Q&A: Lieutenant General Charles E. Croom Jr.
IT Adopter
Achieving Speed and Agility Through Technology Change
Lieutenant General Charles E. Croom Jr.
Director, Defense Information
Systems Agency
Commander, Joint Task
Force-Global Network Operations
As DISA director, Lieutenant General Charles E. Croom Jr. leads a worldwide organization of more than 6,600 military and civilian personnel. This organization plans, develops and provides interoperable command, control, communications, computers and information systems to serve the needs of the President, Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, combatant commanders, and other Department of Defense components under all conditions during peace and war. As the JTF-GNO commander, he is responsible for directing the operation and defense of the Global Information Grid to assure timely and secure net-centric capabilities across strategic, operational and tactical boundaries in support of DoD’s full spectrum of warfighting, intelligence and business missions. Croom entered the Air Force in 1973 as a distinguished graduate of the Rutgers University ROTC program, where he was commandant of cadets. The general has had four commands and has served at the major command, numbered air force, Air Staff, defense agency, Joint Staff, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and unified command levels. Prior to his current assignment, Croom was director, information, services and integration, Secretary of the Air Force Office of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer.
Q: As director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, what are some of the key challenges you’re facing?
A: What first comes to mind is how we can achieve speed and agility and make consistent, value-added decisions in the midst of—and by actually leveraging—the dramatic changes we see on several fronts. We see rapid technology changes in our day-to-day lives. Consumers are now driving innovation and technology to the point that it seems today’s teenagers often have more IT capability in their hands than do our warfighters. To capture today’s technology for DoD, we’ve recognized that we need to change the way we do things within the rulebook to significantly improve our timelines for providing needed capabilities.
Q: You began your remarks at DISA’s 2007 Customer Partnership Conference with the statement, “providing IT is a team sport.” How do the individual entities of the “team” contribute to the overall effort?
A: The team consists, in part, of OSD/NII, which sets the overarching vision, strategy and policy in partnership with the Joint Staff. The Joint Staff ensures warfighter requirements are addressed, and both OSD/NII and the Joint Staff advocate for future capabilities. DISA provides the enterprisewide systems engineering and joint materiel solutions.
Our “Adopt, Buy, Create” approach reflects our desire to create partnerships and welcome the contributions of our government and industry partners. It means that to satisfy an enterprise requirement, we will adopt a capability already developed by one of our military services or defense agencies. We’re also looking to the private sector to capture some of the forward-leaning work they’ve done. When we find a required, commercially available capability or service, we’ll buy it and make it available across the department. Only if neither of these first two courses of action is available will we create or develop the capability or service.
The response from both government and industry has been encouraging. The bottom line is that we must continue to work together. We’ll continue to partner to meet the department’s requirements. We have processes to identify and acquire needed services within DoD and from traditional DoD partners. We’re also looking to non-traditional sources, like academia, to assist in spotting innovative IT capabilities that accommodate command and control functions and operate in a service-oriented architecture environment.
Q: Where have you seen benefits using the Adopt, Buy, Create approach?
A: We are seeing many benefits across the enterprise. One example is the adoption of the Army Knowledge Online [AKO] portal solution. AKO has been a leader in proven portal capabilities and now supports 1.9 million users located around the globe. Based on AKO, the Defense Knowledge Online [DKO] portal offers an enterprise platform as a point of convergence for DoD users giving them secure access to proven capabilities within the portal and existing services across the enterprise.
From within the DKO portal, users have access to Web mail, e-mail for life, single sign-on, instant messaging/chat and whiteboarding. A number of self-service sites and tools are also available through DKO, such as personnel, finance, legal, readiness and education. Because DKO is public key encryption enabled, content owners with a DoD Common Access Card are able to reserve access to their sites on DKO. DKO even offers a video messaging service that allows users to send short videos recorded on a PC thru DKO mail, a service deployed military members find helpful to communicate with their families back home.
