Net-Centric Information Management

The U.S. Department of Defense is pursuing a transformation which seeks to improve mission effectiveness through greatly improved information sharing. The nature of this transformation, the large size of the DoD, and the presence of allied and coalition partners all result in an enterprise with information management needs that cannot be completely satisfied either through top-down direction or by a bottom-up market approach. The difficulties faced by this enterprise may be common to others in which a common purpose requires coordination, but in which the large scale or absence of a sovereign preclude the possibility of effective centralized control. In this paper we discuss this situation and describe the essential architecture of an IM process that fits