Three years ago, it was inconceivable that Boeing would sit at a table with its major competitors, partners, subcontractors, and completely unrelated businesses to engage in open technical discussions, but with the creation of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC), this is exactly what is happening.

Consisting today of more than 75 members, the NCOIC is committed to combining industry’s best technologies, standards and processes into a technical framework that will result in systems designed with the ability to participate in network centric operations on a global network.

Known as “interoperability,” this capability translates into any computing device being able to discover and register as a node in a global network, regardless of who built it, who’s using it, or where it might be operating. In the defense market, for example, this means that a Boeing-built helicopter can share data with a Lockheed Martin-built fighter aircraft and with a Northrop Grumman-built submarine and any other of the myriad systems or platforms it might encounter in military operations.

“If you think about how you currently use information in your daily life, and what it would mean to have all of your information resources linked together, with appropriate information presented to you in a speedy, user-friendly format, it’s easy to see that a net centric capability will significantly improve the contribution these resources make to our daily lives,” said IDS Vice President of Network Centric Architectures Carl O’Berry, who is also chairman of the NCOIC Executive Council.

Several years ago, Boeing recognized that interoperability would be the next great information systems enhancement, and began telling the world about network-centric operations (NCO) and developing the technology to enable it. This resulted in the Strategic Architecture Reference Model (SARM), Boeing’s architecture, which is steadily enabling Boeing’s platforms and systems to interoperate.

“With Boeing approaching a 60-percent share of the defense market, interoperability among Boeing platforms represented a huge leap forward,” O’Berry said. “But that wasn’t enough. We needed to be responsive to our customers and their rapidly advancing need for interoperability—regardless of designer, manufacturer, or end-user. An industry-wide approach was the only answer.”

Prior to his 1995 retirement after 38 years in the U.S Air Force, the former Lt. Gen. O’Berry set communications policy for 55,000 Air Force personnel. Having experienced firsthand the challenges facing warfighters as they function, oftentimes with incomplete information, he took his passion for interoperability to industry, and joined Boeing in 2000 to focus on the company’s NCO strategy.

O’Berry initiated a professional tour of duty in 2002, meeting with customers, competitors, partners, and suppliers to discuss the need for interoperability and industry’s contribution if it could set aside competitive stances and agree upon a unified technical approach. Armed with his own experiences as a military customer, he knew that commercial industry held the key to accelerating interoperability, and that its investment potential and technical velocity could make a substantial impact, once a unified approach prevailed. The critical first step, the incorporation of the NCOIC, occurred in August 2004.

While initially focused on defense applications, Boeing and its colleagues in the NCOIC consortium anticipate that this industry-wide technical framework will rapidly spread to non-military markets, such as homeland security, first response, and an infinite number of civil and consumer applications.

“I believe that we are only scratching the surface relating to how NCO might be used in the future” O’Berry said. “We used to say, ‘Information is Power.’ In an NCO world, ACCESS to information is power. Having more than 70 major companies in agreement to pursue a common set of standards and a common technical approach to the fundamental drive towardinteroperability is a huge step toward eliminating incompatibility and enabling all operators to harness the power of the network to gain secure, reliable access the information they need.