Gardening The Factory (GTF)

In 2006, the Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Systems and Concepts group called for a 21st century approach to IT procurement, in their acquisition modernization publication entitled Open Technology Development (OTD). GTF answers that call for DoD and (fed/state/local) civilian agencies alike, introducing Service Based Procurement (SBP) processes in a Model Based Acquisition (MBA) value chain, enabled by the Open Source eGovernment Reference Architecture (OSERA).

Management talks about 'continuous improvement', while developers and implementors strive to achieve 'continuous integration'. GTF shows how these ideas are two sides of the same coin, and can be achieved by combining the collaborative practices of the Open Source community with the software development automation techniques of the Model Driven community.

The globally distributed Open Source community has long since embraced Social Networking Software (SNS) alongside foundational Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) tools. These well known collaborative bazaars continue to garden components of the software stack and consistently outperform the government cathedrals that persist in today's procurement operations and acquisition models.

The government is still mostly stuck in Web 1.0 – not only do our mission operations fail to leverage Web based participation, our supporting IT initiatives largely fail to target the Web as a platform. With the rise of public and private cloud computing infrastructure, platform and software services, our in-sourcing and outsourcing delivery options are forced to become more Web-centric. What we need now, is a way to enable more rapid development, assembly, and deployment of mission, business and enterprise services to our public or private commodity computing clouds. GTF delivers this capability in agile iterations through performance based contracts.

The Model Driven community successfully demonstrates software factory techniques using voluntary consensus standards (primarily from OMG's MDA and W3C's Semantic Web initiatives) to automate the realization and implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) specifications, which are capabilities identified by (G2G/G2B/G2C) Business Process Management (BPM) orchestrations and choreographies, that can also be used as position descriptions of todays civil servants, and to interactively train their successors.

The OSERA Program, Platform and Projects (3P's) enables us to garden the factory itself. Commercial Open Source projects and other existing Open Source projects that address functional (and non-functional) gaps and contribute to a complete software software stack are continuously integrated into the Platform, as a product offering available to the public. The Program manages licensing and legal aspects while continuously improving and certifying the evolving Platform components, including the organizations and individuals that provide or service them. The result is a cohesive shrink-wrapped Platform with regular product releases specifically tuned to government requirements for use by Model Based Acquisition value chain constituents.

Government domain owners and experts that have specific responsibilities in their Communities of Interest (CoI) produce Authoritative Reference Architectures models (ARA) that are open sourced and life cycle managed by Voluntary Consensus Standards Organizations (VCSO). Academia and Business partner to provide and test innovative Reference Implementation (RI) prototypes. Business provides a workforce pipeline for their Academic partners and commercial support of hardened products to government agencies (and each other).

The OSERA Platform roadmap is the Government Target Architecture (GTA) and the marketing plan for business and the academic curricula for a competitive next generation workforce. The Government Test Harness (GTH) on the Web is the basis of a 'try before you buy' approach to Service Based Procurement, where graduated support for implementations of authoritative architecture models that pass corresponding Test Compatibility Kits (TCK) are acquired through Government Wide Acquisition Contracts (GWAC).

Why Is This Idea Important?