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The Affordability Through Commonality Office (PMS 512) of PEO Surface Strike, in order to promote and enable the implementation of Open Systems Architecture (OSA) for Navy systems, established the Total Ship Open Systems Architecture (TOSA) Industry/Navy Integrated Product Team (IPT). TOSA has developed a notional open C4I template which incorporates an OSA. The application of OSA to C4I spaces will increase flexibility, upgradability, scalability, and adaptability and decrease total ownership cost over the lifecycle of the ship. Open systems concepts are well established in the commercial information technology (IT) field as a means to increase competition among vendors (broaden the market applicability and reduce costs). While the benefits of OSA are easily discernable for IT systems, the use of OSA for HM&E ship systems inter-faces represents a new and unproven application. An important feature of the adaptable ship concept is the Functional Element (FE) zone, which represents physical divisions of a ship with managed functions, configurations, interfaces, and characteristics. This paper describes how the OSA process was applied to develop an example FE Zone template for a specific space, a notional Combat Information Center (CIC) zone. The resulting concept may be used to develop a family of templates to open the remaining Command, Control, Communications, Computing and Intelligence (C4I) zones on a ship.