Services, which are registered in a service registry, can be used in ways the original developers never envisioned. Many systems can leverage the same capability without an integration penalty.

Most important, the need for time-consuming and individually engineered point-to-point interfaces is eliminated. The practice of buying individual, highly tailored, proprietary systems with a requirement for users to have client specific software must end. This is an important message to industry—particularly to the defense contractors currently building information stovepipes and applications that cannot support agile information sharing.

We are about to release the DoD Net-Centric Services Strategy that describes our vision and goals for realizing this information environment. In keeping with the DoD and Intelligence Community commitment to joint oversight of common service infrastructure standards that enable interoperability and access to information, we are collaborating with the CIO for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on a concurrent release of the IC Services Strategies.

Is the DoD equipped to share? Sharing seems counter-intuitive to security.

"Information is power" was the prevalent attitude in the past. Instead, we must change our mindset to understand and utilize "the power of information." In fact, information is a strategic asset and as powerful a weapon as anything in our arsenal. If I know more than my enemies, I can defeat them. Our desire to protect our information advantage reduced the utility of that information. Information within the DoD became silo'd as each owner of that information sought to protect it from others. We're trying to change that. But to do so we must behave as stewards of information and not information owners.

The old model was "need to know." The new model is "need to share" and "right to know." The DNI 100 Day Plan even talks about a "responsibility to provide." As you would expect, there are cultural issues that we're working to overcome. But we are making progress.

Data enables effective decisions. To make effective decisions, you need access to the right data. Data must be shared. In fact, if no one knows about the data, what good is it?

That is why data, like services, is discoverable. Creators tag data with metadata to make it easier to find. Creators and users of data build and register a shared vocabulary that imparts meaning to the data. Data is available for authorized users when and where they need it. Users are alerted when their data subscriptions are updated or changed.

Explain the shared vocabulary concept.