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DOD updates enterprise services framework
Defense Department CIO Terry Halvorsen has signed off on a third version of departmentwide guidance for managing IT services. In an intro- duction to the document, he wrote that the latest edition of the DOD Enterprise Service Manage-
ment Framework puts more emphasis on IT risk and per- formance management.
DESMF is meant to be a scalable framework for IT service management at the Pentagon.
built on the first edition of the guid- ance by including all DOD IT assets and not just services owned or adju- dicated by the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Cyber Resilience, said the framework is a good opportunity for industry and government to build a common IT management language.
DESMF’s basic lexicon comes from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which the framework describes as the most widely used in the world to support IT services management.
“The various branches of the DOD should maintain a cooperative approach to defining, accepting and socializing this terminology,” the frame- work states.
Tupitza welcomed the embrace of ITIL, adding that a challenge for con- tractors has been that some IT termi- nology can be open to interpretation. In his view, the more opportunities there are for industry and government to hash out a common language the better.
— Sean Lyngaas
It came into being because DOD lacked “an integrated framework that encompasses best practices from mul- tiple frameworks, [and it] provides guidance to establish the structure, documentation, and roles and respon- sibilities to plan, implement, monitor and improve” the management of IT services, according to the document.
DESMF Edition II, released last year,
IT performance.
DESMF Edition III includes new
models for measuring the quality of IT services and assessing the pro- cesses through which they’re delivered. Halvorsen said the change came at the request of David Cotton, DOD’s deputy CIO for information enterprise.
Charlie Tupitza, acting CEO of the nonprofit Global Forum to Advance
of reported malware incidents at the U.S. Postal Service were found to be false positives
Terry Halvorsen
Halvorsen wrote that he sees DESMF as a means of identifying and eliminating “redundancy, inefficiency and service quality deficien- cies.” In December, he issued a directive requiring defense agencies to use DESMF as a baseline for measuring their
EDITOR’S NOTE
Finding the industry linchpins of federal IT
Federal IT, like any corner of gov- ernment, has its share of inher- ently governmental functions that fall to agency employees. But vast swaths of government technology are essentially owned and operated by private firms,
and rare is the mission that doesn’t involve com- mercial technologies of some sort.
Industry, in other words,
is integral to the federal IT community. And in September, FCW will showcase the firms that are truly making their presence felt.
FCW’s Hot Companies to Watch is a proudly subjective list. Working
with our sister publication Washing- tonTechnology, we look for compa- nies that are transforming the busi- ness of federal technology in any number of ways. Size alone won’t
do it, but past companies have claimed their spot on the list by:
• Bringing truly transforma- tive new technologies into federal IT.
• Reshaping the marketplace
through acquisitions, merg- ers or rapid growth.
• Establishing themselves as a part- ner of choice for other firms.
• Powering a particularly important agency program.
• Winning one or more cornerstone IT contracts.
• Building a team that’s especially active and influential in the community.
We’ve got quite the list already in the works but are open to sug- gestions. So if there’s a company you think has been especially hot in 2016, email me at tschneider@ fcw.com with a few sentences explaining why that firm should be on our radar. Then check out our Sept. 30 issue to see who made the final cut!
—Troy K. Schneider tschneider@fcw.com @troyschneider
July 30, 2016 FCW.COM 9