Aligning Transformational Change in Policy and Governance with Net - Centric Operations Technology

Implementing transformational change towards the Net-Centric Operations (NCO) vision in support of enhanced command and control presents technical, operational, and cultural challenges. The technical challenges are being addressed by both industry and the Department of Defense pushing the state of the art further ahead. However, in many cases the technology transformation is too far ahead of the DoD policy and management transformational. In fact, technology vendors offering products to help in the management aspects of network enabled systems and services often find their solutions are in search of clearly defined problems. This misalignment exists because a DOD enterprise level NCO " operating model " has not been clearly articulated to demonstrate how consumers and providers of net-centric services will interact. The operating model should be a framework to allow emergent behavior to first grow and then sustain a net-centric environment. Consequently, an NCO operating model must address architectural, policy, governance, performance monitoring, and cultural issues and practices. However, as noted above the operating model is itself a transformational model. It cannot prescribe a " to-be " world to any degree of specificity. Instead, the operating model establishes the tenets of policy and governance that can help align emerging technology to fulfill the vision of NCO. Once defined and set in motion, the operating model presents a way forward to defining emerging NCO capability requirements; selecting and implementing the enabling technologies; and extending the NCO environment to further Defense component and agency domains.