The Global Force Management Data Initiative: Implementing an Enterprise Information Exchange Data Model

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Staff, Force Structure Directorate (J-8), along with the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OUSD(P&R)) put forth the Global Force Management Data Initiative (GFM DI) with the goal of developing a reliable and maintainable enterprise data source capturing Organizational and Force Structure Construct (OFSC) information. The Global Force Management Information Exchange Data Model (GFMIEDM) was developed as an enterprise solution to enable disparate systems throughout the DoD to share force structure, manpower, and equipment data. Extensible Markup Language (XML) was chosen as the data format because it is a popular format for the interchange of data between heterogeneous systems. XML is currently being used as a wrapper around relational data, and tools have been written to validate the data against structural constraints and business rules. In this paper, we discuss the GFM DI architecture, implementation details, and integration with legacy systems.