Tiger teams take on Army challenges

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
FederalNewsRadio

The Army is taking the big picture work that the Defense Department and Intelligence community did around e-mail and identity management and implementing it.

DoD and the intelligence community developed an architecture for enterprisewide e-mail service.

Mike Krieger, the Army deputy chief information officer, says a tiger team will figure out how the Army can make enterprise e-mail a reality.

Krieger, speaking at the Fed Focus 2009 conference sponsored by INPUT in Falls Church, Va. Tuesday, says the Army is kicking off this effort at the first meeting of the Army IT Governance Board Wednesday.

“The board mostly will focus on why IT governance is important and how it works, but we also will announce three tiger teams,” Krieger says.

Along with the e-mail team, the Army will launch one around identity management and how to make it secure, and one looking into asset visibility so the service can know what hardware they have and where it exists.

“My whole goal is to reduce duplication across the Army,” Krieger says.

Part of that effort to reduce duplication also is to use some of the Navy’s lessons learned from their Navy Marine Corps Intranet program to reduce the number of applications the Army uses.

Krieger says Central Command ran one pilot program where it reduced its applications to 93 from more than 400.

“I think they will go lower,” Krieger says. “We have to take those 93 applications and move them to the Defense Enterprise Computing Center and recertify them as secure.”

The Navy had to take a similar path with NMCI where it took all its applications and moved them to one network.

Two other pilots at a base in Rock Island, Ill., and one at Ft. Riley, Kansas, are demonstrating how the Army can move not only applications, but data and e-mail to area processing centers (APC).

Krieger says these pilots encountered a lot of resistance initially, but in the end, the users found it worked well.

He says the Army still is figuring out its longer term APC acquisition strategy.

The Army plans on issuing a request for information in the next few weeks. Krieger says the information the service receives from vendors will help determine what the request for proposals will look like.

“We are having internal discussion about the acquisition strategy,” he says. “We’ve got to get past the dilemma of how can we get the operating environments, the computing and whether it is government or industry to manage the polarity between security and capability and the cost?”

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On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio – For the Army, it’s all about the enterprise

Dept. of the Army – Area Processing Center Information Paper

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