How do you connect multiple operations centers of different types across jurisdictional boundaries to cooperate in a federated democracy? This is a difficult problem for a number of reasons. The paper below compares three different attempts used in the US Department of Homeland Security against a hybrid approach and compares the best way to do it. The result is significantly better in both cost and performance.
Abstract
During the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, a lack of situational awareness delayed and prevented control of airspace, allowing a second aircraft to strike the second tower. In Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a lack of situation awareness caused helicopter pilots to transport patients to hospitals that could not accept them. Numerous reviews, reports, and policies drive the creation of a new mechanism to share situation awareness between federal, state, county, municipal, and tribal governments. Lives, property, and the effectiveness of our homeland security efforts are affected by the capability to share information to create situation awareness.
We examined three solutions to share information between the great number of existing operations centers and their legacy information systems using the various existing data standards. We compared them to a common solution architecture, set of concepts of operations, and set of strategic goals using the methods of enterprise architecture to determine what is most effective in these solution architectures. We then attempted to create a new hybrid architecture taking advantage of the best elements of each. We hypothesized that we can construct superior solution architecture from examination of the initial efforts. We found that it was possible to produce an improved architecture incorporating elements of the architectures studied.
