Authority to issue interoperability policy

About this book

Achieving interoperability among systems is instrumental to enabling critical functions, such as timely information exchange during operations and efficiencies in acquisition, so it is important to understand what parties have authority to issue policy that governs the facets of interoperability. This report presents an approach and framework for determining what parties have authority to issue interoperability policy, the legal and policy origins and implementation paths of the authority, and the extent of the authority. The approach includes rigorous analysis by researchers to identify pertinent authorities in federal law supplemented by a means to facilitate discovery of roles and responsibilities in Department of Defense and Service-level policies. The approach results in a roles and responsibilities network that traces the paths of authority available to issue interoperability policy. The authors use as a case study the authority of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Research, Development, and Acquisition, Chief Systems Engineer to issue Navy interoperability policy related to mission area systems engineering (MASE) to demonstrate the use of the framework and methodology. They find that there are 13 different paths of authority that could be cited by four different parties to claim authority to influence interoperability policy related to MASE. The approach used in this report might be developed, along with complementary analytic techniques, to provide the government with the ability to create and maintain consistent and comprehensive bodies of policy that will ensure the effective and efficient operation of defense agencies.