Q&A: Rebecca S. Harris

Written by Harrison Donnelly

A graduate of Virginia Tech, Harris began her government service in 1980 with Army Computer Systems Command, where she developed software and designed databases for the Army Standard Civilian Personnel Management Information System. She was the Army representative on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) X3H2 Database and X3H4 Information Resource Dictionary System Committees, and the ANSI SQL Database standard was developed during her tenure. She provided technical leadership and direction for the development of the Army’s data administration initiative.

In 1991, she joined DISA to work in the DoD Data Administration Program Management Office. In 1995, she assumed DoD data administrator responsibilities and oversaw the implementation and management of the DoD Data Administration Program. From 1996–1998, she served as head of the U.S. delegation for the NATO Information Systems Subcommittee.

Harris was appointed project manager for the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Program and Global Directory Service in 1998, and assumed DoD PKI deputy program manager responsibilities in 2000. In October 2001, she became chief, Center for Information Assurance Applications, joining the Senior Executive Service. She provided technical leadership and engineering support for the development and implementation of DoD information assurance capabilities.

Harris joined the Office of the Chief Information Officer in 2002 and was appointed chief, knowledge management at DISA. In 2004, she led the Global Information Grid (GIG) Enterprise Services Engineering organization as principal director, where she planned, engineered, acquired and integrated joint interoperable, secure global net-centric enterprise capabilities for the GIG. She was appointed to her current position in February 2006.

Harris was interviewed by MIT Editor Harrison Donnelly.

Q: To begin, please provide an overview of the mission and programs of the Program Executive Office GIG Enterprise Services [PEO GES].

A: The PEO GES in DISA has been charged with the responsibility to provide executive life cycle management of enterprise capabilities to support the DoD transition to net-centricity. We are tasked with delivering best value and operationally relevant enterprise services for enabling the war fighting, business and intelligence mission areas. The PEO is working through the Net-Centric Enterprise Services [NCES] program to extend enterprise services throughout DoD and to provide timely and accurate information to the warfighter anywhere and any time. NCES has been designated as an Acquisition Category Level 1 Major Automated Information System [MAIS]. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration [ASD [NII]] John Grimes is the milestone decision authority.

NCES is delivering capabilities through four distinct product lines: collaboration, the portal or user access, content discovery and delivery, and the service-oriented architecture foundation. General Kevin P. Chilton, the commander of USSTRATCOM, is the operational sponsor for NCES. In addition to the NCES initiative in the PEO, we also play a role in supporting the implementation of the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy. We maintain and operate the Metadata Registry under the direction and oversight of ASD NII.

Q: What is your vision for the NCES program?

A: Fundamentally, what I see NCES becoming is the foundational set of capabilities to help the warfighter achieve information dominance on the battlefield. If we start off thinking about this from the user perspective, today a lot of extra burden is put on warfighters and ops centers. Often the process to gather all the information needed to do their job is time consuming, requires the users to have intimate knowledge of the systems they’re using, know precisely where to go to find the data, and often requires integration by the user. I see NCES delivering a set of capabilities to break this paradigm, by allowing producers of information to expose their data to the enterprise, and allowing warfighters or consumers of the information to have visibility, the ability to readily access the information, in a secure and protected manner. In addition, I see us working to continue to extend the NCES capabilities to the tactical edge and work the necessary federation with the services, capabilities and infrastructures that the components are building. That’s where we’re headed next.

Q: What is the current status of development of the NCES?

A: NCES achieved its Milestone C in June 2008, and we are currently in the production and deployment phase. The team is preparing for a Full Deployment Decision Review in May 2009 and Initial Operational Capability in June. Within the four product lines, there are essentially 11 capabilities we are delivering.

First, the portal provides a user-customizable way to access NCES user-facing capabilities. The collaboration capability provides the ability to do Web conferencing, audio, video, application sharing, whiteboarding and instant messaging. Our content discovery allows customers to find relevant information. The content delivery helps deliver information in a very timely and efficient way to the end user. We have a service security that ensures that these services are secure for users. A service discovery capability allows users to register and find Web services developed across the department for visibility and reuse. The enterprise service management capability allows us to monitor the availability of services to the end user.

