I am a technology guy! I love the excitement of new technology of any kind. In my younger days I believed that all technology was good for mankind as long as humanity properly harnessed it.  I believed that all technology could make our lives easier, enable us to do more in less time, and enable more freedom in our lives.  I began to open my technology aperture in the early 1980’s while working for Rear Admiral Wayne Meyer, the father of the Navy’s Aegis fleet of cruisers and destroyers.  Admiral Meyer burst my bubble one day while I was explaining to him how computer automation would reduce the workload burden on our Aegis sailors.  In his famous, cantankerous way, he told me that I was speaking poppycock.  He then explained to me that automation always makes our lives more complex, busy, and challenged in some unanticipated way! Continue reading →

“Offered with full understanding of the challenges and opportunities these issues and suggested solutions represent for the future of America, and for the U.S. Navy’s role in securing that future.”    Dr. Marv Langston – January 1st, 2010

This post provides real-world examples that help validate the potential for significant savings if the Department of Navy (DON) should decide to move aggressively toward wave 3 information technologies. With NMCI ready to contract for Phase-Out services while NGEN is Phased-In, it is important to consider the potential for saving cost while improving the Department’s IT performance.

– Although it will seem unbelievable, this analysis shows that it is possible to bring the estimated current annual $1.7B IT costs down to between $600M and $750M, and easily pay NGEN infrastructure conversion within annual operating budgets… Continue reading →

Enterprise network & computing, coupled with distributed-services technologies are transforming legacy mission and business systems…

Introduction

This post describes an acquisition concept that I am currently proposing for the DISA led Network Enabled Command Capability (NECC) Program. With this concept the DoD could transform current stove pipe system development and acquisition practices into an evolving enterprise capability through an innovative shared-development strategy that could be the start of a true IT acquisition “game changer.” Continue reading →

…The issue with our current acquisition practice is that we are attempting to use processes designed for an earlier technology…

The reason traditional DoD acquisition practices are failing us today is because we no longer build traditional information based systems. Rather than building new IT systems the way we build new aircraft or ships, we evolve enterprise and application capabilities. Said another way, today’s IT based systems are all moving toward virtual storage, virtual computing, and web services or services oriented architecture layers riding atop the network communications infrastructure.  This means that unlike IT acquisition just ten years ago, today’s acquisition is either about building out or improving the enterprise infrastructure or adding new and/or improved functionality (applications) that ride the infrastructure.  In this case, infrastructure means the network communications connectivity, plus the computing and storage capacity to support the foundation software services and application functions enabled by these “integrated” layers of infrastructure.  To fit these enterprise and application improvements into the current acquisition and budget system we mask the improvements as new programs that fit the Congressional and DoD view of system acquisition.

It is time that we fix this situation!!

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…unless we create voices for a radical change, the critical IT component of our acquisition system will be swept into the same bucket as weapon systems which are currently pushing toward more oversight…

As with all organizational activity, resource allocation is the most obvious power base (“he with the gold rules”) and the place where large amounts of organizational energy are applied. As a public organization that has commanded a large percentage of the Federal budget each year, the DoD expends a large amount of resources (people, policy, and oversight) to provide public transparency to DoD expenditures in order to assure Congress and the tax payers that public monies are spent wisely and properly. With the exception of a few well publicized examples, the Department has done an credible job of ensuring that public money is properly spent.

…our adversaries are exploiting most modern IT capabilities to support command & control, sensor information aggregation, and weapon control.

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