Abstract:
Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration 2008 (CWID 08), Interoperability Trial (IT) #5.64 “Trusted Enterprise Service Bus” (T-ESB) demonstrates a potentially quantum improvement in the government procurement model for information systems. Joint Interoperability Command (JITC) sponsored the World Wide Consortium for the Grid (W2COG) Institute (WI) to conduct IT 5.64. WI studied the requirements of the Multi-National Information Sharing (MNIS) program to distill the following objectives:
• “Flatten” coalition networks
• Enable data and service “discovery” via semantic interoperability
• Demonstrate rapid, adaptive, evolutionary acquisition compliant with the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) and based on commercial best practice.
The general premise is that the government should “buy down” as much implementation risk as possible of its basic information-processing requirement with true COTS capability. An issue is that government requirements, especially military requirements, are typically more stringent than commercial requirements. Security and interoperability are especially critical. True COTS offerings rarely address the total government requirement. Accordingly, IT 5.64 provided credible demonstration of the viability of the following hypothesis: i
If the government (1) continuously develops and furnishes critical raw technology to the industrial base, and (2) simply publishes its use cases, objective selection criteria, and COTS competitive procurement budget in lieu of formal Engineering Development Model (EDM)-type solicitations;
Then continuing industrial competition will generate pure COTS offerings that are ever more aligned with government requirements.
Description:
A faster, better, cheaper approach to netcentric acquisition including engineering, testing, certification, and procurement.
