The C4ISR Architecture Framework: History, Status, and Plans for Evolution

3.0 Adaptations Beyond DoD and Relationships to Other Frameworks:

Although it was developed for C4ISR, the Framework has been used successfully in other DoD domains, such as electronic commerce, logistics, and health services, as well as in the Intelligence Community. Other Agencies and Departments of the Federal Government are also adopting the descriptive product types developed for the DoD Framework. Governments outside the United States have expressed interest in the DoD Framework, most notably Australia, Sweden, and Israel.

A far-reaching goal of architecture development is to have a common means for
expressing architectures so that architectures can be understood and compared at many levels -- for example, within Agencies and Departments (e.g., Service-to-Service within DoD, or bureau-to-bureau within the Treasury Department) and across Agencies or Departments (e.g., between DoD and the Treasury Department). Some can even envision a world in which industry architectures can be readily compared with those of the Federal Government (e.g., to compare the way DoD performs payroll operations with the way IBM performs payroll operations). To this end, a number of organizations are developing architecture frameworks that tell their architects how to describe their architectures using common techniques and templates.