Practical Challenges Facing Communities of Interest in the Net-Centric Department of Defense

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is transforming its information management and sharing approaches in accordance with a net-centric data strategy. New solutions promote a "need-to-share" paradigm that enables all information to be available to all appropriate consumers within the enterprise. DoD has mandated the transformation to occur through the efforts of Communities of Interest (COIs). This paper explores how DoD is progressing towards its vision and what challenges COIs face because of knowledge and automation gaps in the following areas: best-practice information sharing venues; engagement and products relevant to metadata management; and balancing the complementary views of data, services and business rules in analytic activities. Although offered from a DoD perspective, these experiential insights are equally relevant for thoughtful consideration by any large, heterogeneous and distributed enterprise embarking on a similar evolutionary journey