Page 32 - FCW, April 2017

Defense
interesting to see where they land — most likely with the DCMO.”
Halvorsen acknowledged that there will be changes to how the existing AT&L conducts its business, but “I don’t think those will fun- damentally change what the CIO does for AT&L.”
Bender said the next CIO should focus on put- ting cybersecurity and IT strategies into use at DOD, “given that this environment is driving us to cyberspace as an operational domain.”
“The CIO ought to be in on the discussion chartering the roles and responsibili- ties of the principal defense cyber adviser,” he added. The 2017 NDAA orders DOD to evaluate whether that position should be strengthened or possibly scrapped.
Bender said he believes
the role of DOD’s CIO
should be strengthened, but
he would also like to see
more authority delegated
to the CIOs at the individual military services.
“DOD’s CIO should be in the business of developing a strategy and establishing standards to be met and get out of the business of trying to tell the services how to do that,” he said. “The services are all unique in the legacy infrastruc- ture that they bring.”
Bender added that the CIO should not dictate a one-size-fits-all approach to IT modernization across the military. “Tell us the outcome that you want and set the standards to be met and let the ser- vices go about that in the form, fit and fashion that they can do that,” he said.
JIE leads the way
Takai said that once the new CIO sorts out the organizational authorities and relationships, he or she must quickly pivot to the operational priorities.
She, Halvorsen and Bender agree that those priorities are IT moderniza- tion, continued migration to the Joint Information Environment’s joint region- al security stacks (JRSS), data center consolidation, cloud migration and cybersecurity.
Halvorsen, who drafted the Joint Information Environment strategy docu- ment in August 2016, said he expects DOD’s commitment to continue. “I don’t think that will change,” he said, although he acknowledged that it was often a challenge to make officials understand that JIE is a vision rather than a pro- gram with strict requirements.
“If you try to get too specific on the JIE vision, you end up being wrong,” he said.
“I think [Halvorsen has] done a very nice job of coalescing the services around a shared vision for our infra-
structure — not that we’ve made all of the progress that we need to make,” Bender said. “But I think that the JRSS and the technical solu- tions that are in the works are [going] in the right direc- tion. I think the services are all lined up to support it and that we’re on a good glide path.”
Bender added that the next CIO will also need to tackle reforming the Defense Information Systems Agen- cy to bring it in line with industry standards. “By going joint, [DOD is] increas- ingly reliant on DISA infra- structure,” he said. “So the journey to the cloud goes through a DISA-provided cloud access point. They need to deliver at the need for speed.”
Furthermore, “the DOD CIO should continue to focus on moving the DOD toward utilizing the commer- cial sector for enterprise IT, with DISA focusing on stan- dards and oversight, not on
contracting, which has been a DISA weakness,” Bender added.
Halvorsen said DOD officials have made significant progress on adopting cloud technology, improving cybersecu- rity and replacing the Common Access Card, and he expects support for those initiatives to continue.
He admitted, though, that certain goals — such as having a replacement for the Common Access Card by the end of the year — are probably not realistic. “I knew when I put that out that it was probably too aggressive,” he said. “But I’m very happy that everybody signed on, so if it takes another year,...that will still be great.”
Data center consolidation has also progressed more slowly than many had hoped. In the past year, Halvorsen fre- quently expressed frustration with the pace of closures and consolidation, and
“There will be a lot of work to do, and there will be hiccups along the way. I’d love it to go faster, but given the rules of culture, it’s going pretty well.”
—TERRY HALVORSEN
16 April 2017 FCW.COM