By Geoff Fein
Boeing [BA] is applying open architecture (OA) concepts to its own enterprises, recognizing the need to embrace OA in its own environment so the company can incorporate new capabilities as they come along, a company official said.
“We have an enterprise architecture approach that embraces OA, that embraces industry standards, that can be expressed in terms of the DoDAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework) and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) as well,” Sheryl Sizelove, director of Information and Knowledge Systems Boeing Advanced Systems, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“We are really living it ourselves and adopting this whole OA approach…not only living it but we need to do it because it is such a huge organization, huge number of applications and systems that our internal infrastructure needs to support,” she added. “That’s the way we can grow and expand and [increase] capability. So we are reaping the benefits of OA.”
Boeing’s approach maps the DoDAF, and the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF), Sizelove said.
“We are responding to our customers’ direction both in the systems we are building for our customers but also we are applying the same principles to our own environment,” she said.
“The other thing we are doing to make that work across the enterprise is having several enterprise initiatives to get the word out to train the staff, educate folks on this approach, building up a team of certified enterprise architects through training, and being able to deploy those to our programs and being able to spread that knowledge on the various programs and systems,” Sizelove said.
Boeing has an initiative called Enterprise Reuse and Interoperability. Through this effort, Boeing is creating libraries and repositories of reuse services and applications and building for reuse and interoperability, Sizelove said.
“That’s really an OA initiative for using the right industry standards and building products that can be reused across various systems and reincorporated into the OA approach,” she said. “If we can have applications and services that can be shared or we can share services and application across programs, it makes our offering to our customer much better, much stronger. If we can show that reuse, hopefully [we can] reduce cost to the customer, improve reliability and quality of the product.”
The effort will also reduce training for Boeing and their customer, if they are familiar with the product and have seen it before, she added. “Those are certainly some of the advantages in terms of the reuse and the standards…certainly cost, reliability and quality are right up there at the top.”
While it might not make a good business case to open up your systems to competitors, especially when a company has been using a proprietary approach and is locked in as a provider of that systems for many years, Sizelove said, it is really more a question of what will happen if companies don’t take an open architecture approach.
“This is what the customer wants. If we are not providing the systems that meet the customer’s needs, that are not following his guidance and guidelines, we are going to be locked out anyway,” she said.
Sizelove attended last month’s Network Centric Warfare 2009 conference in Washington. She said over and over again attendees heard about OA.
“Certainly the Navy talked quite a bit about it. One captain said [the Navy] can’t move all of its hardware off of a ship and totally replace it, so we have to be able to come in and replace modules as we go along,” she said. “They have to have OA. We don’t have enough money or time to do total upgrades to systems anymore. It’s a way of doing business and Boeing realizes that as well and that’s why we are adopting those same principles in our enterprise.”