The Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO), with its role in facilitating the multi-agency development of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), places considerable emphasis on the value of transparency and open government.  These are important values in implementing strategic change.  With this in mind, the JPDO continues to look for ways to promote engagement with other departments and agencies of government.  It’s part of telling the NextGen story.  On February 23, the JPDO’s Director of Interagency Architecture and Engineering Division (IAED), Dr. Ed Waggoner, hosted a meeting with a delegation of the Veterans Administration (VA) to discuss the JPDO experience in establishing its Joint Planning Environment (JPE).

The JPE is a publicly-available, web-accessible application that serves as a foundation for collaboration of NextGen-related activities among the JPDO's partners and NextGen stakeholders. The JPE allows the JPDO to communicate NextGen planning information in a clear and concise way to partner agencies and stakeholders more quickly, with additional features not possible via paper-based publications. The VA delegation, led by Mr. Robert Bishop, is interested in enterprise-level information and data management to support a broad range of VA-provided services.

Dr. Waggoner began the meeting with an overview of NextGen and the JPDO, stating that the JPDO is responsible for managing a public/private partnership to implement NextGen by 2025.  He explained that NextGen has four foundational documents that are all updated annually with stakeholder input and review, and that this process is managed through the JPE. He noted that because NextGen is a multi-agency initiative involving different planning and architecture frameworks, the JPDO requires a decision-support system capable of handling large quantities of data in disparate formats at various levels of maturity and fidelity. 

Following this overview, Scott Goldsmith, contractor support for the JPDO, discussed the details of the process used in developing the JPE. Mr. Goldsmith stated that the management of the public/private partnership requires the JPDO to collect, analyze, and report NextGen related information in order to:

• Facilitate the transfer of technology from research programs to the Federal agencies with operational responsibilities and to the private sector
• Facilitate, monitor, and report progress of the activities leading to the realization of NextGen
• Coordinate aviation and aeronautics research programs to achieve the goal of more effective programs that result in applicable research
• Coordinate the development and utilization of new technologies and operations to ensure that, when available, they are used to their fullest potential
• Maintain the NextGen planning products (i.e., Concept of Operations, Enterprise Architecture, Integrated Work Plan, and the NextGen Business Case)

Mr. Goldsmith explained that the JPDO evaluated “best-of-breed” Enterprise Data Repository and Intelligence Tools, and chose Enterprise Elements (EE). In order to implement the tool, IAED developed a Joint Planning Framework (i.e., meta model) to organize the elements, relationships, and dependencies across the data sets. The JPDO re-branded the EE solution as the NextGen JPE, which provides:

• Centralized web-accessible user interface to access the data, the ability to quickly extract and integrate data from the NextGen foundational documents
• The ability to proactively and collaboratively develop data, manage interdependencies, and reduce time spent synchronizing data across JPDO divisions and work products
• Improved clarity of data and communications for stakeholders
• The ability to export data to generate JPDO deliverables and offer statistical data analysis to drive fact-based solutions
• Interactive graphics, drill-down capabilities, basic queries, and reports

After discussing the development of the JPE, Mr. Goldsmith provided a demonstration of the JPE’s capabilities, followed by a productive question and answer session.  Feedback from the VA delegation was positive, and a follow-up meeting was suggested as a way to expose a wider architecture audience from the VA to the capability. 

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