Mission Thread Market: A Faster, Better, Cheaper Path to Netenabled Capability

Abstract

Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) employs the W2COG Institute (WI), a government and industry expert body established by OSD, to serve as a computer network-enabling "Capability Broker." Accordingly, the WI has designed a "Mission Thread Market" (MTM) process to incentivize sustained COTS software competition around government use case requirements in 90 day production cycles. In particular, Government seeks to incentivize industry to bind innovative SOA solutions to government furnished high assurance services, e.g. for authentication and authorization. WI executed a case study that compares a typical government managed pilot project to a pilot managed by a Capability Broker. The Capability Brokered project employs the MTM process. Both eighteen-month pilots, executed simultaneously, aimed to deliver the same SOA enabled C2 and high assurance security capabilities. Both used the same baseline GFE software. The MTM process will deliver an open standard COTS/GOTS architecture that addresses ~80% of government requirements; government cost was ~$100K; COTS (e.g. SAML 2.0) is up to date; availability is 2Q FY09 via COTS procurement. The government pilot has not identified any functional architectures or use cases; government cost was $1.5M; COTS (e.g. SAML 1.1.) is eighteen months out of date; availability TBD, but greater than eighteen months. JITC's capability broker has mapped the MTM process to standard DoD procurement methods. It takes about 90 days to establish an MTM from scratch, and an additional 30 days to deliver MTM-based acquisition documents. Establishing an MTM from scratch costs about $2.4M.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 20, 2008
Accession Number
ADA502917

Entities

People

  • Chris Gunderson
  • David Minton

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Cyber
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Command And Control
  • Commerce
  • Computer Networks
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Engineering
  • Information Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Intellectual Property
  • Money
  • Network Science
  • Performance Tests
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Standards
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Word Processors

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.
  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis