Defense Enterprise Architecture Awards Program

2010 Defense Enterprise Architecture Achievement Award

Award Category: Industry

Project/Program Title: Air Force Space Command, Space Situational Awareness & Command and Control Enterprise Architecture Development

Performing Organization: Serco Space Programs, Serco, Inc.

Customer: HQ AFSPC/A5C, Col Stephen Butler; ESC 850 ELSG/NGS, Mr. Mark Laforce

Primary Nominee: Mr. Eric Svarverud, Vice President, Space Programs

Description

HQ Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) is organized under a Capability Team structure. Each Capability Team manages the development and sustainment of a synergistic multi-billion dollar portfolio of programs and systems to meet AFSPC's obligation to support the warfighter and broader space community of interest (COI). In addition to DoD and Intelligence Community (IC) users, the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Command and Control (C2) Capability Team must address the needs of a rapidly expanding and evolving sector of DoD, non-DoD, commercial, and foreign SSA Sharing Partners who have become critically dependent upon the United States for space environment information and information provided by space assets. To meet this challenge, the HQ AFSPC SSA & C2 Capability Team is pioneering an innovative object-oriented, architecture-centric method, leveraging industry best-practice Unified Modeling Language (UML), to document current (as is) and visionary (to be) business processes and IT system requirements with explicit traceability to the needs of this dynamic SSA and C2 community of interest. The Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at Vandenberg AFB, CA is the principal C2 node supporting C2 of space forces on behalf of US Strategic Command and Joint Functional Component Command Space (JFCC SPACE). The near-obsolete IT systems currently employed at the JSpOC require immediate upgrade to a more integrated, service-oriented solution in accordance with DoD's Net-centric Data and Service Strategies. To ensure the JSpOC continues to provide quality space support services to the growing space community, in accordance with national policies, AFSPC is leading a cooperative effort between JFCC SPACE (14 AF/A5/8), HQ AFSPC staff agencies, and the Electronic Systems Center (ESC) with the JSpOC Mission System (JMS) program. Primarily using a federated and integrated configuration, the SSA & C2 Capability Area Architecture (CAA) and the JMS Enterprise Architecture (EA) capture JSpOC mission functions and visionary, net-centric system requirements respectively. Collectively, these architectures provide a critical decision aid and a means to document and communicate stakeholder needs and the material IT capabilities, requirements, and non-material approaches needed to satisfy those needs. The integrated architecture and associated DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) products serve as AFSPC's foundation for defining, developing, and managing highly automated services in support of the JSpOC's missions of space C2, integrated SSA, and defensive space control. The architecture approach provides stakeholders with a means to identify, integrate, document, and control operational concepts, link and manage resultant program requirements, and realize those requirements in system design. Furthermore, the architecture approach facilitates user and developer feedback to influence requirements and operational concepts by providing a disciplined system engineering process to facilitate and document agreements on incorporating technological innovation and delivery content.

Alignment with the DoD Information Management & Information (IM/IT) Technology Strategic Plan

Serco's architecture approach is a goal-oriented approach that aligns seamlessly with the DoD Information Management & Information (IM/IT) Technology Strategic Plan. IM/IT goal #1 – The architecture approach employed by the SSA & C2 Capability Team ties the operational concepts captured in the CAA to proposed net-centric service solutions through system requirements captured in the JMS EA. Together, these UML architectural elements provide a foundation for business process improvement analysis to exploit net-centric capabilities. IM/IT goal #2 – Serco's architecture approach emphasizes stakeholder identification and agreement on enterprise information needs to ensure authoritative, relevant, trusted, actionable information is available. The CAA and JMS EA are leveraged by the HQ AFSPC C2 SSA COI and system developers to define, document, and register SSA and C2 information to promote information sharing within and between DoD and external partners. Program requirements reflect the need for SOA solutions to ensure effective service and data accessibility to current and future stakeholders while providing the capability to comply with security and other data distribution constraints. IM/IT goal #3 – Serco's object-oriented, UML-based architecture approach enables stakeholders to identify patterns of operational and/or system behavior for potential reuse across domains. For example, the cyberspace and space weather domains have successfully leveraged data and process modeling from the CAA and JMS EA, thus economizing on potential solutions through streamlining net-centric, cross-domain dependencies. IM/IT goal #4 – The JMS EA provides the framework and requirements around which ESC JMS systems engineers and developers implement DoD net-centric guidance to maximize mission assurance through protected networks and information. IM/IT goal #5 – Together, the CAA and JMS EA provide a disciplined method by which ESC systems engineers ensure the target system employed at the JSpOC is designed and implemented to align with operational concepts and expressed warfighter requirements. The clarity and elaboration of system requirements documented in the JMS EA enhances developer understanding of the expectations for system behavior, thus minimizing acquisition risk. Explicit traces to performance metrics in JCIDS products ensure system success is results-based and will lead directly to improved mission performance. IM/IT goal #6 – Though the CAA and JMS EA provide no direct impact to this goal, it does provide a visual representation of the information and processes across the stakeholder community to enhance understanding, manage expectations, and reduce ambiguity.

