Information-Centric Decision-Support Systems: A Blueprint for ‘Interoperability’

For the past 20 years the US military services have suffered under the limitations of stove-piped computer software applications that function as discrete entities within a fragmented dataprocessing environment. Lack of interoperability has been identified by numerous think tanks, advisory boards, and studies, as the primary information systems problem (e.g., Army Science Board 2000, Air Force SAB 2000 Command and Control Study, and NSB Network-Centric Naval Forces 2000). Yet, despite this level of attention, all attempts to achieve interoperability within the current data-centric information systems environment have proven to be expensive, unreliable, and generally unsuccessful.