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The army has been talking about the need to modernize its corporate IT networks for years, but officials think bigger when it comes to an upcoming digital transformation strategy. In addition to technical upgrades, the multi-year strategy will seek to reform the army’s IT policy, realign its workforce and establish new partnerships with industry and science.
In their comprehensive modernization strategy for the army in 2019, army leaders called for the need for a “digital transformation” for the first time. However, the Army’s Digital Transformation Strategy (ADTS), due to be officially released this week, aims to explain exactly what the service aims to achieve between now and 2028.
It is organized around three pillars: modernization and readiness; Reform; and people and partnerships, according to Raj Iyer, the Army’s chief information officer.
At the US Army’s annual conference in Washington on Wednesday, he said the Army’s IT struggles are not fundamentally a money problem.
Although the “transformation” will come with some tradeoffs, with $ 15 billion a year in IT spending, the Army has the resources it needs, he said. But without a coherent strategy that focuses on modern digital approaches, much of that money is spent on projects that are not helpful to the cause.
“With ADTS we achieve a unity of efforts. If you don’t have this, commanders will do what they’re good at, which is conducting and operating the mission. Program managers will do what they do best, which is cost, performance, schedule and the requirements of their individual program, ”he said. “ADTS strategically involves the CIO and senior executives. When we say we’re going to be cloud native in everything we do, we need to make sure we have the right oversight and support. We also need to work with industry to make sure you all understand the strategic intent and direction we are going. The ADTS helps us with this. “
In addition to the great emphasis on the cloud, the enterprise approach to cybersecurity will be a major focus within the modernization pillar.
Maj. Gen. Matt Easley, the Army’s chief information security officer, said this is in part because the nature of the threats the Army faces has changed rather dramatically since the development of their networks and cyber defenses.
“Many of these attacks have moved to the application or person level, and that is forcing us to change our attitude towards cybersecurity. The way we think of a network, the way we think of our systems needs to be brought together, ”Easley told reporters. “The army is a very large and complex organization: we have 128 posts, camps and stations, but when you include the National Guard, Army Reserve and other institutions, we have more than 3,000 institutions. How we integrate all of these technologies into our enterprise architecture is a big change. Our authorizing officers have authorized more than 3,000 systems. Normalizing these systems so that they use a similar cybersecurity solution, data standards, and cloud infrastructure is the way to scale this. “
And Iyer said the Army couldn’t change its approach to things like network infrastructure and cybersecurity without also making a concerted effort to update its IT policies.
Most of these government documents were written in an earlier era – some are 30 to 40 years old – and in many cases they stand in the way of soldiers and civilians already trying to innovate using modern digital tools, Iyer said. They also make it more difficult for the army to implement modern cybersecurity principles such as zero trust.
“Zero trust is the opposite of [perimeter defense approach] we’ve done in the past. The guidelines we need for zero trust are just saying that we won’t let anyone in, and that’s our guideline – we’ll use analysis to determine if you’re a good actor or a bad actor, ”he says . “And when it comes to things like robotic process automation, we don’t have company policies yet. What do we do with these non-personal entities on the network? Right now we’re giving people Common Access Cards and that’s how we know they have access to the network. We need the right guidelines to make sure these bots are treated like humans, with the right access rights and so on. “
In the meantime, the people-oriented pillar of the strategy aims to build the army’s digital talent factory.
The service has already made efforts to train and retrain the 72,000 military and civilian IT staff. Iyer said one of the goals of the strategy is to create a centralized “simple button” managed by the CIO’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency to put in place a cloud-based IT infrastructure to enable employees to focus on higher-value tasks can concentrate and not on the administration of servers and data transport.
“If we don’t make headway in the race for talent, we run the risk of losing it right from the start. So we’re building capacities, but we’re building them up small [increments], with reasonable expectations. I don’t want to create a dozen software factories like some of the other services. We need to learn from what we’re doing at the Austin software factory, get the experience, and then talk about how we’re going to scale it, ”he said. “We don’t want to rely on them either [active duty] Army. How do we use the expertise that we have in [the National Guard and Army Reserve] – people who actually do this in their daily work? We want to build a marketplace for talent across the Army, regardless of what your specialty, what component you work for, and whether you are a civilian or a contractor. “
David Markowitz, Chief Data Officer for the Army, said much of the workforce planning is done through a separate but related digital human capital strategy.
So far, the issues raised by the armed forces digital workforce have focused heavily on data specialties, but the analysis also encompasses the skills and numbers of staff required for functions such as cloud architecture and cyber defense.
“One of the areas we’ve tried to identify is general skills, the [required by] like 90% of the workforce – things like basic data manipulation, data analysis to find out which are the higher skills, ”he said. “We want to make sure we have a common skill metric across our training and Doctrine Command schools. At baselines, we also want to make sure our cyber workers are trained for the work they do and make sure they are the right fit. What can we automate so that we can free people from very labor-intensive tasks? It will be a continuous type of review that asks, ‘Are we about right?’ This zero baselining and restructuring will be with us for at least five years, if not a decade. “
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