DCMA innovates IT through new virtual lab

Jacob Haynes, the chief information officer at the Defense Contract Management Agency, said the new innovation lab helps the agency use a disciplined approach t...

The Defense Contract Management Agency is opening up its creative veins thanks to the Defense Department’s Better Buying Power initiative.

DCMA is taking the concepts called for in BBP 3.0 and applying them to its business processes.

Jacob Haynes, the chief information officer at DCMA, said the agency launched a virtual innovation lab to better match needs with product or service capabilities.

“Instead of just buying and trying and doing things, we have a very disciplined environment that understands what the capabilities should do and have outputs, understand what the critical issues and criteria would be and say ‘This is what constitutes success for whatever we are putting through the lab,'” Haynes said. “The more we learn in doing that, we’ll be able to provide better capabilities and faster to our workforce, and more importantly not waste time and money doing so.”

Better Buying Power 3.0 is focused on reestablishing the Defense Department’s technological superiority in the world. One tenet of BBP 3.0 is for DoD to understand how to achieve affordable innovation.

One example where the virtual lab already is paying off is with DCMA’s tablet computer pilot as part of its mobility strategy.

Haynes said the end goal is to get down to a single device per DCMA employee and the innovation lab is helping to figure how best to do that.

“What we are finding through our iLab, we are testing tablets that could satisfy that requirement. It can be that single CPU for an individual. It has a docking station that would support dual-monitors, a full keyboard and anything else that you’d be able to do with a laptop, and it’s Common Access Card enabled,” he said. “We also are going through the cost module there to understand what is the lifecycle of a tablet versus a laptop versus a desktop, and take that back to the business and let them know what it costs to incorporate this level of mobility into our enterprise.”

Haynes said the pilot started with 50 people and then they will evaluate how it worked before deciding where to go next.

DCMA’s mobile effort isn’t just about moving to a new set of devices. Haynes said DCMA created a mobility strategy, moved many of its employees to laptops instead of desktops and implemented virtual desktop interface (VDI) to make connecting via smartphone or tablet to the network easier and more secure.

Haynes said the innovation lab helps DCMA understands the needs of the business or mission areas much more quickly and can change direction quickly if necessary.

“We are actually looking at other requirements we have for applications,” he said. “We will find sometimes we will have a commercial solution that may satisfy 80 percent of what that requirement is going to be and maybe only 20 percent of custom code around that. We can put those kinds of things through the lab environment and see, if in fact, if it will meet the demands of the business and be able to accelerate that capabilities to the field at a much lower cost.”

Along with innovation and mobility, Haynes said DCMA is focusing on several other priorities starting with achieving a clean financial audit.

He said the Financial Improvement Audit Readiness (FIAR) program has a huge impact on the agency’s IT systems.

“When you start talking about the control objectives that’s important for FIAR, you are talking about security management for our systems, the access controls, which is huge mission factor for IT, configuration management for all of our IT and segregation of duties is something we have to watch very closely, and contingency planning for our data,” Haynes said. “We actually have to go through our controls, test our controls and have a corrective action plan for each of our controls.”

Haynes said the CIO’s office is a service provider to the financial management systems, so it’s important that his systems have a clean audit too.

“What you have to do from day one is understand and figure how you can incorporate those principles of FIAR — security management, access control and configuration management — as part of your day-to-day mission,” he said. “We have to make sure we have an eye on it, that we have the metrics and the controls so we don’t have a lapse.”

Along with the financial management audit readiness effort, DCMA is restructuring how it manages its IT portfolio.

Haynes said DCMA has 88 separate systems and is managing through its new platform architecture strategy to ensure there is a standard approach to upgrading and improving them for the business side.

“We have now six major platforms that we have looked at from a strategy perspective and we’ll going to look at how we can satisfy our future requirements from those platforms and modify those platforms as opposed to going out and adding new distinct technologies,” he said. “We started looking at the major buckets of how we do business and all of those systems that support that both from infrastructure and overall applications would be managed under those major titles. It just gives us logical grouping of our applications and a very systematic approach both from a business and technology, and more importantly for me is that once those proven platforms are in place then as we look at new demands or new requirements coming in, we can look across those platforms to see if we can maybe start managing those platforms to bring a best of breed to provide a capability. Is it a tweak of one of the entities inside the platform or do we need to do something inside the platform to be able to meet the demand?”

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