SOA as a catalyst to empower the warfighter through improved enterprise data access over the GIG

As private industry and the department of defense (DoD) move toward enterprise architectures (EA), CIOs have been lauding service oriented architecture (SOA) as the approach to meet enterprise needs. It is clear that SOA addresses many challenges that face the DoD from information sharing to the fiscal issues of maintaining an IT infrastructure (networks, routers, desktops, peripherals, technology refresh, etc). Many large enterprises have investigated SOA, and have or will embrace it as a strategic course, no matter what underlying technology is used. However, SOA cannot be realized without the application of tried and true Systems Engineering principles with a balance between process and agility. The bottom line is that SOA must deliver a solution that crosses organizational, political and cultural boundaries as well as address the issues of information sharing regardless of where that information is actually stored. When the DoD reaches a SOA solution that supports the enterprise, the IT investments decisions should be much easier and affordable. The overall affect to programs should be easier to share, easier to enhance, easier to upgrade, easier to extend and ubiquitous data access across the enterprise. This paper explores SOA as the means to provide an enterprise architecture to enable information access through the implementation of data services for our strategic war-planners to our tactical war-fighters.