Transforming Defense Logistics Information Services

Using a service-oriented model allows a completely different approach to the delivery of information services. It organizes IT as a set of discrete business components that are attuned directly to what the business wants to achieve.

Key elements of the vision:

• The rigid application boundary is replaced by a more loosely coupled process boundary, defined by the business functions that are invoked by the process. This orchestration can be adjusted at a tempo that more closely matches that of business transformation, providing a much more adaptable environment that is able to respond swiftly to urgent need.
• The rigid link is broken between business function and information repository. Functions are no longer embedded in applications supported by application-specific databases but exist as discrete services that can be called by any business process that requires them. Services are sufficiently granular to enable a high degree of re-use and so minimise duplication.
• The services providing the business functions will invoke one or more managed data services to retrieve and update core data. Example shows that a Plan Maintenance Task function would access Platform Data to determine the maintenance requirement and would access Inventory Data to earmark spares for the task..
• The core data repositories are protected by managed services to guarantee data quality.
• Use of the service-oriented approach means that business processes can invoke services inside and outside of the Defence boundary. For example, to support CLS contracts a shared data environment could be set up as a managed service into which the supplier would publish equipment availability information and the operator would publish usage metrics.