Pentagon officials on Monday detailed the newly-released software modernization strategy that will look to create a department-wide “software factory” ecosystem and accelerate enterprise cloud migration.
The strategy was approved last week, with the Pentagon’s chief information officer (CIO), top acquisition official and chief technology officer now tasked with leading a new Software Modernization Senior Steering Group that will deliver an implementation plan in the next 180 days.
Danielle Metz, DoD’s deputy CIO for information enterprise, told reporters during a briefing the strategy is intended to solve the “significant problem” of software efforts being siloed between department entities and shifting to a more enterprise-level approach for software acquisition, testing, evaluations and delivery.
“Together, we are able to remove impediments and roadblocks within our current processes and figure out ways and partnerships with the military departments, the combatant commands, our defense agencies and field activities to be able to streamline, improve, update or sometimes revolutionize our policies and guidance standards in order for us to be able to democratize the exceptionalism that you’ve seen in pockets over the last few years,” Metz said. “We have to be able to deliver capabilities as minimum-viable products and then quickly build upon them, constantly testing, evaluating and taking user feedback.”
Metz added that the approach laid out in the strategy for agile software development is to ensure it’s based around “department endeavors and not just…pockets of excellence.”
“The question was how do we make it so that the entire department can benefit from this modernization, not just those that have the means or those that are trying to break glass within their sphere of influence,” Metz said. “We really wanted to be able to democratize exceptionalism. And that’s taking us to the next level in terms of how our department’s leaders think about and talk about IT. And it’s not just a back office function. It truly is something that allows us to be able to execute our mission.”
The new enterprise-level approach will include scaling up the department’s 29 software factories working on capability development and building out an ecosystem for the entities to receive additional support for collaboration.
Jason Weiss, DoD’s first chief software officer, also told reporters the CIO office is working with the Pentagon’s acquisition and research and engineering offices to identify more programs that could make best use of the recently-created software acquisition pathway.
“I believe that you’re going to see much more interest going forward and even further adoption. And by leveraging and reusing some of the capabilities in these existing software factories, there’s going to be a cost savings that could be potentially realized by these programs. So I think the best is yet to come for the Software Acquisition Pathway,” Weiss said.
Weiss noted 35 programs are actively using the software acquisition pathway after it was first established 18 months ago, calling it a “pretty strong adoption rate.”
Metz said the strategy’s emphasis on furthering enterprise cloud adoption will also help bolster software development initiatives across the department.
“That’s really where you’re harnessing the power of cloud and compute. [That’s] where you’re able to natively build and develop software applications in the cloud and continuously do it and have incremental capability out to your workforce and for the department and to our warfighters,” Metz said.
The Pentagon is currently pursuing the new multi-billion dollar, multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) enterprise cloud computing effort, issuing direct solicitation requests in November to Amazon Web Services [AMZN], Google [GOOG], Microsoft [MSFT] and Oracle [ORCL] to submit proposals for the program (Defense Daily, Nov. 19).