NOAA's Move Toward an Enterprise Architecture

Constance Killion and Thomas Adang

The Aerospace Corporation's technical expertise has been critical in helping NOAA develop a comprehensive system for managing the collection, processing, and transmission of environmental data.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) conducts research and gathers information about the oceans, atmosphere, space, and sun. Within the Commerce Department, NOAA performs these activities through five major organizations: the National Weather Service; the National Ocean Service; the National Marine Fisheries Service; the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service; and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

During the past two years, NOAA has sought to streamline its operations and systems and facilitate coordination among these NOAA organizations. Aerospace, as a member of a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) and Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) contractor team supporting NOAA's Office of System Development, has been assisting in this effort. By applying specialized expertise in systems engineering and architecture development, Aerospace is helping NOAA move from its traditional focus on individual "stovepipe" systems to its new vision of an integrated enterprise architecture.

A New Strategy

NOAA's move to increase organizational efficiency began late in 2001 with the arrival of Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher Jr. as NOAA's administrator. One of Vice Admiral Lautenbacher's first tasks was to conduct an agency-wide program review to determine whether NOAA's spending matched its priorities. Of course, this question could not be answered without first identifying priorities and quantifying resource allocations. Thus, the program review team submitted numerous recommendations along these lines—most important, that NOAA should develop a strategic plan, implement a requirements-based resource-management system, and develop a system for planning, programming, budgeting, and execution.

Another important recommendation was to develop an observing-system architecture. Before an "optimal future" or target observing-system architecture can be developed, NOAA needs to develop a comprehensive inventory of its current systems. Then, NOAA must gain an in-depth understanding of how the observing elements and their data-handling elements are supporting NOAA mission goals and identify the performance shortfalls.

Acting on these recommendations, NOAA began developing a strategic plan, and asked Aerospace to help identify strategic goals for an integrated system for environmental global observations and data management. At the same time, NOAA asked Aerospace to help formulate a NOAA-wide concept of operations.

The Baseline

Aerospace developed a preliminary baseline architecture by comparing NOAA's existing operations with its current systems. In the course of this work, it became clear that NOAA needed not just a baseline architecture for its observing system, but a more comprehensive enterprise architecture for its entire organization. And in fact, this conclusion echoed an assessment by the Congressional General Accounting Office, which told the House Science Committee in July 2002 that NOAA "needed to take an enterprise architecture approach" for its environmental satellite and data information system. Lawmakers wanted to ensure that any increase in NOAA's observational capabilities would lead to a commensurate increase in data usage and usefulness.

Aerospace began by systematically dissecting all of NOAA's diverse operations and linking them to one of four NOAA mission goals (concerning ecosystems, climate, weather and water, commerce and transportation). This analysis revealed that NOAA was more than just an oceanic and atmospheric research body, but was really an environmental information clearinghouse. It also revealed that many of the environmental parameters supported more than one mission goal. Thus, the focus on the observing system failed to consider the bigger picture. Rather, the production and dissemination of environmental information must drive the end-to-end decision-making process at the enterprise level.

Aerospace produced a concept of operations that included an overarching schematic of NOAA operations. This schematic, known as the Information Service Enterprise, recognizes four distinct segments within NOAA: User Interface, Observations and Collections, Archives and Access, and Data Product Processing. Each segment interacts with the other segments, and overall coordination and control is provided by the Methodology, Innovation, and Implementation element and supported by NOAA leadership and support services.

The Information Service Enterprise has four segments: User Interface, Observations and Collections, Archives and Access, and Data Product Processing. Each segment interacts with the others, and overall coordination and control is provided by the Methodology, Innovation, and Implementation element.

Aerospace provided a strategy, implementation plan, and schedule for the Information Service Enterprise. The implementation plan also called for the creation of a corporate oversight body and the hiring of an enterprise system architect.

Accordingly, NOAA established an oversight body, the NOAA Observing System Council, and brought in an observing-system architect. Development of the target observing-system architecture is also under way. But the process is far from simple. The extensive data collection that Aerospace led while building the baseline architecture revealed a number of important details about the agency. For example, NOAA operates about a hundred observing systems with thousands of globally distributed collector platforms and maintains hundreds of data-management systems. Of these, approximately 60 percent are research-based and 40 percent are operational. In addition, NOAA collects 225 Global Change Master Directory defined environmental parameters.

These revelations point to more questions that must be addressed before (and during) definition of the target architecture. For example, what are the driving needs? What is the gap between the needs and capabilities? When will existing capabilities start to degrade or disappear? What other systems provide these capabilities? Who benefits from the current and future capabilities? Who are NOAA's partners? How are NOAA systems tied together with systems outside NOAA responsibility?

Future Directions

Aerospace has worked on similar efforts for other agencies and is therefore familiar with the complexities of federal enterprise architecting and well versed in the evolving guidance. Aerospace was able to provide reliable evaluation criteria to help NOAA select the most appropriate architecture development tools (see sidebar, Enterprise Modeling). These include software for architecture visualization, requirements management, analysis of geospatial databases, and Web-based synthesis of observing-system information and architectural elements from various system owners. These tools will go a long way toward answering the fundamental questions raised by the baseline-architecture study.

The Information Service Enterprise has been codified in Strategic Direction for NOAA's Integrated Global Environmental Observations and Data Management System, a document principally authored by Aerospace and published by NOAA in July 2004. The Information System Enterprise will be NOAA's contribution to the U.S. National Earth Observation System, which will in turn contribute to international efforts to develop a Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

Significant consensus building lies ahead before NOAA can begin developing the new systems and programs that will constitute the Information Service Enterprise. In the meantime, Aerospace, with its experience in both global observation and information architecting, will continue to help NOAA realize its ambitious information enterprise goals.

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