IDEAS Team,
The bi-weekly IDEAS telecon was held 07 March 2008. In attendance were:

1. Doug Wilson

2. Guy Caron

3. Dave McDaniel

4. Francisco Loaiza

  1. Australia Executive Briefings. Doug reported on the three meetings that were recently held for George Wauer, Mike Wayson and Bill Tracy. First meeting on 26 February was with a deputy from the office of the Chief of Joint Operations Command (who was unable to attend). It was very well received and the deputy will brief the Chief of Joint Operations Command and invite us back to do another national presentation. On the second day, 27 February, a meeting was held with the CIO and the acting head of Capabilities Systems, along with some brigadiers and folks from NTWPO and mobilization. The utility and capability of IDEAS was apparent to all. Doug mentioned that it was generally agreed that when discussing/presenting IDEAS to the warfighter, we need to stay out of the details of ontologies and architectures and stick to the business practices and benefits they would realize. This was kept in mind in preparing for the third meeting with Joint Operations Command in Sydney. There, the group met with the Deputy Chief of Joint Operations Command and supporting staff. They were very appreciative of the team taking on the challenges of the IDEAS focus and related easily with our objectives.

The overall result of the meetings reinforced the degree of Coalition support for IDEAS at very high levels. This will greatly assist in soliciting additional and future funding support for implementing a national IDEAS effort, as well as helping to renew interest in an actual exercise and realign participating nations’ funding levels.

Doug observed that warfighters view the application of architecture data to an operational use as novel and that IDEAS is seen as a supplement to present information exchanges. It provides more detail about national capabilities in contribution to a Coalition. Dave observed similar reactions during the recent DoDAF 2.0 workshop with US Joint Forces Command.

  1. IDEAS Schedule. Discussed that the current project GANTT chart needs to be revised due to changes the experimentation schedule and other developments.
  1. Maturity Matrix. Recall that the purpose for the maturity ratings is, 1) to support release of a limited set of IDEAS components to a broader audience (e.g., national framework teams) and 2) help drive our next priority of work towards the April meetings in Orlando. The idea is to identify which areas are “ready for primetime” with an emphasis on simplification and ease of understanding for the end-user. Doug proposed the possible use of a template for terms and concepts that fit in an overall concept.

Proposed topics for next telecom:

  1. Revision and adjustment current IDEAS development plan
  2. Future training/tutorial documentation
  3. Review of Maturity ratings

The next bi-weekly is scheduled for 4 April 2008 at 09:00 USA Eastern Standard Time. The GoToMeeting parameters remain the same:

Conference Call: (217) 287-4185, access code 379-990-965
Meeting ID: 379-990-965
These minutes and all other materials discussed herein can be found on the FTP site:
ftp.ideasgroup.org
U/N: international
P/W: modaf
Please let me know of any errors or omissions in these minutes.