Information Sharing White Paper

DoD ASD(NII)/DoD CIO requested the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI) Information Sharing Working Group (ISWG) to bring together senior leadership from the public, private and academic sectors and to produce recommendations and a check list for implementing governance within large, federated environments. Authors have been Bryan Aucoin and Jarl S Magnusson. In line with DoD Information Sharing Strategy, the ISWG focused on governance concepts and approaches that are:

• Self-forming, self-organizing and self-regulating;
• Required to support the establishment and maintenance of trust relationships for sharing;
• Agile: supporting rapid change in business/mission requirements;
• Light-weight: can be reliably implemented with minimal additional administrative burden;

The key conclusions of this paper are as follows:

• There is one “one-size fits all” style of governance. The style of governance must be tailored for the state or phase of evolution of a given federation as it form and self-organizes.
• The end-game of the evolution of a federation formed for information sharing is information stewardship. Information Stewardship is a best practice based upon empirical assessment of Information Technology (IT) governance.
• This paper defines the concept of a “meta-governor”. The role of a meta-governor is guide federations through their evolutionary processes toward information stewardship.
• The paper provides guidance, in the form of checklists, for meta-governance, federations, and information stewards.