In addition to the entire Army, more than 80,000 joint, non-Army users are now registered and taking advantage of the DKO enterprise portal. Joint Forces Command established Joint Knowledge Online as its portal to joint training on DKO, and DISA has moved the DoD-wide Information Assurance Portal to DKO, avoiding the time and cost of establishing new portals.
Q: What else should we expect to see in the near future?
A: More “adopted” solutions will be coming online. After receiving the program’s full Milestone B decision back in February 2007, the Net-centric Enterprise Services [NCES] program office has been busy building partnerships for network content discovery and delivery services and for core service-oriented architecture foundation [SOAF] services. We turned to the intelligence community to leverage their content discovery service and to the Air Force for Akamai-based content delivery. Using the Army’s ITES-2 contract, activities are also underway for new partners that will provide SOAF services.
Also, in SOAF pilot efforts, communities like Maritime Domain Awareness have achieved some great results. Members of that community believed 70 percent of the information needed for their mission already existed in various locations. Using SOAF technologies, DoD and the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation were able to create common pictures of maritime vessel tracking data enabling all three departments the ability to exploit the data with common services.
Additionally, we just awarded a contract for an Adobe-based enterprise collaboration solution from Carahsoft, which should be available this fall. Capabilities in this service will include XMPP-based instant messaging and low-bandwidth text chat, Web conferencing and whiteboards.
Q: How did DISA decide to “buy” DoD’s collaboration tools?
A: DISA bought commercial, Web-based collaboration services to improve speed of availability, cost and interoperability. What makes these enterprise collaboration services unique is that we acquired them through what we call a two-button strategy. We partnered with IBM for the first button and now with Carahsoft, to provide two collaboration- managed services. So, we’ve given our customers the opportunity to choose the collaboration service that best supports their need. And because the collaboration services providers are only compensated for the services actually used by DoD customers, it creates competition to be the provider of choice.
Our collaboration services vendors of this partnership are working closely with us to identify the needs of the department, and they in turn, will incorporate those needs while developing future versions of their products. Available across the department, these managed services also allow us to collaborate with our mission partners outside of DoD. This enterprise capability has already been leveraged by the Army in October 2006, when they connected all Stryker Brigades worldwide simultaneously during their first virtual Stryker symposium.
Q: What are other notable examples of DISA’s “buying” enterprise services?
A: One of DISA’s missions is to provide DoD’s centralized computing. Previously, DISA procured hardware specific to the needs of individual programs or applications. This model required purchasing sufficient capacity for spikes in demand. This often left unused extra capacity and required ongoing purchases to refresh technology. In fall 2006, DISA changed this model and awarded several contracts on a utility business model. Leveraging virtualization technology, processing capacity can be added or removed as necessary.
The single biggest difference in acquiring computing services is that it moves the cost of computing from a capital expenditure to an operating cost. Having capacity available only when needed, and paying for only the processing used, will save DISA’s customers money. Time to service is also greatly reduced as customers use the contracts when they need capability. With this “capacity on demand” offering, there seems little reason for anyone to own their black boxes.
Q: Are services also being utilized in the ongoing defense of the network?
A: Yes, we are using the Host Based Security Service [HBSS], which is currently deployed at 22 locations worldwide. DISA again looked to a commercial provider, McAfee and its ePolicy Orchestrator framework, to provide a service that both locks down and monitors each desktop and Microsoft server across the network. HBSS is an automated means for managing the historically disparate configurations across the DoD enterprise. Scaling this capability across the DoD enterprise allows DoD configuration and security policies to be consistently applied. HBSS is a “win-win” solution, providing more power at the local level but also creating more awareness of any weaknesses across the network.
Q: From a win-win perspective, what other steps is DISA taking with respect to the user experience?
A: User experiences are important to both DISA’s success and to the acceptance of net-centric capabilities. We have learned these lessons the hard way, and believe we’ve made good progress with performance measures that really reflect success such as those developed for the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application [AHLTA], the system used in all military treatment facilities. In this case we found the significant measure to be the number of patient encounters each day per doctor.
We’re learning now what measures best reflect successful user experiences for our enterprise, managed services. This is another area where I believe industry can help us.
