An information architecture for the Naval Postgraduate School enterprise

Abstract

The advent of personal computers, workstations, and multiple interconnected Local Area Networks at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), Monterey, California, has resulted in significant distribution, redundancy, and fragmentation of the data elements and databases necessary to effectively manage the organization. This thesis addresses this issue by accomplishing the following two goals. First, it develops a high-level model of the organization's information architecture through the use of the Information Engineering methodology, with· automated support from the Texas Instruments' Integrated Computer Aided Software Engineering (I-CASE) tool Information Engineering FacilityTM (IEFTM). Based on the high-level model it then provides an analysis of data management architecture alternatives to address the current problems. The thesis main recommendation is for the implementation of a client/server information processing architecture at NPS. The enterprise and information architecture analyses provide additional recommendations to improve the current NPS organizational structure.