By Geoff Fein
The Department of Defense (DoD) is looking at novel acquisition approaches to enable information systems to keep up with the rapid speed of technology changes, according to a DoD official.
DoD not only faces the challenges that the commercial world has in trying to keep pace with technology change, but the military also has some additional constraints, in particular making sure systems are secure to a degree that most commercial entities don’t have to worry about, David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) told Defense Daily in an interview earlier this week.
Ensuring the security of the systems not only adds an additional technical development set of complexities but also a governance set of complexities, he said.
“At DoD we have a notion of certifying systems for operations.certifying they are secure and network ready…[that they] do what they are supposed to do and do no harm,” Mihelcic said.
That adds to this burden of friction in the system, he added. “Basically friction that slows down technologies from moving forward quickly.”
Some of the ways DISA is dealing with this is looking at novel acquisition approaches, Mihelcic said.
“Normally in DoD a large program has to go through a well-defined process of governance where documents are written and evaluated and then the program is only allowed to progress so far in its lifecycle based on the governance, based on the evaluation of those documents…those test artifacts,” he said. “So when I say a novel acquisition approach, we do something called the Joint Concept Technology Demonstration (JCTD).”
JCTDs are similar to the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD), Mihelcic noted.
“What we are trying to do is shorten the time cycle of these developments. Where ACTDs would typically be about five years, JCTDs are much shorter in span,” he said. “Basically two years in development evaluation and test, and one year to transition to operation. We are trying to better leverage JCTDs to deliver technology more rapidly to the warfighter.”
DISA is also trying to put in place some fundamental changes in the way DoD develops technology, in particular software, Mihelcic said.
“Moving toward open architectures (OA) are basically what we are doing across the board, in terms of software in the DoD. And not only OA but adopting techniques such as commercial open source development techniques to be able to speed that pace of change,” he said. “So, in the Navy OA movement, there probably are some elements of open source in there.”
Part of the challenge, Mihelcic said, is to take the software that typically the DoD maintained rights over, but another contractor maintained commercial rights over, and ensure that, that has a license so that it is appropriate to hand that out to competitors.
“One of the things we are doing in the DoD is using open source development techniques and methodologies so that we can share software developed anywhere in the DoD, not only with different programs in the DoD, but potentially with different vendors,” he said.
That will lower the barrier of entry for smaller companies so that it isn’t just the big incumbent who has maintained full commercial rights to the software, Mihelcic added. “Basically anybody who wants to bid on the work can go to a repository and with the appropriate security credential access this repository of software.”
“We actually have a program here in DISA, not a formal DoD acquisition program really, more of small project to build something called Forge.mil, which is more or less a DoD substantiation of something called SourceForge,” he said.
SourceForge is a website that open source developers use to put projects in place to build software, to do configuration management of the build, to hand out assignments to a network of developers that are decentralized world wide and manage the pieces of the build as they come back, track artifacts like test results, bug tracking, request for changes, documentation, etc.
“If you go to SourceForge you can access this open source repository. We are implementing a DoD version of that called Forge.mil, which will enable us to use that same technique, that same technology, to do software development inside the DoD on our secure networks,” Mihelcic said. “In fact we are leveraging the same software that Forge.mil runs on…we are not reinventing the wheel. We’ve contracted with the developer of that open source development software, CollabNet. We are working with SPAWAR Charleston and they are doing the implementation of that using CollabNet. We expect that to be available for early user evaluation on or about the first of the year.”