A Chief Information Officer’s Perspective on Service-Oriented Architecture

1. A Chief Information Officer’s Perspective on Service-Oriented Architecture Presented to Service-Oriented Architectures for E-Government Conference 31 October 2006 The Mitre Corporation, McLean, VA by Deborah L. Phillips Chief, Enterprise Architecture National Reconnaissance Office

2. Mission Context • The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) designs, builds, and operates the nation’s reconnaissance satellites • NRO goals: • Be the foundation for global situational awareness • Provide intelligence supporting real-time engagement • NRO products can: • Warn of potential trouble spots around the world • Help plan military operations • Monitor the environment Information and information technology (IT) are critical to the NRO’s ability to perform it’s mission.

3. Business Context • NRO plays a primary role in achieving information superiority for the United States Government and Armed Forces • Part of the 16-member Intelligence Community (IC)

4. Context for Information Sharing • IC is putting policy into practice to achieve the maximum degree of information exchange among its member agencies • Provide sufficient context and background on relevant intelligence information • Protect information on operations • Move systems and processes toward information sharing Quantity of Information Data Access Requirements Collaboration-- Info Sharing Response Time

5. Purview • As Chief Information Officer: • I serve as the principal IT advisor and overseer for NRO • I coordinate the liaison between IC and the Department of Defense for all IT matters I believe a function of the CIO’s office is to encourage discussion about topics of interest. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one of these topics.

6. Interest in SOA • Mission imperative to share information and better utilize available resources • SOA-based strategy provides a way forward (but we need to carefully assess cost/value)

7. Expanded Understanding • Hosted three SOA Summits over six month period • Among my staff • Across NRO • Across IC • Focus: • State of the art • State of the practice • Lessons learned from implementations

8. Potential Benefits • Investing in SOA by itself produces no direct mission value – • … However, creating SOA-based services – within the context of other integration or development activities that do produce mission value – provides future agility. • Enhance ability for data sharing and collaboration • In our business, as in most (perhaps for different reasons), security engineering is critical for Enterprise-wide SOAs • SOAs offer opportunity to provide common security services, primarily for core business functions

9. Some Challenges • Standards are still evolving • Access management • Governance • Understanding the cost of implementing SOA-based services • Building new services from scratch may be more cost-effective than trying to adapt some legacy systems • Not clear path to sufficient interoperability between vendor solutions; dealing with vendor proprietary issues • Security is hard!

10. And, There Are Risks • Potential impact on mission critical services • Some services need to be 100% available • Performance of SOA approaches in high performance environments; mix/match with other technologies

11. Summary Still more questions than answers…working to determine answers…need to manage expectations Teamwork is key.