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sharing information on DMS/OP material shortages among DoD and industry groups to reduce redundancies and improve effectiveness. Today, however, Air Force, Army, and Navy organizations, as well as commercial companies, provide their own alerts, health analyses, and recommended solutions. GIDEP has never been fully used. Capable manufacturers feel that the visibility of component issues (DMS) across multiple products and platforms would present a real opportunity to create innovative and cost effective solutions to parts and service problems.

In the area of open systems architecture, the committee noted that the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) (a federally funded R&D center sponsored by DoD through the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics) has been actively involved in work on open systems since 1993, developing tools and process initiatives, and developing formal standards. However, neither DoD nor the Air Force has taken full advantage of advances in software architectures. The committee identified more than 25 organizations, both within and outside the Air Force, that are working on various aspects of the DMS/ OP problem. Although each organization may be effective in its limited area, overall coordination of these activities is loose, at best, and the results are not broadly distributed to DoD or the Air Force. With a coherent DoD/Air Force strategy for dealing with DMS/OP problems, a collective management could be established for these diverse activities, which could lead to more productive use of the results and minimize redundant expenditures.