A Business Model to Provide Interoperability between Agencies in Operations in an Interagency Environment
Interagency Interoperability Model, Civil-Military Operations, Monetization of Interagency Operations
Operations in Interagency Environments with the participation of the Armed Forces (AF) and civilian agencies are increasingly frequent. In this context, in order to achieve success, it is necessary that there is interoperability between the agencies involved with the sharing of information in order to achieve the common objective of the operation. However, to make this integration possible, several barriers need to be overcome, which reduces the interest of institutions in sharing their data. Despite the existence of several studies in the literature on the subject, there are still gaps to be addressed. Among them, there is the need to create a business model that allows for a greater scope, in terms of participants and data, and that uses a strategy to encourage agencies to share their information. In this work, a new business model is proposed, based on an architecture that has as its central element an API Gateway and, among others, the Pricing and Financial Control module. The main objective is to provide the necessary interoperability for the monetized sharing of information between the entities involved, directly or indirectly, in Interagency Operations with the participation of military and civilian agencies. It is also intended to enable the sharing of data to be carried out in a comprehensive way and to be a tool to encourage integration, in order to alleviate the obstacles generated with the expenditure of resources to make the data available. The incentive will be provided with the implementation of monetization whenever sharing occurs between entities. To validate the proposed model, a prototype was implemented and tests were carried out in a controlled environment. The results obtained with these tests were analyzed in order to verify the correct execution of the functionalities foreseen in the conceptual model. The performance of the prototype during the execution was also analyzed. Finally, an analysis was carried out regarding the economic viability of the proposed model.