by Loraine Lawson, IT Business Edge
Jul 7, 2009 10:38:24 AM
Loraine Lawson spoke with Vice President of MEGA's product management Jean-Marie Zirano about why the NATO Architecture Framework is critical to global cooperation on security, military and civilian affairs and why Mega – whose clients include NASA and the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Agriculture, and Transportation - decided to modify its MEGA Modeling Suite to support it.
Lawson: Could you explain what the NATO Architectural Framework is and how it relates to or is different from other frameworks?
Zirano: Yes of course. The NATO Architecture Framework is a framework to build architectures of systems. It was initially thought as the mean for several people working in teams to build an architecture to respond to a particular type of challenge, which is initially defense and security-oriented.
The NATO Architecture Framework actually can be viewed as a private framework or an integration framework for existing frameworks today like the DoDAF for the U.S., MODAF for the UK, and one with a less-known name in France called AGATE. All of these frameworks are defense- and security-oriented.
We’ll eventually be integrated inside the NAF, and in that regard you can look at NAF as a superset of each - MODAF and DoDAF in particular. So it is the framework with the same intent and from the same family as MODAF or DoDAF, but it is richer; it contains more views, which are inspired by the growing complexity and growing modernity of the defense and security systems that need to be built.
The reasons to use this framework are of two natures. One, the complexity of the architecture generally underlying a defense and security system, especially if it is military-oriented and two, the need for the people who work on these defense and security solutions to work according to standards, according to the same methods, using the same type of views and, above all, delivering the same contractual deliverables to the customer.
Lawson: Okay, so it’s only used in the defense industry?
Zirano: Initially, yes, but you're right to ask the question, because more and more there are other industries in which the NAF type of frameworks are used.
The architecture must be complex to really leverage the use of NAF. Usually, it is a huge project where international teams work together remotely and they need to make sure they will eventually follow the same guidelines, principles, models, and views and deliver the same deliverables. Those customers today working for the defense and security industry, in other terms, and customers like Ministry of Defense of European countries and the U.S., agencies from the Ministry of Defense in the U.S., for example.
But there are also civilian industries using NAF-like type of architectures to build solutions relying on complex architectures in manufacturing, in particular.
Lawson: Okay, and can you tell me a little bit about MEGA and what it is you do and why you chose to support NAF?
Zirano: Yes. MEGA is a company that has been in the business for using modeling techniques to provide solutions since ’91 and we’ve been rather successful doing so. We are recognized by industry analysts in the enterprise architecture as well as business process disciplines. We provide a tool that enables users to build architectures and to represent how a solution should work eventually. Our tooling, for example, allows users to represent how a company works, what IT resources it uses to improve the business processes, to plan what the roadmap of the IT system will be and so on. So we have a very strong modeling experience.
We provide solutions for enterprise architecture and as you know, depending on the industry, the architecture of the enterprise can really be something complex. We provide a tool with a sophisticated, rich database, which basically responds to the complexity and the challenges of frameworks like DoDAF and MODAF. So that already was a good ground to build NAF.
The second reason to build NAF is that we built the DoDAF solution right before and of course you can go following a continuum from DoDAF to NAF. NAF is just a super set, as I said before.
The third reason why it was natural for us to build our NAF solution is because France joined back into the integrated military command of the NATO. That, of course, causes significant change locally in France to start with, where we’re based. Second, in Europe, there is strong need for interoperability when you build defense-oriented architecture and, finally, at a worldwide level, especially looking at the U.S., because the U.S. is the head of the NATO and they are using DoDAF.
So the use of DoDAF will continue for awhile, especially on projects that have just started using DoDAF but of course things will change with time and we’ll see more and more projects moving from DoDAF to NAF or more realistically more and more new projects started using the NAF framework.
Lawson: How does it relate to or address integration and -- I know SOA is a huge style of architecture, does it relate to that at all?
Zirano: Yes, it does. There are, I would say, two levels of integrations that are addressed by methods and by the NAF framework in particular. First of all, when you build an architecture defense or not, when you build an architecture, it’s always at some point about integrating different components. Depending on the scale at which you look at these components, they are more or less big.
So if you start bottom up, you start integrating small components together. These small components being integrated together form a super component, which in turn can be integrated with others. So you can build bottom up like this, you know, finding components.
At the elementary level, today when you look at an information system, which is designed using the best practices of today, it is undoubtedly service-oriented. It means that the elementary component is a service. It is initially described only as at business level, meaning you only need to express your needs saying, “I want this component to do this and by contract, it should do this.”
Then, at the technical level, knowing what it should do, you have to decide how it should be called and what it should give back. You can look at this as a service. You ask a service and you get a service from it and because you ask the right thing, you get the results that you were expecting. So that’s an elementary report that you're going to be assembling all along your assembly process.
At some level, you understand that the sophistication you can reach goes bigger and bigger. NAF is here to help you apply the very same integration methodology, but integrating complete systems with other systems. In other terms, the architectures you build when you use the NAF methodology is an architecture of systems. It’s a system of systems. The bigger the system of systems, you can imagine how sophisticated it can be and how demanding a project that consists of building the architecture can be as well.
Why this and why is it specifically applicable to the defense and security market? Well, it’s because the nature of challenges that are posed today to the defense and security entities around the world, starting with the military ones, are generally international and the problems addressed are generally very, very complex.
Let me give you an example of one of the projects -- or two of the projects -- on which one of our customers helping us develop NAF and planning to use our version of NAF is doing.
One of the challenges they have is: How would you tackle a terrorist attack in the Mediterranean Sea, bearing in mind that this terrorist attack is going to come from the sea? Build the architecture for this. I mean that is really the basic, the most elementary way, to pose the problem. To solve this problem, you need to build the right architecture because the solution consists of making sure that several countries can interoperate to tackle the terrorist attack using different military means - aircrafts, ships and whatever military means - to tackle the attack.
Another example in the civilian world is about a European-based company based in Belgium, which performs air control for the entire European airspace. The system to control the airspace is to be renewed and, as you can imagine, this is, if not defense, at least strongly security-oriented, and to rebuild the air control system, which is of course by nature complex, they are going to use the NATO architecture framework.
So these are two examples. One which is strongly military oriented, the other which is civilian, but you know there are a lot of interconnections between the military and the civilians when it comes to air control.
As you mentioned, the SOA principles are, of course, in the picture, if I may say, and our modeling platforms do provide all the SOA principles embedded to make sure they can be used at once by the users.