GROUND RULES
The U.S. Army’s System-of-Systems Engineering effort has identified a number of computing environments through which to implement standards defined by the Army Chief Information Officer (CIO/G-6), service officials said. When adopted into the foundational software and hardware, these standards will define the Common Operating Environment (COE).
T
he intent of the COE is to al- low different systems—such as battle command applications, sensors, and vehicles on the
move—to communicate more efficiently.
The COE is an initiative aimed at address- ing interoperability between systems and agility in development and deployment. It also focuses on an open architecture to leverage industry innovation, cyber- hardened foundations for security, and reducing life-cycle cost of systems.
The computing environment (CE) struc- ture is geared toward organizing the Army environment from the sustaining base to the tactical edge, including sensors, com- mand posts, mounted vehicles, handheld devices, mission command platforms, and numerous applications in real time on the battlefield, service officials explained.
STRINGENT STANDARDS The Army will establish and enforce stringent technical standards for software infrastructure that will guide materiel development and ensure built-in interop- erability, said Terry Edwards, Director of System-of-Systems Engineering for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (ASAALT).
Also, the COE will be aligned to indus- try trends, best practices, and products while making the necessary investments in complementing security components to support DOD-unique requirements. This will enable the Army to quickly take
16 Army AL&T Magazine
advantage of commercial innovation and will spur competition, Edwards said.
The COE is being designed to tell industry upfront and with certainty the parameters within which Army technol- ogy (hardware and applications) must fit. The plan is to establish an ecosystem for each of the CEs so that developers have access to architectures, foundational products, and certification environments required for developing applications.
“What we are saying is, we want to go to a model where we provide these foundation pieces and make them available. That will then let everybody who wants to build applications build them on this common foundation,” Edwards said.
BUILDING A FOUNDATION Edwards compared the Army effort to commercial endeavors such as those undertaken by Apple and Google.
“If you look at what Apple and Google have done, you will see that the Apple founda- tion and the Android foundation have a bunch of software that determines their environment,” Edwards explained. “When you go to build an app, it does not take a long time to build because a lot of the pieces are already there. All those are common pieces of software that have been provided by the Apple and Android environment. People take that software, and they build their application on top of that,” he said.
“The computing environments allow us to organize our programs in such
a way that there is greater efficiency due to greater collaboration among the PMs [program managers],” said Monica Farah-Stapleton, COE Lead for System- of-Systems Engineering.
A key rationale for the COE is to ensure that various mission command applications all work together on a common software foundation, Farah-Stapleton explained.
The CEs will have a minimum standard configuration that supports the Army’s ability to produce and deploy high-quality applications rapidly. They will reduce the complexities of configuration and support training, as well as reduce life-cycle cost.
By focusing on the “control points,” strict compliance to standards will ensure interop- erability between CEs, Edwards explained.
BENEFITS TO INDUSTRY The CE standards promise to be as valu- able to industry as to the Army. “I can tell you just from the joint tactical radio envi- ronment, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from industry in terms of the definition of standards,” said BG Michael E. Williamson, Joint Program Executive Officer Joint Tactical Radio Systems.
CEs will allow the Army to more fre- quently and more clearly articulate capability gaps and to put those requests for information out faster, explained LTG Susan S. Lawrence, Army CIO/G-6.
Industry is willing and able to respond, she said. “They tell me they will spend
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