USN's OSA strategy to help foster innovation, lower ownership costs

The US Navy (USN) has published its Open Systems Architecture (OSA) strategy, a four-page document to guide acquisition towards quicker innovation, reduced cycle times, and lower total ownership costs.

The strategy, published in early January 2013, is the culmination of a year's worth of work to pull together a four-year plan with concrete actions and is aligned with the Chief of Naval Operations' (CNO) emphasis on pursuing the concept of "payloads over platforms".

"If we want to get to reusable enterprise components where you have things that can be put across multiple platform types, then there are some things we have to change about the way we have to build them and the way we invest in them," Nickolas Guertin, director for transformation in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of the navy for research, development, test, and evaluation told IHS Jane's .

"My personal belief is we are not going to get big change in how much we spend on our products until we start working on commonality, especially looking at technical frameworks that can be applied across multiple domains, because that is where the action is," he said.