Software Alliance
A recent agreement between DoD and Office of the Director of National
Intelligence has given a further boost to the growing use of enterprise software licenses.
by Karen E. Thuermer, MIT Correspondent
A recent agreement between the Department of Defense and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has given a further boost to the growing use of enterprise software licenses as a way to hold down costs and encourage information sharing.
Net-centric software licensing agreements are especially important because they improve information sharing capabilities. That’s because their primary purpose is to eliminate informationsharing roadblocks, such as institutional boundaries or license limitations, and encourage sharing among people and organizations that defend the interests of the United States, its international allies, and the federal government’s state and local partners.
The enterprise asset management market could reach $2.8 billion in 2010, according to the ARC Advisory Group. Failure to manage software assets effectively can lead to companies overbuying licenses on as much as 60 percent of their software portfolio. For this reason, on July 22, the chief information offices of DoD and ODNI signed a memorandum of agreement to institute a unified approach across DoD and the intelligence community to establish a combined approach to managing certain computer software licenses. The move will give authorized information technology users immediate, unobstructed access to information.
“This effort leverages the collective bargaining power of DoD and the IC to ensure that our nation realizes the significant operational benefits of information sharing at a reasonable cost,” said the DoD deputy chief information officer, David M. Wennergren.
“It encourages vendors to economically deliver superior products and services to support our evolving business model,” added John Brantley, deputy associate director of national intelligence for intelligence community technology management in the ODNI/CIO. “This will help us maximize information access across an increasingly agile enterprise.”
Both Wennergren and Brantley cosigned the DoD and ODNI memorandum of agreement.
The approach supports the DoD’s net-centric data and services strategies, as well as the intelligence community’s information sharing strategy. This explains how information must be visible, accessible, understandable and David M. Wennergren trusted, so that it can be discovered by people and organizations who need the information. “While the phrase service- oriented architecture [SOA] is often used to describe this change, put simply, it’s all about creating an information advantage for our people and mission partners,” said Wennergren. “While we have made great progress, there is still much to be done in any large organization to ensure that the right information is available to the right people at the right time to speed decision-making and improve effectiveness.”
SERVICE-ORIENTED ENTERPRISE
Specifically, ODNI was involved in the initiative because it and DoD are working together on a number of important initiatives to improve information sharing and security.
“This effort to restructure software licensing agreements is a natural area for our organizations to work together, as we will both be able to benefit from a unified approach in achieving our shared vision for net-centric information sharing and to provide better options for procuring common, standards-compliant, and commercially available software under the most favorable terms and conditions by leveraging the buying power of a combined DoD and DNI community,” Wennergren said.
Consequently, DoD and the ODNI will jointly negotiate with software vendors for licensing agreements that will allow the organizations’ components to access information and share it with any potential authorized user, regardless of the user’s organization.
“Much will change about how we do business as we become a service-oriented enterprise,” Wennergren explained. “In a world of net-centric information sharing, the data that we produce within our information technology systems must be made available to other users outside of our organization so that we can effectively share information across government.”
This means that licensing agreements that restrict the ability to share government data will need to be changed. For example, if an existing license limits access to data only by specified software tools or by specific users, then sharing information with other agencies that need the information can be stifled.
“We will be working in the months ahead with software companies to revise software licensing agreements to ensure that information can be shared as necessary, and that any necessary changes to licensing agreements are done in a cost effective manner and as a part of our overall enterprise licensing strategy [known as the Enterprise Software Initiative within DoD and SmartBUY for the entire federal government],” Wennergren explained. “The relationship between government and industry will change as we move from a world of large stand-alone systems to the more agile world of enterprise services available anywhere and leveraged by the entire department. “
This enterprise licensing effort is one of many steps in this transformation. In 2003, DoD established its Net-Centric Data Strategy, which outlined a vision for managing data in a net-centric environment. Here the focus was on a “many to many” exchange of data, as opposed to the old standardized and predefined point-to-point interfaces. It stated that data must be created and managed to ensure maximum visibility, availability and usability to authorized users when and where needed.
The purpose was to accelerate decision cycles and improve the quality of those decisions. Other key attributes of the strategy included tagging of all data (intelligence, non-intelligence, raw and processed) with metadata to enable discovery of data by users, and posting of all data to shared spaces to provide access to all users except when limited by security, policy or regulations.
To update the strategy, on May 4, 2007, the DoD net-centric services strategy established the vision for a netcentric environment that increasingly leverages shared services and SOA.
COLLABORATIVE EFFORT
Since establishing common netcentric licensing agreements require close, cross-organization coordination, the DoD and IC CIOs are collaborating to identify participants for a joint net-centric licensing tiger team and a senior oversight chair. The DoD and DNI chief information officer teams, which will comprise software licensing subjectmatter experts and contracting officers, together will develop terms and conditions for future licensing agreements in this area. The team will work with technology vendors to create and/or modify any applicable existing agreements. DoD’s Enterprise Software Initiative Working Group will coordinate the work.
The Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) is a joint project designed to implement a true software enterprise management process within DoD. By pooling commercial software requirements and presenting a single negotiating position to leading software vendors, ESI provides pricing advantages not otherwise available to individual services and agencies. Twenty-three software best practices have been identified and adopted by the ESI Working Group, leading toward a DoD-wide business process for acquiring, distributing and managing enterprise software.
Existing policies and procedures will guide the ESI team in coordinating the work, and the work will be done in conjunction with the federal SmartBUY team, so that the work can support possible adoption and use across the entire federal government.
SmartBUY is designed to promote effective enterprise level software management. By leveraging the federal government’s buying power, SmartBUY is reducing costs through governmentwide aggregate buying of commercial software products. Besides providing reduced prices and more favorable terms/conditions, the SmartBUY program assists agencies to achieve greater standardization, improved configuration management, and more robust IT security. ♦
