DISA wants collaboration marbled through enterprise

The vision for the future of the Defense Information Systems Agency likely will be unveiled next week.

John Garing, the director for strategic planning and information, held up the draft campaign plan Thursday during a panel discussion sponsored by AFCEA Washington D.C. chapter, and says the document is awaiting DISA director Lt. General Carroll Pollett.

"We are at a crucible moment in the Defense Department on how we approach this," he says.

"You will hear the term enterprise infrastructure, call it a cloud if you want but it's more than that. It's a concept about how we are about to deliver information to warfighters globally and support them as well. This is a new realm for us."

The plan talks about DISA's lines of operation and how it will approach them.

"It talks about the enterprise, talks about the environment and what we have to do as a group-all of us-to make sure we can deal with the next engagement," he says.

A key piece to those lines of operation and enterprise infrastructure is the ability for servicemen and women to access and share information at any time, from anywhere and securely.

Defense Department deputy chief information officer Dave Wennergren often talks about secure information sharing and how that has to be the goal of every system.

DISA has the responsibility to make secure information sharing easier.

Garing says the goal of the enterprise infrastructure is remove any barriers for the users of the information in the military.

To meet DoD's goals, Garing says making collaboration easier through the enterprise infrastructure is job one.

"I look at this collaboration service as really a fundamental foundation of the enterprise infrastructure because it allows you to get in and do things inside," he says.

DISA has been developing collaboration tools for several years through its Net-Centric Enterprise Services. It tested two technologies and recently decided to adopt departmentwide Adobe's Defense Connect Online software to provide Web conferencing, and instant messaging with presence and awareness.

DISA now is taking the tools at the desktop, such as chat or white boarding, and integrating them with the Web or video teleconferencing.

Tony Montemarano, DISA's component acquisition executive, says the agency is developing a technical reference model (TRM) to integrate the video teleconferencing and desktop tools into a plug-and-play capability.

"The user needs to have a conference and they want to plug-in and get a conference on demand," he says.

"We have to figure out how we will work with our installed base versus what technology is available. We have to figure out if it scales to support the world. It has to scale to the tactical environment."

Montemarano says the TRM should be done in about four months, and the DISA will develop a draft request for proposal. He says a final RFP would come after industry comment. An award could be expected in mid-2011.

DISA also has plans to expand its use of collaboration tools to other parts of the infrastructure, says Dave Mihelcic, the agency's chief technology officer.

He says the Forge.mil software development platform is one example of what the future will look like. He says more than 3,000 developers on the unclassified and classified networks are using the platform.

"You will see a much richer portfolio of collaborative services integrated in everything we do in the department," he says. "Web 2.0 based, social networking based, making all of our applications and services collaborative in nature."

One way DISA wants to help DoD get to that end goal of making applications more collaborative in nature is through the use of thin client computers.

This is where the user has a mouse, keyboard and monitor that are connected to the network, but there is no box with a hard drive underneath the user's desk. The employee accesses all applications and stores all data on the network.

Mihelcic says another piece is to provide data as a service.

"You will see massive data clouds," he says.

"A massive data cloud is you take all sorts of data related to a particular topic, anything that might have any utility in a particular area and put in a massive processing cloud, not just with storage, but with processing power and analytics built in."

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