Roy Roebuck's Page

My New (since 1982) Idea.

Objective: By 2010, establish a secure and privacy-protective capability for National-Enterprise Management, Improvement, and Cross-Enterprise Interoperability, Unification, and Federation.

Result: Reduced cost of operations, increased quality, improved responsiveness, and improved quality for all participating organizations, groups, and individuals.

I have been a manager, management analyst, and management consultant with the U.S. Federal Government for over 30years. In that time, I have observed that the dominant cause of ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness in operations is the inconsistent terms used across the various boundaries of government, their contractors, industry, non-profits, and citizens. There are terminology boundaries between locations, organizations, offices within the organizations, work functions, processes, resources (e.g., people, intelligence, funds, skills, materiel, facilities, services), and capability requirements (e.g., missions, information systems). The matching cliche is "tower of Babel".

To resolve this problem, I first suggest the "Management" part of OMB define the term "management" for the entire federal government. As a starting point, I suggest the definition: "management is the adaptive resolution of complexity and diversity in science, society, and perception into a dynamic system of evolving controlled order".

Further, identify that the two main functions of management are operations management integrated in a spiral life cycle with intelligence management.

Then, all Federal Executive Branch National Essential Functions, OMB Business Reference Model subfunctions, DoD Missions and Functions, and DOC NAICS industry functions would then be used to begin populating a full National Functional Inventory taxonomy, further extending out to encompass work functions across the missions of all public, private, non-profit, and volunteer organizations nationwide.

Next, the vocabulary of these functions would be automatically collected, organized, and placed into a National Terminology database to enable integration, interoperability, unification, and federation of operations as appropriate for the evolving missions. I have a public domain design for this database.

This terminology process would focus on the vocabulary of these functions, primarily from the processes, rules, and metadata about the functions, and the terms extracted from the functional documentation, and would exclude any terms having privacy, confidentiality, or security considerations present in the functional data. That is, it would include the terminology about "types of things" such as Person, and exclude terms about "specific things" such as "John Smith". Technically, it would focus more on the metadata containers of the data content rather than the data itself, especially excluding any data likely to have any means of identifying individual persons, groups, or organizations.

Conversely, an individual, group, or organization could choose to link their protected identifying data into a local copy of the National Terminology design, thus providing the means for these entities to position their interests and concerns within the issues, events, and activities described in the National Terminology. These entities could then be more informed about their situational and operational context in the Locale, Region, State, or Nation, without the Nation having inappropriate insight into them.

Include in this National Terminology a root taxonomy with two sections, one for a noun/name taxonomy and one for a verb/relation taxonomy.

For the noun taxonomy, form seven subject classes organized into management-subject catalogs: Location, Organization, Organization Unit, Function, Process, Resource, Requirement.

For the Requirement Catalog entries, further identify that the requirement is at one or more of the following life cycle states: Request, Authorization, Allocation, Acquision (Build/Develop or Buy/Procure), Deployment, Operation and Maintenance, Assessment and Improvement.

For the verb taxonomy, provide the following Relation Categories: Equivalence, Categorization, Containment, Sequence, Version, Variance, and Descrptive.

For Sequence Relations, further identify the "value-chain" role of the linked nouns/names. The value roles are: Customer, Supplier, Performer, Authority, Subordinate, Partner, and Public.

A verb taxonomy entry would then be selected to relate two entries in the noun taxonomy's catalogs, forming a "line of sight" "subject-relation-subject" triple across the subject catalogs. All the triples in aggregate, as metadata, could then be filtered and sourced by subject to provide a structure of knowledge about that subject (i.e., a viewpoint, an ontology) in the form of a knowledge base.

I have placed my detailed approach for accomplishing this Objective into the public domain. Through this approach, the Nation can gain a consistent all-enterprises management approach (concepts, methodology, metamodel, supporting-technology specifications, implementation plan templates, operation and maintenance life cycle procedures, assessment and improvement procedures) and information system implementation by which organizations, groups, and individuals, and combinations of these, can appropriately, securely, and contextually identify, collect, aggregate, normalize, unify, and share network-enabled intelligence to support dynamically merging and aligning federated co-operations.

Existing organizational management approaches can remain intact, with the Objective capability supplementing where needed, to support reducing the cost and complexity of inter-operation with other organizations.

This Objective capability would support all information systems, procedural/process systems, work functions, enterprises, and missions requiring automated support for dynamic intelligence integrated with dynamic operations, and for dynamic merger and unification of intelligence and operations.

The Objective capability will provide a generalized approach and "intelligence-base" capability to support dynamically forming and aligning of adaptive endeavor operations to support the concurrent and possibly interdependent Agendas of National, International, State, Tribal, and Local organizations.

I am looking for public, private, non-profit, and volunteer organizations, and individual persons, to partner with me in this endeavor.

Note: This is a variant of the enterprise management architecture approach I applied as Chief Enterprise Architect for the Federal Executive Branch Continuity Communication Enterprise Architecture (CCEA) program initiated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense in 2004 and 2005.