Army ESB

The US Army is making dramatic changes in force structure and business methods to support the warfighter through network-centric access to knowledge that enables sound decision-making across the government. The Army is transforming business practices and prioritization of IT investments to increase its situational awareness, improve asset accountability, and to enhance and leverage enterprise-wide synchronization. Moreover, it is financially and programmatically impossible to replace the hundreds of mission-critical legacy systems in operation today. In addition, new systems are constantly being developed that also provide mission-critical data. Most of these systems cross organizational and operational boundaries, making secure data-sharing essential to Army transformation.

The Army was ordered to decrease the time required to deploy troops into battle. Much of this time is taken up in the network design and initialization of command and control systems. While engaged in solving this issue with the ACSIS-ADE application, KITS proposed that the network design and initialization data be shared across the enterprise so that other Army mission areas have the ability to leverage this data. To this end, KITS proposed, designed, and deployed an enterprise service bus (ESB) integrated service oriented architecture (SOA) as a method for integrating disparate data sources.

The ESB provides the connectivity infrastructure required for Army-wide business integration and focuses on six essential capabilities:
1. Dynamic Discovery
2. Universal Connectivity
3. Flexible Quality of Service (QoS)
4. Service Mediation
5. Security
6. Business Process Management

The SOA approach provides the modular framework to systematically integrate, evolve, and manage solutions with varying characteristics, including disparate data sources and formats. This allows the Army to focus business systems modernization on supporting the warfighter by using more timely data, as well as decreasing operational cost and cycle times by eliminating redundant IT investments and systems.


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