The messaging service, also known as machine-to-machine messaging, provides notification, updates and alerts to users. Our metadata discovery facilitates the data interoperability between programs of record and communities of interest across the components. We have a capability for people discovery, which allows us to discover and locate people across the department. In the near future, we will have a mediation capability to provide the ability to translate between different data formats and protocols, and to do orchestration. While we have done some initial piloting in this area, we have not yet delivered a mediation capability for limited operational availability. All that I have mentioned, with the exception of mediation, are operating on NIPRNet and SIPRNet, and we have a number of users that are using these services in operational missions today across DoD.

Q: What are some of your operational successes?

A: It truly is all about getting the services and information in the hands of the users, and to provide value. I think we have done that, and I’d like to share some of the successes that our customers have had. First, I’ll talk about collaboration. The collaboration capability that we have in NCES has been with us the longest, so we have a lot of metrics we monitor for improving and delivering the capability. What’s exciting to me is that I see the groundswell from two dimensions—from the action officer level as well as the senior leadership in DoD, both of which are actively using the NCES collaboration tools.

For example, the Defense Travel System Program Management Office has incorporated their training materials within our collaboration service, so they are able to deliver their training materials by accessing our collaboration service, allowing users to come from geographically dispersed locations at no cost and just at the click of a button. In addition, the chief of staff of the Air Force has successfully incorporated the use of NCES collaboration capabilities for conducting meetings with his senior leadership located at geographically dispersed locations. We have over 160,000 users registered with our collaboration tools, and we are seeing, on average, 1,500 new account requests per week. This past February, we reached 8.6 million total meeting minutes across our collaboration capabilities, which is a 63 percent increase since November 2008. That was on the unclassified network, and on the classified we’ve had 8.7 million total meeting minutes, which is a 5.4 percent increase. We’ve also seen a 28.5 percent increase in peak concurrent usage. These metrics give us an indication that more people are becoming aware of these tools, and our capabilities are becoming more integrated into end-user operations and/or business practices.

The next service I’d like to talk about is our GIG Content Delivery Service [GCDS], which is really taking off for us and being aggressively adopted by our user community. What GCDS does is provide the capability to efficiently deliver information or content to end users. It’s becoming so effective that we are finding that demand for its use is quickly moving toward our full operational capability levels, which is good for the program. An example of a user and the benefit is the CENTCOM J-3, which has found that through the use of GCDS, their content caching is up to 80 percent faster, with up to 59 percent bandwidth off-loaded. Another customer actively using the delivery service is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is using GCDS to distribute their intelligence products to customers. They have realized not only efficiencies in delivery, but also bandwidth savings.

The last example I’d like to share—and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them—is the Maritime Domain Awareness [MDA] data-sharing community of interest. I think of them as the pioneer in the department for taking these net-centric enterprise services and turning them into value-added capabilities for the users. MDA uses the NCES machine-to-machine messaging capability to track shipping, and thus improve maritime safety and security. Organizations, including the Navy and the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation, leverage the NCES services to enable unanticipated users to discover and subscribe to Automatic Identification System information. More than 20,000 messages per day are delivered to 24 channels, with more than 130,000 messages per day going over the channels to subscribers. Also in their pioneering role, MDA has started to incorporate the content delivery, and making information visible through the NCES search capability.

Q: What are you doing to extend enterprise services to the tactical edge by providing the warfighter timely and accurate information anywhere and anytime?

A: We’re working hard on that. It’s clear to me that as you put these capabilities onto the network, users that you didn’t anticipate quickly find them and leverage them to accomplish missions in ways never planned. Our services today are currently being used by tactical customers located throughout Southwest Asia. While the current focus of our program has been on delivering these capabilities to well-connected users, many of our capabilities can be leveraged by those with limited bandwidth. The operational successes I just mentioned include the use of GCDS to reduce bandwidth requirements and stage data closer to disconnected users. Our chat capabilities are being used by tactical users to communicate.

We are harnessing a “coalition of the willing’’—a multiservice SOA consortium comprising programs of record that have an interest in SOA federation. These programs of record include the Army Future Combat System, the DISA Net-Enabled Command Capability, and the Navy Consolidated Afloat Network and Enterprise Services. As a coalition, we’re working on addressing the challenges, technical standards and governance that we’re going to have to implement to do the federation to support the tactical user. Our services are out there on the network, and can be accessed by tactical users who can reach them. We know we have a lot more to do in this space, and we’re working with the joint community to come up with the technical standards and specifications, and we will continue to include the tactical user requirements in our follow-on acquisitions.