Innovation in the Use of DoD Architectural Products

The JMS EA supported by its federated alignment with the CAA enabled the Serco EA Team–on two separately-scoped versions of the JMS CDD–to rapidly develop all DoDAF 2.0-compliant products required for the JMS CDD; Appendix A. The expanded detail in which architectural information is captured in the CAA and JMS EA was easily abstracted to create OV-2, OV-3, OV-5b, OV-6c, and DIV-1. Through the landmark use of self-developed software plug-ins and other architecture mining tools, the Serco EA Team developed both systems (SV) and services views (SvcV) 2, 4, 5, and 6 directly from the JMS EA, requiring only minimal modifications. The JMS EA aligns with the rules and principles outlined in the DoD Information Enterprise Architecture (IEA). Relationships between the JMS EA and the DoD IEA was discernable and provided a basis to derived program requirements which were resolved as mappings in OV-5b operational activities, as well as services captured in SvcV-4. The final set of DoDAF products submitted in support of JMS CDD formal coordination yielded over 200 pages of detailed architectural documentation. Both AFSPC and ESC lauded Serco architects for the incredible relevancy, detail and accuracy in the final products delivered. Serco's architecture approach focused on explicit representation of all system interfaces to users across all modeled capabilities to aid system designers in using current core enterprise services (CES). The advantage of the architecture approach allows for the inclusion of future CES evolutions as new services are fielded without having to rework the enterprise model. The DoDAF 2.0 successor to the Core Architecture Data Model (CADM) is the DoDAF Meta-model (DM2). DIV-1 and DIV-2 data elements conform to DM2 concepts, associations, and attributes, thus facilitating reader understanding of the use of data within the CAA and JMS EA.

Financial Impact

SSA & C2 architecture played a prominent role in HQ AFSPC's success in defending SSA & C2 program funding resulting in a $564 million increase in funds allocated to develop and sustain SSA and C2 capabilities – a remarkable achievement in the current austere DoD funding environment. The architecture demonstrated to DoD and HQ Air Force resource managers the interdependent, synergistic, and mission critical capabilities that AFSPC's SSA & C2 portfolio of programs bring to the space community and that all duplication of effort among programs in the portfolio had been eliminated. In addition, the ability to re-use object-oriented SSA and C2 architectural artifacts has profited other domains, most recently space weather and cyberspace. The JMS environmental data models positioned AFSPC and ESC to negotiate with weather data providers in a collaborative effort to develop a common lexicon and negotiate product needs. For cyber, the cross-domain process and data modeling resulted in an estimated 18-month savings in development time for the AFNET 2014 architecture and assisted in identifying boundary issues early in the development process. The SSA & C2 Capability Team's architecture-centric approach provided a highly effective means for collaboration among a growing set of stakeholders across multiple domains, thus reducing costs by minimizing duplication of effort and maximizing reuse of architectural information. Collaborative data modeling efforts have provided a foundation for integration among external sensor programs, satellite operations domain, and IC interactions prior to developing hardware or software; reducing program risk and Page 3 of 4 development costs. Finally, re-usable system behavior models provide an opportunity for test agencies to simplify the development of test plans and procedures.

