Reengineering DoD through enterprise-wide migration to open systems

Abstract

The Department of Defense cannot afford to develop and deploy information systems that have no growth potential. Legacy systems must be replaced with flexible, highly interoperable systems that produce high residual values. With shrinking budgets, depreciation of existing hardware, and rising maintenance of legacy systems, organizations must deploy systems that are capable of evolving with changing business requirements. The Department of Defense enterprise vision for information management (IM) emphasizes integration, interoperability, flexibility, and efficiency through the development of a common, multipurpose, standards-based technical infrastructure. This vision requires a new paradigm for building information systems. The new paradigm relies on open systems, which make it easier, less expensive, and faster to develop and change applications and to employ new technology features. This research examines open systems and provides a strategy for organizations to migrate to them. A case study of the Naval Postgraduate School illustrates the strategy. Provisionally, a prototype application models the desired characteristics of an open system.