Q: What developments do you expect to see in NCES over the rest of 2009?

A: As I mentioned, we’re working toward our upcoming Full Deployment Decision Review in May. We are currently conducting a follow-on test and evaluation [FOT&E] for our service discovery and some of our service security capabilities. We will have a fielding decision for these capabilities in the summer— in the August time frame. We are planning for a second FOT&E event in the late summer/early fall time frame for the enterprise service management, machine-to-machine messaging and mediation capabilities, with a subsequent fielding decision in March 2010.

Q: What are some of your evolving enterprise services outside of NCES?

A: What’s rewarding to me is starting to see the transition from two aspects. One is that as we get the initial set of core enterprise services fielded, we are starting to see the identification of candidates for new enterprise services. In addition, we’re starting to see initiatives and efforts come into being that are leveraging our services to deliver capabilities. It’s goodness at both ends. A service that has been recently identified as a new enterprise capability is one that we call enterprise e-mail. This past September, DISA was tasked by the DoD Enterprise Guidance Board to be the service provider for enterprise e-mail. We’re working that very closely with the components. What we’re doing is taking an initial approach where we consolidate the current Microsoft Exchange investments on NIPRNet and SIPRNet into the DISA defense enterprise computing centers. We want to improve the performance, functionality and information sharing, and gain some resource efficiencies.

DISA will be the first organization to come on to the enterprise e-mail service. We want to make sure that in addition to validating the technical approach, we validate that we have all of the supporting processes, procedures and customer support activities nailed down. Then we’ll work with early adopters across the department. To support the enterprise e-mail, we are going to be implementing an enterprise Microsoft Active Directory resource on NIPRNet and SIPRNet.

We have been asked to partner with NGA on working a geovisualization enterprise capability for the department. NGA has a geo-visualization capability today; we are using that as our baseline and in a joint forum developing a business case and other supporting requirements in accordance with the Enterprise Governance Board procedures.

We are also supporting DISA Chief Technology Officer Dave Mihelcic in the work that his team is doing in support of the net-centric initiatives of the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The set of capabilities that Dave and his team are delivering will provide improved access to global data assets and improved global situational awareness by in part leveraging the NCES service discovery, search, messaging and security capabilities. We are excited to be a part of this effort.

Q: How is the governance structure evolving, and what is the role of the PEO GES?

A: It’s no surprise that for something as important as enterprise services, governance is a critical aspect of being able to deliver, manage and evolve the capabilities. For NCES, what we did to get off the ground and support the development and delivery of our capabilities was to establish two forums where we could work with our stakeholders and customers. The first forum established was the Enterprise Services Engineering Review Board [ES-ERB]. The ES-ERB focuses on the technical aspects associated with delivering and evolving enterprise capabilities, and membership consists of chief engineers and technical experts from all the major programs and PEOs across the DoD and intelligence community.

The second forum established was the Enterprise Services Acquisition Management Group [ES-AMG]. The ES-AMG focuses on the programmatic/synchronization issues related to implementing and leveraging enterprise capabilities. ES-AMG membership consists of DoD and IC PEOs and program managers. As we established these two forums we wanted to have DoD/IC co-chairs to ensure that the standards, specifications and agreed-upon courses of action weren’t just DoD-centric, but also would meet the IC requirements. That gives us great synergy, because our users go across different networks, and we all know and appreciate the need to deliver a common experience for our users no matter which network is being used to support their mission.

From a DoD perspective, DoD Deputy Chief Information Officer Dave Wennergren chairs the DoD Enterprise Guidance Board [EGB], which is chartered to develop and approve DoD CIO enterprise guidance. The EGB is leading the establishment of a DoD governance structure to support the development, implementation, operation and sustainment of enterprise services. The EGB, as I mentioned with enterprise e-mail, is taking the lead for the department in identifying prospective enterprise services. DISA is represented on the board, and we participate on the tiger teams and working groups that are used to support EGB activities. Mr. Wennergren and his staff are in the process of drafting a supporting structure to consolidate and leverage DoD governance forums. Over time, I see the ES-ERB and ESAMG being rolled up and leveraged to support EGB activities. So there are a lot of exciting activities under way in this space; effective governance is crucial for promoting common services and schemas across the enterprise.

