Mr. McDaniel is the President of Silver Bullet Solutions, Inc. He works on the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) as part of the Lockheed-Martin team under contract to the DoD CIO’s Architecture and Interoperability Directorate.
He has worked on US defense systems for over 30 years, from programming weapons systems to researching sensor data fusion algorithms to department-wide enterprise architectures and data repositories.
His first work on architectures was in the mid-1980’s, developing the US Navy’s System Engineering Handbook Battle Force Architecture document for the Naval Sea Systems Command.
The focus of this document was to define a systematic way to go from national-level command and control requirements to varying levels of functional designs and allocations efficiently and in a way that would better meet Navy operational requirements and lead to multi-platform systems interoperability.
When the C4ISR Framework was being developed in the early 1990’s, Mr. McDaniel was brought onto the team and helped with the SV’s, in particular the SV-1 (System block diagrams) and SV-4 (functional data flow diagrams).
He was also the Navy representative for the C4ISR Framework’s meta model, the Core Architecture Data Model (CADM).
In the latter 1990’s, his Silver Bullet team supported the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in developing the Naval C4ISR Architecture, in defining the methodology and in the creation and maintenance of architecture “picklists” and an architecture data repository called the Naval Architecture Database (NAD).
Owing to the success of NAD, the team went on to enlarge the database Navy-wide, called the Department of the Navy (DoN) Integrated Architecture Database (DIAD).
The DIAD had architecture data from 30 diverse functional areas, from Navy medicine and law to acquisition and finance to weapons, ships, aircraft, and ground forces.
In parallel, Mr. McDaniel was the DoN lead for the extension of C4ISR Framework to non-C4ISR domains, in what became known as the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF). Mr. McDaniel has since worked on DoDAF 1.5 and 2.0 and has been the leader of the DoDAF Meta Model (DM2) working group.
As the working group leader, he convinced the group to adopt the International Defence Enterprise Architecture Specification (IDEAS) in which he had been the principal US participant for several years.
The formal ontologic foundation of IDEAS allowed a two-order of magnitude reduction in data elements in DM2 compared to the CADM predecessor -- while simultaneously significantly increasing the expressive power. Mr. McDaniel continues to lead the DoDAF-DM2 working group in its new role as the configuration management body for improvement and evolution of DoDAF.
His intellectual and business interests include DoD process efficiency, ontologies, data fusion, automated inference, and sensor, combat, and C4ISR systems. His degrees are Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Systems Applications. He currently lives in Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and San Diego, California.