Department of the Navy architecture Federation Pilot: 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 …

CHIPS, July-Sept, 2008 by Brant Frey

The Defense Department knows that the structured analysis associated

with architectures is essential to transform its plat-form-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 re sponsibility 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 2.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

To deal with the complexity and diversity of the enterprise, this concept sets the stage for dividing the enterprise into manageable components. These components can be described and documented by the communities that are most closely associated with them using a set of standard rules and practices.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Ideally, only a small set of rules, common terms and standards are inherited from the parent architectures to maintain consistency throughout the enterprise and effective high-level guidance from each higher tier.

The DON's federation process provides a method for linking or aligning subordinate and parent architectures via the mapping of common architectural information. This concept advocates subordinate architecture alignment to the parent architecture. For alignment, the operational activity model (OV-5) node tree, which describes the activities that are normally conducted in the course of achieving a mission, capability or a business goal, serves as the basis for federation and acts as a reliable touch point between architectures.

This is based on the belief that activities are of an enduring nature. Capabilities will change over time as will the processes and systems that instantiate those capabilities. As activities are aligned throughout the enterprise to a tiered taxonomy, the ability to trace capability development in systems can be effectively realized.