Faced with disparate, proprietary, stovepiped systems, government and military leaders express an understandable degree of frustration. Non-interoperable legacy systems cost too much to operate, consume excessive resources and ultimately disrupt mission readiness. Thus, within the vast array of military systems, particularly for IT mission systems related to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as command and control, and weapons control, for example integration has become the new benchmark priority. Tearing down the walls has become the order of the day.
“We’re trying to avoid stovepipes. We all know what can happen if there’s a stovepipe and we overlook a critical piece of intelligence,” said COL Charles Wells, project manager for Distributed Common Ground System.
This calls for tighter forms of collaboration between government and industry. In a recent study from Government Business Council (GBC) and Booz Allen Hamilton, 43 percent of the senior federal and military defense leaders surveyed identified the disconnect between government and industry expectations as a significant problem in the current defense acquisition process.
Many leaders want to see the government take a lead in integration efforts. In the survey, 55 percent of respondents said greater government involvement would generate products and services that better meet warfighter needs, and 51 percent said they would expect to see greater interoperability.
Private industry already is moving in this direction. MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the system integration market will grow from $191.36 billion in 2013 to $331.76 billion in 2018. The military is actively working with integrators and has made multiple awards for systems integration related to complex IT programs.
Still, there is plenty of room for expansion, particularly for more complex mission systems, as opposed to business systems like email, human resources and finance. “The Department of Defense (DoD) is simply a very large enterprise that has a large number of variables in it,” said Martin Gross, a program executive officer for communications for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). “It’s very complex because we have such varying missions, and we have to be very careful that we don’t break things as we integrate them across the boards.”
Despite the risks, the integration of multiple components strengthens the system overall. “A new sensor may have a ground station that needs to be connected to the left or the right. There is a value in that connection, but it is point to point, physically connecting one thing to another,” said Greg Wenzel, Booz Allen Hamilton senior vice president and lead of advanced enterprise integration. “So each one of those systems has one piece of the puzzle. When all those pieces come together, that is when you actually start getting the situational awareness that you need to find the bad guys.”
While several methods have been tried to unify disparate systems, all have fallen short in one way or another. Lately, though, a sensible solution has increasingly risen to the fore, in the form of the enterprise integrator. It’s rooted in a philosophy traced back to the 1990s and the concept of netcentric warfare introduced by the late VADM Arthur Cebrowski, who served as the director of the DoD’s Office of Force Transformation from late 2001 to early 2005. In the age of enterprise architecture, the enterprise integrator is more relevant than ever before. The enterprise integrator offers a solution to the challenge of making data readily interoperable – a human intervention to smooth out what has so far been a bumpy technology road.