Q: What do you see as the chief challenges you face in providing executive life cycle management of enterprise capabilities to support the DoD transformation to net-centricity?

A: Some of the aspects that make NCES and enterprise services an exciting program to work are also the same aspects that introduce challenges. One is as these capabilities are placed onto the network, you run into obvious challenges. The GIG is heterogeneous. Many players are involved in its management, operations and delivery of capability. So as you put a service onto the network, you run into the challenge of having firewalls not open, which will impact the end-user experience. There are a lot of external dependencies NCES has to work through with the community to resolve in order to improve the end-user experience.

Another challenge has been that we are essentially moving the department from a need-to-know to a need-to-share culture. It’s a whole different mindset. We still need to make sure the data and information is protected, and the people who are accessing it have the right privileges. But what we want to do is to create an environment where we can expose or have visibility of the information, so it can be accessed by the right individuals. Another challenge we have is one we talked about earlier— when we put the services on the network, how do we quickly enhance services to make them productive or value-added for the tactical end users? There are a lot of different competing, important priorities that the program needs to work through.

Finally, I’d like to mention that as we start to tag our data and make it visible, we also get insight into the quality of the data. You need to have this insight in order to be able to improve the quality and determine the authoritative sources operators or warfighters want to go to depending on the type of decisions they want to make. This is part of the expected evolution of continuing to deploy the capabilities, but when you put a service out there, the department is large and diverse, and it has to operate efficiently and provide value to all users at the same time, and that’s a hard job.

Q: What is the role of your organization in providing the infrastructure to publish data/metadata artifacts and enable the DoD Data Strategy?

A: What we’re doing to support the DoD Data Strategy is important. The DoD CIO established the DoD Metadata Registry, and the supporting registration process, to facilitate the collection, storage and dissemination of our metadata information and resources. This registry is a clearinghouse that both industry and government can use to collaborate on metadata issues and technologies. As the executive agent, DISA maintains and operates the Metadata Registry, under the direction and oversight of ASD NII. Today, we have more than 10,000 users registered on the Metadata Registry, and 180,000 assets out there for people to leverage and reuse, and we’re supporting more than 900 programs of record. We have users not only in DoD, but also the IC, NASA and NATO, which have name spaces in the Metadata Registry. The registry is on the NIPRNet and SIPRNet, and we’ve implemented a number of enhancements of the registry recently. We have developed what we call a net-centric publisher, which streamlines the end-user experience, providing information to the Metadata Registry, service registry and enterprise catalog. So instead of a user going to three places to register data, they can go just one place and the information is propagated across all three. This will help people get their information into the registry and meet policy requirements.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A: First, I’d like to thank MIT for the opportunity to share what we’ve done on enterprise services and communicate where we are and what we have to offer. As you can imagine as we deliver these services, one of the challenges we work every day is how to continue to get the word out. So having this opportunity is appreciated.

I really believe NCES is forging the path on delivering mission capabilities to the warfighter in a new and different way that matches the way the fight is happening now. The capabilities being delivered by NCES support the changing nature of the fight, and for today’s and tomorrow’s warfighter, the speed of decision is absolutely critical, and these capabilities help do that. The work we’re doing is complex, complicated and multifaceted, and by that I mean there’s a technical aspect, a cultural aspect and an aspect where we need to develop new policies or transform policies. So there are many different dimensions the team is working through, and I am truly proud of my team. What they have been able to accomplish and the passion they have are unsurpassed by any team I’ve ever had the opportunity to lead. They do it because they want to provide the best capabilities they can for the warfighter.

The other thing that is important to recognize is that NCES is an opportunity for team DISA to shine. My team is working hard, but we would not be where we are without the entire DISA organization, whether our computing, engineering or IA arm or our CIO, all of which supported us and helped keep us on schedule and on track. Joint programs are hard, but they are also one of the most rewarding efforts one can be involved in, because you get an opportunity to work with representatives from the components and our stakeholders, and you understand their priorities and challenges. What NCES has been able to do is partner with our stakeholders and leverage what they’re doing to make them part of the team, which has helped us accelerate the delivery of our capabilities. ♦

Back to Top