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Possibilities Panel Discussion: "What's Next?"
By Jerome W. Mapp, DISA Corporate Communications

John Garing, DISA chief information officer and director of Strategic Planning, moderated a panel discussion themed "Possibilities," that featured experts from the federal government and the private sector discussing innovations in information technology and what the future holds.

The distinguished panelists included Dr. Werner Vogels, vice president and chief security officer, Amazon.com; David Mihelcic, DISA chief technology officer and principal director, Global Information Grid Enterprise Services-Engineering; Evan G. Burfield, chairman and chief executive officer, Synteractive; and Alfred Rivera, director, DISA computing services.

Garing framed his first question from an article published earlier this year in The Washington Post. He read, "Yet, as powerful as information technology is today, we will make another billion-fold increase in capability at the same cost over the next 25 years. That's because information technology builds on itself. We are continually using the latest tools." Garing turned to Vogels and asked, "So the question is, what's next?"

"I think that it's very hard to look ahead 25 years, first of all," Vogels said, although he offered that with the current speed of technology, he would not be surprised to see major advances in information technology in the next five to 10 years. "Most of these changes are already in progress," Vogels added.

"Rather than tell you about what's coming, let's talk about what is here today if we have the courage to reach out and bring it into our infrastructure," said Mihelcic. He praised Amazon's innovations as being the model for programs currently underway at DISA.

"Our NCES program, Net-Centric Enterprise Services, with a service-oriented architecture foundation, is predicated on the same notion that Amazon is built on," Mihelcic said. "We can [now] build services that are reusable to integrate and build capability much more rapidly than we could otherwise."

Mihelcic said that DISA is meeting the challenges of getting capabilities quickly into the hands of its customers, citing, for instance, the mobile command-and-control capabilities that allow commanders on the battlefield to communicate with speed and efficiency. Citing the available hardware, software, and collaboration tools, he added, "All of this is available today if only we choose to make use of it."

Burfield said that the capabilities are there today, they are powerful, and they are growing.

"When you look at what is interesting in business today, fundamentally, different modes of organized businesses that are starting to emerge," he said. And insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan as using innovation to wage war against coalition forces.

"They are highly distributed, highly agile insurgent organizations that are able to use the power of social networking, connectivity, agility, and pulling botnet networks together to coordinate and consolidate their assets. That's what we're dealing with," Burfield said.

Rivera said on the federal government level, innovation is often slowed by yards of red tape that hinder DISA from reaching out all the way to the technology.

"The technology is here and the technology is available. But governance is driving our innovation," Rivera said. He said that while the agency has the tools and capabilities at its disposal to embrace technology, policies and regulations often hinder the development of innovation.

Citing the unrestrictive innovations at companies such as Amazon.com, Rivera said the question becomes how [government] loosen the restrictions in implementing those innovations with the technology that is available. "How do we break the mold?" he asked.

In response to Garing's question about the future of company enterprise data centers, Vogels said that as a CIO, you stop thinking about physical infrastructure and data centers as a unit.

"You stop thinking about computing, you stop thinking about computer cycles, you stop thinking about storage units as virtual units," Vogel said. "You have to take the [next] step of virtualizing your infrastructure so you are no longer constrained by these boxes. To build an agile enterprise, you need to be able to get all those resources at your fingertips that you need and seamlessly move through those."

"I need an identity service," said Burfield. "I don't care where that identity service comes from. I need to know who this person is [operating the service] and what they are trusted with. I don't care if it's running on Google's cloud or [Amazon's] cloud, I just need the service to solve my problem."

Vogels said that the old cycle was build, deploy, observe, and think of the next generation. Now it is that you find the services you need, you connect the services, innovate on part of that with business logic and reflect on that.

"You focus on what your functional expertise is," said Rivera. "Now, with that said, I really believe that your customer has an expectation that you have to reach the functionality of your business. What is the impact to your business, why is it [the system] down, and what does it take to get it back up."

Mihelcic said that DISA needs a platform for innovation. "We don't need IT networks, we don't need computing centers, we don't need operating systems, we don't need command-and-control stats," he said. "We need a platform for innovation to allow the department to do what Amazon has been doing—move to bringing capabilities to the network in small packages that leverage everything that has been built before. We need to streamline testing and development and certification."

"We have to change our way of thinking," said Burfield. "We want to control everything, but it's like people trying to figure out things based on the assumption that the sun revolves around the earth. When it became known that the earth revolves around the sun, then other things made sense."

"We have to move faster," Mihelcic said.

"Stop thinking about this as a possibility. This is reality. This is what our enemies are doing," said Burfield.

"It's all about capabilities and applications, not the infrastructure," Vogels said.

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