Q: How has this shift of focus from systems to services influenced the ability to make capabilities available to the warfighter faster?
A: Previously, the government acquired monolithic systems using proprietary technologies. This approach required years of development and capability upgrades also came slowly. The pace of technological change and the evolving nature of military joint operations, combined with tightened budgets and the urgency of the war effort, pointed us to a new approach. Now, we understand that our applications and data need to be understandable, visible and readily accessible to those who need it, when they need it. The NCES solutions recognize this, as does the Net-Enabled Command Capability [NECC] program.
NECC will replace the family of existing joint command and control systems and take us the next step toward achieving modern command and control. We are expecting to earn a Milestone B decision this fall, and Milestone C in March 2008. The program has already adopted about 19 capabilities in their Federated Development and Certification Environment [FDCE], “the sandbox,” that will be ready for rollout at Milestone C.
There are some significant things about how NECC is moving joint command and control forward. First, the program is focusing on smaller capability modules, leveraging the good work that others in the department have already done. These capability modules are entered into the FDCE at a level consistent with their level of maturity. For example, we can forego developmental testing for a capability that’s already undergone some operational testing. In the virtual FDCE, warfighters, developers, testers and certifiers can rapidly work together to judge the suitability and effectiveness of these capabilities before they are made available to the warfighter.
Q: What additional roles can industry play?
A: DISA is attempting to dramatically increase the speed with which we deliver capabilities and services to the warfighter. Industry can help us by understanding the speed imperative and the “adopt before buy before create” strategy. They need to help us identify solutions already in place, compliant with architecture and standards that we can adopt. This means that both DISA and our industry partners will have to change our business thinking and models. This includes looking for capabilities and services in non-traditional ways and perhaps from non-traditional sources. Our strategy includes thinking big, building small modules of capability or service, and being able to scale them appropriately. I am confident that our message is getting out and that our industry partners are eager to help us.
More specifically, in addition to the RFIs, RFPs and RFQs DISA puts out, industry can also have a significant and positive impact by sharing its expertise with other DoD organizations. By helping organizations across the department tag their data and register their services, industry can be a catalyst in improving DoD information sharing.
Q: What challenges and benefits do you see related to DISA’s move to Fort Meade, Md., by 2011?
A: DISA will reap several benefits due to the Base Realignment and Closure. The move to Fort Meade will improve anti-terrorism and force protection by moving DISA headquarters to a military facility, eliminate the high cost of leased space, consolidate common support functions, and consolidate headquarters operations into a single location. The consolidation of DISA headquarters components will enhance communications within DISA and reduce the time lost traveling between multiple sites. It will also facilitate greater synergy between DISA and NSA by the two agencies being collocated at Fort Meade.
DISA recently held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the establishment of a Liaison Facility and Telework Center at Fort Meade. The ceremony was the first of many steps that will be required to relocate DISA headquarters and the Joint Task Force- Global Network Operations [JTF-GNO] from the National Capital Region to Fort Meade by 2011.
I think our greatest challenge in executing this BRAC action is preserving the critical technical skills and experience of our people. When the BRAC recommendations were announced, more than 75 percent of DISA’s workforce lived in Northern Virginia. To encourage folks to stay with DISA when we move, we’re offering numerous employee incentives, including relocation incentives, retention incentives, student loan repayment program incentives, permanent change of station relocation costs, and spousal placement. Our top priority is to have the maximum number of employees transfer with headquarters to Fort Meade.
Q: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?
A: We’ve got some big challenges facing us now, and how we handle them will have a significant impact on our nation’s continued superiority in the warfight. Our world faces the global war on terror, which is challenging us in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We must be more agile and successful than our enemies in sharing and protecting information and in taking advantage of the tremendously fast-paced changes in information technology. To do this, we’ll need to continue to work together—government, industry and our non-government and coalition partners. We collectively must maintain our sense of urgency as soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines rely on what we do to survive and win our nation’s wars. They are depending on us to deliver capability today. ♦