Operational Impact

Serco's architecture approach provides an explicit means to trace national goals and objectives to supporting operational concepts, to required operational capabilities, to system design implementations. This has enabled Space COI stakeholders to take an active role in elaborating system requirements and ensuring fielded solutions achieve stakeholder needs. The CAA and JMS EA have enabled HQ AFSPC to articulate capability requirements, stakeholder expectations and achieve those expectations through multiple, incremental SOA capability deliveries. The JMS EA plays a critical role as the repository of detailed system requirements in the context of business/mission processes, which are data mined to populate Technical Requirements Documents (TRD). The emphasis on service-oriented architecture (SOA) techniques and net-centric data sharing is positioning space solutions to provide timely, assured data access. The operational link to system solutions is also available to assist developers and higher headquarters to understand and articulate the operational impact from programmatic decisions as resource and delivery timelines fluctuate. To enhance information sharing, collaboration, accuracy, decision making, agility, and interoperability across a wide spectrum of geographically separated stakeholders, Serco architects have innovated two key solutions. First, to effectively collaborate between the AFSPC requirements architects and ESC systems and services architects, Serco employs IBM® Rational® Software Modeler (RSM)/Architect (RSA) for developing the CAA and JMS EA; Subversion® version control software in a distributed, networked environment; and, Defense Connect Online (DCO) web-based collaboration tools. With architecture data stored and managed on a single server, Serco facilitates real-time EA development with geographically separated contributors. Architects and stakeholders located in Colorado Springs (Serco and MITRE Corporation systems engineers supporting ESC) collaborate with other architects and contributors located in California (Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC)), and Rome, New York (Air Force Research Lab [AFRL], Air & Space Command & Control Systems Branch). Second, for those stakeholders not able to connect to the distributed architecture development environment, Serco regularly creates an HTML-formatted version of the JMS EA and supporting products and posts them to a website, providing JMS stakeholders with current information. Serco's publishing approach has been especially helpful during requirements document review to enable High-Performance Teams (HPT) to view the systems engineering underpinning the DoDAF products contained in the JMS CDD.

Cultural Change

The SSA & C2 Capability Team has embraced a truly "architecture-centric" culture for defining, integrating, prioritizing, resourcing, delivering, and sustaining national SSA and C2 services and products for the growing and rapidly evolving DoD, non-DoD, commercial, and foreign SSA Sharing Partners who have become critically dependent on the U.S. for space information. The SSA & C2 Capability Team's distributed architecture development and collaboration tools have enabled stakeholders at all levels to become active participants in driving solutions to a common goal. The JMS EA has become the recognized central "repository" of operational and system requirements, thus ensuring both Major Command (MAJCOM) and Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) stakeholders have consistent and unambiguous understanding of stakeholder needs and the integrated SSA and C2 services and products required to meet those needs. The amount of JMS program office involvement in architecture development is increasing as new JCIDS mandates drive developers to address complex integration challenges earlier in the program to avoid costly (time and money) delays in "fixing" fielded systems. The successes of the SSA and C2 Capability Team architecture is serving as the pilot for a potential cultural change within HQ AFSPC to evolve to more architecture-centric systems management and engineering methodologies throughout AFSPC. The level of requirements elaboration detail, the amount of stakeholder involvement, the opportunities for architectural information re-use and upfront integration of services provided by Serco's architecture approach is unprecedented within AFSPC, ESC, and arguably throughout DoD.

Contact Information Page

Primary Nominee Contact Information

Name: Dan Cooley
Title: Vice President, C5I Solutions
Organization: Serco Inc.
Address: 1050 North Newport Road, Colorado Springs, CO 80916
Phone number: 719.235.4102
E-mail: Dan.Cooley@serco-na.com

Nominator Contact Information

Name: Colonel Stephen Butler
Title: SSA & C2 Command Lead
Organization: HQ AFSPC/A5C
Address: 150 Vandenberg Street, Suite 1105 Peterson AFB CO 80914
Phone number: 719.554.3234
E-mail: Stephen.Butler@peterson.af.mil

Remaining Team Member Contact Information

Name: Ed Seward
Organization: Serco Services, Inc. – C4I Systems

Serco Services, Inc – Enterprise Architecture Team

Rob Byrd, Chief Enterprise Architect
Bob Dillow, Deputy Chief Enterprise Architect

Mark Chandonnet
David MacKay
Nick Behner
Elroy Flom
Wendell Holley
Doug Moffitt
Mike O'Loughlin
Don Ruff
Robert Dunn
Dan Reilly
Larry Jacks
Simon Willis
John Dextras
Garry Dooley
Tom Porter
Deb Grissom
Dan Sanford
Duane Riggins