecture federation as consisting of five central elements that govern the process and the methodology of federation: tiered accountability, categorization, semantic alignment, reference architectures, and search and discovery, as illustrated in Figure 1. Together these elements provide the framework for effective federation of DON architectures.
Architecture federation techniques recognize that the responsibility for architecture development is shared at several echelons or what the DoD federation strategy calls tiers. Tiered accountability establishes a hierarchy of architectures whereby subordinate architectures inherit characteristics from the higher level architectures in a parent-child relationship. The basic concept behind tiered accountability is to architect down to a minimum amount of detail at each tier to establish clear touch points between the tiers. This concept is shown in Figure