What is Network Centricity? – The United States DOD Model in Profile

12/20/2008

In my blog postings, I have covered the notion of the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) but more importantly, the benefits of SOA in transforming your enterprise to an organization with fresh, germane and relevant information available on-demand in support of your business decisions.

To beat an old cliché to death, business is war. As such, I felt looking at the United States’ Department of Defense (DOD) posture is using SOA to conduct its business, its operations and war capabilities in a fully network centric manor and posture known-as Network Centric Operations (NCO) and Network Centric Warfare (NCW) as a very appropriate example. The United States DOD is a rather interesting, and somewhat unfathomable, enterprise. Its annual procurement budget alone (at nearly $1 trillion) is larger than that of many of the world’s 188 economies. Furthermore, the US DOD’s logistics coordination, supply chain management and visibility challenges are perhaps, the most complex of any organization in the world. Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that the DOD envisions a “Network Centric” world where all its assets from Ready-to-Eat meal packages to its ships to its Humvees to its UAVs down to its soldiers are visible nodes on a global network that is fully visible and hence manageable by its military commanders behind a computer located anywhere in the world.

The are three key ingredients to cook up such remarkable capability: a global information infrastructure known as the Global Information Grid (The GIG); a SOA enabled architecture known as the enterprise services bus (The ESB) such as the IBM’s WebSphere or Microsoft’s BizTalk servers, and last but not least, Sensors, ranging from GPS transponders to RFID tags to distributed MEMS and wireless beans. It is very worth to note that the size of the “Network Centric” capability enablement market worldwide is nearly $350b with over ½ in the United States alone.

DOD’s goal is to have live information about all its assets in global theaters of operations, be it a soldier in a battle field; supplies en-route to a theater of war or peace keeping mission depot; ships on the ocean or commercial cargo carries delivering ready-to-eat meals; and constructions supplies to hot zones. And, by the way, if you are in the later category (commercial cargo deliverers) and can not comport to these requirements, you will probably be screened out in the RFP qualification process.

Why the need for such extensively network-centric capability: The DOD owes its stakeholders (The American Citizens and their Protection) its commanders and soldiers (its Decision Makers and its On-Ground Execution Arm and Resources), its internal functions ( The DLA, The Military Services, DISA, The Office of the CIO, The DFAS (all what are commonly known as DOS’s Business Mission Areas-BMAs) as well as its Suppliers (Sources for its Material Needs to Get the Job Done) a service Level agreement (SLA): In short, a “I will do my job right so can do your job right” commitment.

Real-time Intelligence, Decision Support Tools, The stakeholders, The commanders, The soldiers, The Suppliers, SLAs, Supply Chain Visibility, The Enterprise Functions, The Mission – Does your organization sound much different?