Enterprise Architecture Provides Base for Air Force Mission to Secure the Space Arena

Stakeholders Rely on EA Solutions to Leverage ‘Space Situation Awareness’ Data.  An effective national defense strategy demands dominance in air, on land, and at sea. To adequately defend these arenas also requires superiority in space. The key to space superiority is Space Situation Awareness (SSA), a complete understanding of environmental and man-made events in space.

From a military perspective, Space Situation Awareness is critical for success in any warfighting domain—from defending space-borne assets against hostile attack and environment hazards, to supporting forward-deployed forces on land and sea. For example, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, SSA can help ensure the availability of satellite-based reconnaissance for operations support by forecasting, three days in advance, solar disturbances that could disrupt communications and thus endanger lives.

Space Situation Awareness has a broad stakeholder base in the national security and space communities. Stakeholders encompass 15 different organizations, including the military services and intelligence agencies. Numerous federal civilian agencies concerned with space, such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also rely on SSA.

To support systems and capabilities planning requirements and to provide guidance for investment decisions, the Air Force established its Space Situation Awareness Integration Office (SSAIO) in 2002. A central mission of SSAIO is to build SSA Enterprise Architecture for use in making recommendations to stakeholders in their acquisition and allocation of resources for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, environmental action, and C3 (command and control communications).

“Previously these functions were done in a stovepipe fashion. There was a recognition at the top levels of the Defense Department that we had to start integrating all of that diverse data to gain a more complete and accurate view of the space environment,” says Lt. Col. Bruce Cessna, SSAIO Deputy Director. “To do that requires a unified architecture capable of monitoring and capturing data on all of the resources for communication, navigation, weather forecasting, targeting, intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance functions, and other capabilities.”

Lt. Col. Cessna oversees the SSAIO’s Enterprise Architecture activities which focus primarily on developing an As-Is architecture, a To-Be architecture, and a Should-Be architecture. The goal of SSAIO’s Enterprise Architecture initiative is to enable top-to-bottom cost management and decision making across the Air Force Space Command—from the Undersecretary of the Air Force to product developers building individual systems.

The As-Is architecture reflects operations capabilities now in the acquisition cycle, all of which should be fully in place by 2010. The To-Be architecture will comprise multiple versions, each reflecting a different set of additional operations capabilities—various mixes of ground- and space-based systems—for possible acquisition through 2016. By developing As-Is and To-Be alternative architectures and assessing them, the SSAIO can track increases in capabilities for a given cost, helping to ensure the most effective use of investment dollars by stakeholders implementing SSA systems. The Should-Be architecture supports long-range budget planning by reflecting new technologies likely to emerge through 2025—the “state of the possible” in operations capabilities.

The SSAIO system has two primary purposes:

• A core visualization tool for displaying all data pertaining to SSA. To this end, the SSA employed a tool that allows for visual representation of all the data and products used within the Enterprise Architecture, and provides users with single-click access to this data. The focus is to have traceability back to the source data used in decision-making during the evolution of the As-Is and To-Be architectures.

• Capability Analysis for providing guidance throughout the budget cycle. The final product produced from the Enterprise Architecture is a 30-page document which references recommended decision points within the architecture and the analysis of these decisions.

“The bottom line is that our Enterprise Architecture will be critically important in influencing many billions of dollars of investments over the next 15 years,” says Lt. Col. Cessna, who says he spends about 20 percent of his time briefing senior leadership in the stakeholder communities. “It gives us a powerful tool for advising our stakeholders about shortfalls in their SSA capabilities, and what they should be investing in to achieve a given capability level.”

In the initial phase of developing the SSAIO system, the enterprise architecture team under Lt. Col. Cessna came to recognize the necessity of taking a “family-of-tools” approach that would assemble a variety of tools with specialized strengths tailored to discrete architecting tasks. The team selected tools for structured analysis and requirements management. It is also using Microsoft productivity tools, including Word, Excel and Visio, to generate specialized reports and Use Case documents. The team also selected an EA visualization tool flexible and powerful enough to support building a massive EA meta-model. Initiated in May 2004 and slated for completion in September 2005, the SSAIO meta-model encompasses more than 8,000 objects, 30,000 relationships, 30,500 object views, and 40,000 relationship views.

The SSAIO system is built on a Microsoft SQL Server database which provides a central repository for data capture on multiple levels, streamlined integration of data from different sources, and easy data access by a wide variety of tools. A web interface allows authorized users to directly access scripts and reports and dynamically select the components of an EA metamodel to load from the database. Optimized COM interfaces within the various tools include functions to populate data, capture the look and feel of UML diagrams, generate reports, and even develop architectures using spreadsheets instead of the Metis visualization tool.

Even links are classified

“Our biggest concern when we are integrating data is ensuring our stakeholders that we are not giving away too much,” says Shawn Hosp, a senior software engineer on the SSAIO’s EA team. “In order to confirm the data is classified, every object we collect contains a classification and every link contains a classification as well. As a result, when we move up to a top secret environment, we can still capture it.”

“The stakeholders in our enterprise range from unclassified foreign entity relationships up to very classified intelligence,” says Lt. Col. Cessna. “We have developed networks—classified secret, top secret—and they all roll up. Our challenge is to operate between the databases. Because we can readily integrate the EA data from the different tools used by the stakeholder organizations and adapt to changes in those tools as they are made, we can continually and securely leverage the work they have accomplished without repeating their effort.”

Web-accessible architecture provides fast access for all users

The first As-Is iteration of the EA will include the entire current SSA database in a web-based environment. “We are maturing beyond just giving printouts or disks with HTML versions of the EA to our stakeholders,” says Shawn Hosp. “Through their web browsers, authorized users will be able to quickly access the exact information they need, whether they are working at a very high level of the EA or drilling down into the details of an SSA capability captured in HTML, Word, and Excel documents.”

Next steps in development of the SSAIO enterprise architecture—set to begin in late 2005—will emphasize the ability to actively disseminate SSA data in the EA to stakeholders. “We will focus on identifying the command and control communications relationships in place across the entire enterprise,” says Lt. Col. Cessna. “This will enable us to ensure that all of the information we have developed on Space Situation Awareness capabilities can actually be pushed out to stakeholders—such as forward-deployed forces and satellite operators—who need that information in real time.”

Beyond that, the SSAIO’s interest centers on standards management: using its acquired solution to assess Global Information Grid (GIG)-compliance and evaluate interoperability protocols within the net-centric enterprise. Similarly, once security certification is obtained, Lt. Col. Cessna speculates that his team could automate the costly data collection process through automatically generated Web forms. Currently, team members have to board an airplane to go physically collect status and current configuration data.