Service exchange requirements of a defence force portfolio

Abstract

The Australian Department of Defence is developing a capability portfolio which involves interoperability between disparate portfolio elements, via the concerted contribution from multiple stakeholders. In order for project staff and stakeholders to obtain a better understanding of interoperability requirements, this work applied an established framework which records intended service exchanges and provides a mechanism to analyse the service exchanges required to generate capability. To test and refine the framework prior to its Department-wide adoption, a case-study was commissioned. This work draws from the study’s outcomes, focusing on the utility of the framework as a means of capturing and understanding dependencies between elements to support portfolio-wide decision-making.

Keywords:

• OR in defence studies
• capability portfolio
• interoperability
• Delphi

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Sharon Boswell and Yi Yue for helpful comments during the early stages of this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback which has resulted in a better paper.

Compliance with ethical standards

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Research involving human participants

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Australian Department of Defence.

Notes

1 Environment, Coupling and Response Behaviour, Type of Failure, Infrastructure Characteristics, State of Operation, and Types and Dependencies.

2 Syntactic boundaries form due to differences in jargon and symbols when members belong to specialised knowledge groups, and different organisational affiliations. It is important to note that members in this situation appreciate each other’s roles as necessary for task completion. Overcoming syntactic boundaries requires establishing a common language so that members can effectively communicate with one another to complete tasks.

3 Semantic boundaries form when there is no common language amongst groups and members do not fully appreciate each other’s roles for task completion, usually due to increasing specialisation of each member’s function. In this situation the willingness to collaborate to solve problems is diminished. Overcoming a semantic boundary requires the establishment of shared meanings, in addition to establishing a means to communicate.

4 Pragmatic boundaries occur when uncovering shared understanding reveals potentially clashing interests and incentives amongst group members (e.g. budgetary or political pressures), creating potential for conflict and resistance from group members to engage in problem solving. Pragmatic boundaries are the most complex to overcome, as group members are required to negotiate meanings and be willing to transform knowledge and interests from their own specialised domains.

5 Given specific requirements, it is possible to aggregate two or more of the services, thus creating less exchange services in the framework (e.g. combining Physical Mobility and Information Mobility into a single Mobility service exchange). Equivalently, it is also possible to add more fidelity to any of the existing services, thus creating more service exchanges to the framework – this process is detailed in the following paragraph of this Section for the C2 service exchange.

6 Perception is where data/information is merely consumed and perceived. Typical perception involves awareness of objects/individuals in time and space.

7 Comprehension involves correlation and interpretation of the data/information that has been consumed, enabling the understanding of objects/individuals under consideration.

8 Projection enables reasonable judgements about the possible future movements/actions of objects/individuals.

9 Refer to (Australian Defence Force ranks, 2023) for a summary of Australian Defence Force ranks.

10 For example, a future list of elements to include in the next iteration of the network could be produced by the current participants nominating additional elements (and the projects they are part of) they felt were missing from the current study, but are necessary to generate intended capability.