A pilot program to improve the way companies take advantage of the Navy’s Software, Hardware Asset Reuse Enterprise (SHARE) repository is set to go live in March.
“We stood up a pilot to try better understand how to frame an environment for using software and have a better appreciation for what the government’s data rights were and how to leverage them, and to take advantage of those rights to improve our cost…in future acquisitions,” Nickolas Guertin, deputy director for open architecture, told sister publication Defense Daily recently.
The Navy is in the third year of operating the SHARE repository. The repository holds software and hardware that the government owns on its own, either through government purpose rights or unlimited rights (Defense Daily, Feb. 2, 2007).
One way the Navy is looking to improve SHARE’s performance is by bringing innovative ideas and capabilities into the repository environment, Guertin added.
“The way we are choosing to do that is by leveraging the work with a small business through a SBIR,” he said.
Fairfax, Va.-based Trident Systems was awarded the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract for improving SHARE.
“I was intrigued by their initial discussion–how we might improve SHARE,” Guertin said. “We already have a SBIR contract that has the right kind of statement-of-work…for a new operator environment.”
Trident Systems is creating a new database construct that will allow for greater flexibility than what the Navy has now and also provides a much more intuitive graphic user interface, Guertin explained.
The new effort is dubbed SHARE II, and is currently in Phase II of the SBIR program, he added.
“We are going to be putting out a Phase III contract this year for the operations and maintenance piece,” Guertin said.
He noted the government is trying to improve the performance of SHARE from two perspectives.
The first effort is to make the process of looking for and checking out material much easier. And there will be a requirement for companies to provide a level of diligence that the Navy has been performing for them.
There are two types of customers who use SHARE, depositors and requestors. In the past when a company deposited a product into SHARE, it was up to the Navy to take the item apart and sort out proprietary data from everything else, Guertin said.
Guertin had a team at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren that would look at the material deposited and would discover software or hardware that has a copyright, or a SBIR data rights claim or something that is a proprietary licensed product.
“We wouldn’t be able to put those things in SHARE,” he said.
Additionally, requestors of information held in SHARE wouldn’t have a good understanding of what was missing, Guertin said.
“Now when someone goes in and deposits something they are required to do all that diligence to understand what the government does have rights to, and only deposit those things and to tell us what’s missing,” he added.
For example, if an operating system is a distribution of Red Hat Linux, while Linux is an open source product, Red Hat distribution is licensed and can’t be shared, Guertin explained.
“If the depositor will tell us what make, model, and release date of that particular product is, when a requestor goes to [check] it out they know what they are getting and what they are not getting, which is something we don’t do very well in the current version of SHARE,” he said. “So the requestor will more likely have the ability to turn that thing that has been deposited into something we can use.”
The release of SHARE II goes hand in glove with this, Guertin said. And there will also be an upgrade to the Open Architecture Contract Guidebook, which will be coming out in a couple of months.
The Navy added language to the guidebook about how programs should ask for things to be delivered to the government to enable the SHARE repository to disclose that information and provide that software or hardware to a third party.
“That’s what the real value of SHARE has been all about–understanding the government’s rights,” Guertin added. “And being able to figure out how to use those rights to improve our effectiveness and performance.”
So we are improving SHARE to get a much better user experience but also a more effective experience.
“Trident has the technical expertise to create that new graphical user interface (GUI) and they have some creative unique ideas on how to improve SHARE’s performance,” Guertin said. “We took a home grown government-created environment and are using a small business to improve its performance.”
Currently, SHARE II is in its Beta test phase. Trident will go live with SHARE II in March, he added.
“One of the things we were having a challenge with was that the database that the current SHARE environment is built on wasn’t going to scale to the performance we needed for the long-term,” Guertin explained. “[Trident] went to using a database that is going to be much more flexible and cost effective.”
Additionally, Trident is taking advantage of research the Navy paid to help the service figure out how to find things better in SHARE.
“They are going to more cost effectively use the output of that research and transition it into the SHARE environment much sooner than we projected,” Guertin added. “We are going out with a Broad Area Announcement in the not too distant future that we are standing up the SHARE 2 environment.”