The White House on Monday released a new action plan that supports the nation’s Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) strategy and directs the establishment of a national enterprise architecture around information sharing across all levels of federal, state and local government.
The enterprise architecture could include “enterprise, web-centric, cloud-based, information and services, common data standards, and data access policy,” says the National Maritime Domain Awareness Plan (NMDAP), which merges two earlier plans and is one of seven implementation plans that support the National Strategy for Maritime Security. The NMDAP consolidates and supersedes the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness and the Global Maritime Intelligence Integration Plans that were published in 2005.
Improved information sharing at various levels of government will mean faster and more accurate decision making, says the NMDAP.
“The transition to national-level collaboration through an information sharing environment that enables data access through multiple sources (e.g. clouds or databases) provides authorized users with more flexible access to greater number of sources, types, and volume of data and the ability to search databases without relying on point-to-point access,” says the 38-page plan. “Under this construct data should be authoritative and conform to recognized standards, such as those currently employed under the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate).”
The establishment of the national-level information sharing architecture will be overseen by the MDA Executive Steering Committee (ESC), which consists of senior-level executive agents from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Transportation, and a representative from the intelligence community.
The new plan also “encourages maritime stakeholders to identify and address MDA-related capability challenges and measure progress toward solutions.”
To enable greater and improved information sharing and to better address MDA challenges, the action plan calls for expanded, deeper and sustained collaboration among all stakeholders, including government, academia, industry and international. One way to improve global MDA could mean cooperation with industry and international partners on the commercial use of space,” the action plan says.
The drive for improved collaboration through outreach will be led by the MDA ESC, the plan says.