By Geoff Fein
Following the release last year of a directive for implementation of open technology development and acquisition, the Air Force is beginning to apply it to all phases of life cycle, everything from how fees are awarded to how the service does investment across different programs, an Air Force official said.
The directive is very good and forward thinking, Tim Rudolph, senior level technical adviser Electronic System Center, Hanscom AFB, Mass., told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“It’s actually a fairly comprehensive approach,” he said.
And part of that approach is assessment, Rudolph added.
“Saying good things about moving to modularity, open standards, protocols, etc., is interesting but if you are not checking on what the results of that [are] you really don’t have any idea if you are making progress,” he said.
Rudolph is seeing industry embrace the open architecture (OA) concept, especially in areas that will show the most immediate gains such as command and control, and planning and execution systems.
“I think we do have companies that support that regardless of the number of systems integrators or other innovative companies that are also providing products,” he said.
“For us here at Electronic System Center (ESC), it’s possible [for it] to be [a more] broadly adopted activity just because of the nature of this primarily software intensive product,” Rudolph added.
Personnel at the ESC understand you can’t throw a switch and have everybody be doing open technology given the level of legacy systems, the different spirals and increments, and things of that nature, Rudolph said. “Because it is a cultural change, we do have a crawl, walk, run philosophy.”
The crawl part, he added, probably is more broadly applicable to more than software intensive systems because it is more modular, based on open standards protocol, and some of the plug and replace type of models. A lot of that guidance is incorporated in the Netcetric Enterprise Solutions for Interoperability (NESI) document
“We are building out, I would suggest, the enterprise architecture in these different domains to really accommodate open technology,” Rudolph said.
On the walk side, Rudolph said the service is finding that instead of the old traditional model of developing everything in stove pipes across the services, the Air Force is trying to get away from the concept of “every program of record does everything for itself,” and trying to share that infrastructure and other components across different programs.
An example of the that effort is a project called the Automated Metadata Processing Service (AMPS).
“We are trying to take concepts in industry such as the community processes for open source things, like the Java Community Process, and applying them to the development of something that not only supports the Air Force, but through OSD, has great benefit,” Rudolph said. “Basically, it is being piloted for all the services.”
The availability of metadata to accommodate searches and making relevant some of the authoritative data that’s available through a wide variety of systems is an important concept and part of a Department of Defense data strategy, he added.
“AMPS is an important activity not only because it helps to create that metadata that is searchable across the community, but I bring it up as an example more because it’s not only talking the talk but walking the walk,” Rudolph said. “It has plug ins, it’s easy to use, it follows a very open development type of approach that I think is more common in industry.”
The AMPS technology is one that has been made available to the Navy in particular, Rudolph added.
“We have a great deal of overlap and I’d say common activity with the Navy through the NESI series of standards and implementation guidance,” he added.
NESI is a group of activities resulting in a comprehensive set of guidance that works to provide implementation help to programs, Rudolph said.
It is becoming a complicated affair balancing between Office of the Secretary of Defense guidance, service guidance, and industry best practices, Rudolph said. “This NESI body of documents is trying to get this minimum mandatory one-stop-shop to figure out how a program manager can best approach these topics including open technology development.”
NESI volume 3 talks about migration to service oriented architecture and the principles of open technology development, he added.
“It’s a great common set of body of knowledge because it has actually worked cooperatively with DISA, between the Navy and Air Force, and there is a regular release schedule about twice a year,” Rudolph said. “That’s a great one-stop-shop for implementation guidance.
“The Air Force I think is trying to take this stuff seriously. [We] have had the Navy basically blazing the trail in open architecture. We’ve had some leverage of that in the department wide MOSA (Modular Open Systems Approach) standards. The Air Force understands we need to imbue that in the culture, particularly the acquisition culture, to make any headway with it.”