Q&A

SOAs Enable Collaboration Within the Department of Defense

Margaret Myers, the Principal Director for the Department of Defense (DoD) Deputy Chief Information Officer, talks about the DoD's service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy.

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By Ben Bradley

May 16, 2007 — CIO — Dr. Margaret Myers' primary focus is on leading the Information Age transformation for the Department by enabling Net-centric warfighting and operations. Her prior positions include acting deputy chief information officer; acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) acquisition; and director of information technology acquisition and investment for the assistant secretary of defense for C3I. She was appointed to the Senior Executive Service in 1992 as the deputy commander and technical director of the U.S. Army Operational Evaluation Command. In 2005, she retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a colonel. She earned a B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College, an M.S. in operations research from American University, and a Ph.D. in information technology from George Mason University.

BRADLEY: How is the Department of Defense improving data sharing?

MYERS: The DoD is embracing Web-based services and service oriented architectures (SOAs) as a way of breaking down the traditional and ineffective information stovepipes.

In the Cold War, the Soviet Union was pointing missiles us. We were pointing missiles at them. We focused on a single threat—our organization, our infrastructure and our tactics were designed with this single threat in mind. Today the threat is evolving and unknown. So we need to confront this uncertainty with agile fighting forces and systems that support them. Hard-wired information stovepipes won't work. We must enable information sharing.

No matter how good the software development team, our current and future conflicts are characterized by uncertainty. It is impossible to write a requirements definition that defines our future system requirements. We don't know where we will be fighting. We don't know who we will be fighting. We don't know which allied countries will need access to our systems. We cannot anticipate our information needs in the next conflict.

That type of uncertainty demands agility. To confront uncertainty with agility we are leveraging the power of information. Therefore, data must be visible, accessible, understandable and trusted. The Department's "Net-Centric Data Strategy" describes our strategy for sharing data with known and unanticipated users (and can be found on our website).

Using Web-based services and implementing SOA is key to how we are changing. Using Web-based services means we are moving away from a reliance on client specific software. SOA supports an information environment built upon loosely coupled, reusable, standards-based services. It promotes data interoperability rather than application interoperability. By using SOA, capability providers can reuse what already exists rather than recreating it every time. New capabilities can be fielded much more quickly, greatly increasing military agility. Ultimately, SOA provides the services to discover, access and use data by the people that need it, when they need it.