- About the volumes
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- V1 - Introduction and Management
- V2 - Near Term
- V3 - Mid to Far term
- V4 - Interoperability Profile Guidance
- V5 - NISP Design Rules
- V6 - NISP - Annexes
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3.3. Management and Implementation Approaches
31. The Management Approach to NNEC has identified four coherance areas as a management mechanism to organise information about NNEC developments in order to facilitate NNEC governance. The four NNEC Coherance Areas are:
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Operational Concepts and Requirements Implications (OCRI);
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Architecture and Service Definitions and Specification (ASDS);
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Implementation; and
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Leadership and Guidance (L & G).
32. The purpose of the OCRI Coherence Area is to improve coherence across the operational community of all activities which need to address NNEC. The goals of OCRI are to ensure that NNEC principles are addressed in all concept development, identify and derive common NNEC service requirements from operational concepts and requirements, to provide NNEC concepts and technological advances for use by developers of operational concepts, doctrine and organisation, to define operational interoperability metrics, and to recommend operational improvements.
33. The purpose of the ASDS Coherence Area is to improve the coherence of interoperability standards. The goals of ASDS are to oversee the development of a common service-oriented architectural framework and set of service definitions based on operational needs, to update these as new technologies and operational needs are developed, and to define service-based maturity levels.
34. The purpose of the Implementation Coherence area is to improve NNEC coherence across all capability delivery programs. The goals of Implementation are to identify current and future service availability, to identify services shortfalls, to perform interoperability evaluation and assessment, and make recommendations for changes.
35. The purpose of the L & G Coherence Area is to support NNEC governance and to ensure overall coherence. The goals of L & G are to establish levels of ambition, to establish high level NNEC policies, to provide coordination between all four Coherence Areas, and to provide widespread awareness of information about NNEC.
36. The NOSWG supports the C3CCSC as a coordination body for the ASDS by Identifying Standards appropriate for all architectures and profiles supporting implementation solutions.
37. The Implementation Coherence area also needs to adhere to the standards, grouped in profiles that are placed in the NISP as 'agreements'.
38. However the role of coordination bodies for the four Coherence Areas will require significant additional staff work. Although it is expected that the NATO C3 Representatives (NC3Reps) will become the coordination body for Leadership and Guidance (L & G), the coordination bodies have not been agreed for the other Coherence Areas. Once identified and agreed, each designated coordination body will need to determine whether the work can be achieved by reallocating personnel from existing tasks or whether there is a need to hire additional staff.
39. NATO, Nations and industry have all recognized the necessity to migrate to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based implementation to support NNEC. The set of standards and profiles formerly identified in the platform based approach were not adequate to support either the SOA or the NNEC concept. It was therefore a necessity to reorganise and rework the NISP to identify additional standards and profiles to support service specifications. During this rework it came apparent that the NISP needs to support not only a time phased implementation, but also the ongoing work on developing a maturity model to help NATO and Nations to develop roadmaps for NII achievement.
40. Partitioning the NISP into timeframes of near, mid and far-term was greatly influenced by the NNEC Feasibility Study, NATO Architecture approach, national NEC development and industry best practices. One common thread through all these efforts is the need to partition NATO CIS implementations into well defined time periods in order to transition to NII.
41. NATO, Nations and industry have adopted a time phased approach achieving their respective goals for system implementations. Although using different terminologies and time frames, these approaches are based on the same concept of mapping of standards and profiles to timeframes. The NISP has adopted this approach as a guiding concept for its development.
42. In addition there is another strong need to develop Roadmaps for NNEC implementation. These roadmaps will describe which level of maturity that either NATO or the Nation shall achieve at a specific point in time. The identified maturity level will point or map to specific standards and profiles that are required in order to be interoperable and compliant.
43. The following sub-sections contain some representative examples of the maturity level model and of the time phased approach for specifying standards and technologies.
3.3.1. NII Maturity Level (NML) Model [2]
44. The concept of a NII Maturity Level was one of the two main components of the NII Interoperability Framework (NIIF), the other component being the Information Interoperability (I-Squared) Index. In general terms, the NML supports Programme planning and auditing activities across NATO and the nations, while the I-Squared Index will be a more detailed technical reference document.
45. One of the challenges in implementing an effective NEC involving NATO, NATO nations, coalition partners, government agencies, and non-government organisations is to ensure a common understanding of information infrastructure capabilities including interoperability, based on objective criteria. This challenge is particularly difficult in an alliance context where there is no overall authority so policies, procedures, and standards cannot be directed from a central authority. NATO does not have any guaranteed insight into nor any responsibilities towards national infrastructure programs. In response to this challenge a time-phased NML approach is proposed as a solution to ensuring this common understanding.
46. The NML approach uses a five-level definition of capabilities numbered from 1 to 5, defining increasing levels of capabilities. This five level approach provides an intuitive and easily understood measurement of a complex capability and is extremely useful for effective communications between diverse audiences. It must be noted, however, that the NML approach is designed to improve processes and not to measure actual physical infrastructure. However the use of a five level model with defined information infrastructure capabilities for each level with specific objective criteria is a simple and powerful approach.
47. It should also be noted that this NML approach to NNEC capability could be expanded to cover not only the NII but the complete spectrum of capabilities, perhaps divided into the Doctrine, organisation, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel and Facilities (DOTMLPF) categories currently used in assessing a force capability. This would provide a more complete model to assess the capabilities of a force but was beyond the scope of the NNEC Feasibility study.
48. A five level model can be related to the overall vision of NNEC which defines four levels of mission capability, namely Deconflict, Coordinate, Collaborate, and Coherent. A fifth level of capability, reflecting a rudimentary capability, called "Stand-Alone" could be added, below Deconflict. This would reflect an organisation or military unit with little or no capabilities, procedures, nor experience in interoperating with other military forces or organisations. It is anticipated, (indeed hoped) that there will be few forces or organisations that fit into this rudimentary capability category.
49. The NML presented in the NNEC Feasibility Study Volume II Annex G consisted of two major components. The first was the time-independent NML itself which was derived directly from the overall time-independent NNEC NML developed in Volume 1 of the study and is in turn tied into the required NNEC operational capabilities expressed as Mission Capability Packages (MCPs). The second component was the time-dependent Infrastructure Implementation (I-Squared) Index which was derived from the first NML component, but provides measurable criteria for use in defining and implementing an NII roadmap. Note that full completion of the I-Squared Index including validation of the criteria values would take considerable effort and was not within the scope of the NNEC Feasibility study.
[2] Referred to as the NII Capability Maturity Model in the NNEC Feasibility Study, Annex G to Volume II, October 2005