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GCN Home > 01/09/06 issue

Net-centricity plan puts data up front

By Dawn S. Onley, GCN Staff

Military strategists since Sun Tzu in the sixth century B.C. have been trying to predict the future of warfare.

Forecasts are generally heavy on weaponry, systems and tactics, with top military thinkers planning ways to outmaneuver enemy states with a cadre of promising and lethal capabilities.

The information that will be contained in tomorrow’s weapons and business systems, however, hasn’t always been a priority. And configuring the data in a way that will help the military services and agencies become interoperable hasn’t always figured high in the plans, either.

That is changing.

“If you look at all the trends in the IT arena over the past 30 to 40 years, we’ve moved into an environment where we’ve got faster networks, more powerful processors, but it really comes down to the data,” said Michael Todd, associate director for information management in DOD’s CIO office.

Need for speed

During war and postwar operations, everything needs to be done fast. Troops on the ground need up-to-date mission information. They need to know where the bad guys are. The right people have to get the right information at the right time.

“The one thing about the war is everything is moving at a very accelerated pace,” said Terry Edwards, director of Army enterprise architecture in the Army CIO’s office. “Our need to share data is now.”

“I think if you look at even the current operations of what’s happening in Iraq today and the interaction of the joint partners and the number of coalition partners, it becomes key on how we share data, how we make data accessible and how to make it visible to them. Those key characteristics have become essential in our ability to achieve interoperability,” Edwards added.

Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of Defense, issued a directive Dec. 2, 2004, establishing policies and responsibilities for DOD to implement data sharing “as early as possible” to enable network-centric warfare. The department is working on guidance—to be released in March—to help the services implement the directive. And DOD is preparing a series of interoperability programs to test the directive.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Defense IT, Management



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