The Pentagon’s top official for information technology said Wednesday that contractors will have to be pressured to meet the lowest required bandwidth requirements as the building transitions to a unified and interoperable IT framework.

“If you are going to develop software for us, you must develop it to require the minimum bandwidth possible,” Terry Halvorsen, the acting Pentagon CIO, said at a conference in Washington. “Harsher” rules are needed to ensure bandwidth and money are used more effectively, he said.

Pentagon_anddowntown_Software developers should focus on being more efficient in writing coding to to use less space, he said.

Halvorsen is overseeing the Pentagon’s effort to transition to the Joint Information Environment, a government wide initiative meant to scale down and integrate the various IT networks that are currently in operation to create more commonality, reduce cost and increase data sharing.

Halvorsen said a big part of that effort involves greater use of commercial technology and open architecture systems to save money but also because “what you gain is some efficiency and some agility by moving to an open environment.”

Open architecture systems are seen as solutions to reduce lifecycle costs while enabling more rapid technology upgrades.

In moving forward, Halvorsen said he is continuously pushing to lower cost.

There are some areas where there will be some risk, with a higher priority of protection being given to combat system networks and classified systems, while greater risk will likely be assumed by business and unclassified systems, he said.