Tailoring DoDAF for Service-Oriented Architectures

This paper provides a brief overview of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an explanation of how the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) can be used to describe a SOA. DoDAF uses IEEE 1471 definition of an architecture description to define a standard approach to describing, presenting, and integrating a DoD architecture that can be used with a service oriented approach to capability based planning. The principal objective of the Framework is to ensure that architecture descriptions can be compared and related across organizational boundaries, including Joint and multi-national boundaries. SOA is an architectural approach to application integration that enables flexible connectivity of applications or resources implemented as services. Such services have well-defined, platform-independent specifications that hide the underlying technical complexity of the environment (encapsulation), are self-contained (loosely coupled), and reusable. Capability based planning involves identifying required capabilities, their desired effects, and the ways (operational activities) and means (human functions or system services), as well as the conditions ands standards under which the capability is required. Creating DoDAF architecture descriptions that are capability based and service oriented supports globalization and the integration of geographically dispersed organizations (Net-centricity).