Here on TechSource, we’ve been focused on innovation and, with the release of our first annual TechSource Awards, we are looking at federal agencies that have their finger on the pulse of change. One true visionary in the field is Terry Halvorsen, Acting CIO of the Department of Defense (DoD) who is determined to change the culture of the agency to embrace both change and innovation.
When the first cloud policy was released in 2012 by the DoD, Halvorsen was not happy. He felt that even with the policy, adoption of cloud wasn’t happening fast enough. Now as the acting CIO of the agency, Halvorsen told an audience at FedTalks 2014 that the department plans to release a new cloud computing policy this month, in an effort to make cloud adoption more agile.
As Halvorsen spoke about the new policy around cloud, he focused specifically on culture and technology and the dilemma that is presented today. “The biggest challenge isn’t in the technology but in the culture,” Halvorsen said. “How do you get people to think differently about IT?”
Culturally – according to Halvorsen – people believe their data needs to be on the table next to them. “We can’t operate that way. It is costly. It is unsecure. It is not effective.” Moving data to the cloud will address these issues and improve efficiencies and lower costs.
The first step is to give each of the military departments control over cloud procurement. “We’ve got to go faster,” Halvorsen stressed. And putting cloud procurement into the hands of each department is a faster way to get to the cloud.
DISA will still have a role as the DoD goes more commercial. They will set the security requirements and will enforce cloud policy compliance. DISA will also continue to work closely with the services as the Joint Information Environment (JIE) continues to evolve and take shape. The JIE effort is one that Halvorsen feels is a necessary step to centralize information and consolidate the network to improve efficiencies. Under JIE, Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) are being developed to reduce the threat landscape while reducing costs. Halvorsen says the consolidation of firewall boxes alone is making a significant impact on cost savings. JRSS is scheduled to be operational in 2017.
But it is not just the operational side of IT that is changing. How the agency views data also needs to change, according to Halvorsen. “We want to expose data and we want to let the data be there so people can use it for different things.” As analytic tools get better and they start putting these together with the data, DoD can accomplish things they haven’t even thought about yet. Now, that is a big cultural change, says Halvorsen.
With all of these changes ahead, Halvorsen expects to leverage innovation from industry to improve costs and expects that over the next five years or so, the money saved in IT costs will be redirected into warfighting to move the DoD mission forward.
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