scope:

The NIIA builds upon the construct laid down in the NATO Enterprise Architecture (NEA) (see Figure 1), which addresses, as a minimum, the NATO Headquarters, the NATO Command Structure, the NATO Agencies plus other NATO requirement holders and customers entitled to consume information and communication technology services provided by NATO Service Providers.² The NEA is defined as the combination of:

a. Business architecture defining business strategy, governance, organisation and key business processes;

b. Information Architecture describing the organisation logical and physical information assets and information management resources;

c. Application Architecture providing a blueprint for the individual services to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationship to the core business processes of the organisation;

d. Technology Architecture describing the infrastructure (software & hardware) capabilities that are required to support the deployment of services.

This document interfaces with the Technology Architecture of the NEA and provides the technical framework to provide interoperability between national and NATO ISR systems and outlines the concepts for the development of an ISR architecture for NATO. The NIIA is focused on promoting interoperability of NATO and national ISR assets among NATO/Coalition nations, which supports NAFAG's focus areas, including: Requirements Harmonisation and Translation Mechanism; Interoperability Through Standardization; Interoperability Through Armaments Procurements; Information Exchange; Leverage Civil and Defence Technology & Industry; and Demonstrations.³

The key to successful deployment of interoperable systems is the implementation of the architecture in national and NATO systems, and the test and certification of the implementations to verify interoperability and compliance with the standards. Implementation is an obvious element of interoperability, but one that is often deferred due to resource limits or lack of political will. Test and certification of the implementations is less obvious, but an important step in achieving interoperability. The standards for digital interoperability are complex and often have multiple options. Test and certification ensures that the standards were correctly interpreted and applied, and documents the options chosen in the particular implementation. Failure to test the implementation often results in expensive fixes in the field to make systems work together after deployment. This is more expensive and delays the integration of important systems into operations.

While this document addresses the technical issues of interoperability for ISR systems, issues of security and data sharing policies can still hinder the dissemination and retrieval of ISR data throughout the combat theatre. These issues must be addressed at the senior national levels to ensure that battlefield commanders and combatant forces can access the information they need to execute their missions with the minimum amount of risk to Alliance or Coalition resources.

² C-M(2015)0041-REV1 "NATO Enterprise Architecture Policy," https://tide.act.nato.int

³ AC/224-D(2017)0003 "NAFAG Management Plan," 3 March 2017.