NOAA's Plan for Information Management; A System of Systems That Act as One

NOAA's business is information creation, assessment and dissemination. As NOAA has grown over the past 35 years, it has not had well-defined approach to coordinating its many data management initiatives and has not had data management system architecture to use in assessing proposed new requirements or data management systems. This decentralization of data management responsibility and lack of a comprehensive architecture has made it difficult to ensure that data management systems are: (1) Designed to provide the maximum value to NOAA; (2) Not duplicative of existing systems, and; (3) Operated efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. Admiral Lautenbacher has tasked the Data Management Committee (DMC) of the NOAA Observing System Council (NOSC), with developing a plan for integrating NOAA's data management systems which in essence is a task to develop a Data Management Systems Architecture; a component of the NOAA Enterprise Architecture and tightly coupled with the observing systems architecture. Data management can encompass a wide range of information management functions from ingest, to product generation to dissemination with many other functions along the way. Just as with NOAA's observing systems, making optimal use of NOAA's data management systems for a variety of NOAA program requirements, while balancing the disparate, and sometimes contradictory, requirements placed upon them is, and will continue to be, a constant challenge. This DMC architectural effort will capitalize on on-going data management initiatives (e.g., CLASS, IOOS DMAC, etc.) as well as legacy systems. The resulting architecture should capture the state today as well as the future state (e.g., 10 to 20 years). With this architecture, NOAA will be able to assess current capabilities and identify short-term actions as well as planning for the necessary future actions. This architectural plan will be encompass data management components pertaining to ingest, monitoring, data processing, archival, and access of environmental information within NOAA as detailed below.