We presently are experiencing intense pressure not to raise the debt ceiling, prophecies about the downfall of government IT, more legislators considering reducing the once-sacred defense budget, and prophecies of gloom and doom relating to government programs in general. Despite this, a number of leaders and real change agents both in government and outside government offer us some real hope and shining examples.

A number of senior government and former government leaders are helping lead the Citizen Enabling Open Government initiative intended to make government responsive to the citizens who know what they need from government. Among its advisors are Dennis Wisnosky, DoD Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, and Mark Forman, co-founder of Government Transaction Services and the first Federal Chief Information Officer. Mike Dunham, chair of the Enterprise Architecture Shared Interest Group of the American Council of Technology and Industry Advisory Council, has made the observation that these leaders “have really taken the bull by the horns.”

Some people’s eyes glaze over when you mention the term Enterprise Architecture (EA), may have misconceptions about what it truly means, and others think it is a colossal waste of money that produces negligible results. EA, regardless of whether it is the Federal Enterprise Architecture, the Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture Framework, or some other model, provides frameworks within which experts working with business and technology leaders and other specialists can categorize, inventory, and prioritize a current state of existing lines of business functions along with those technologies and programs that support them, then develop a future state.

Mark Forman was recently interviewed on EmeraldPlanet; the show ran on a Northern Virginia public access cable channel in June and is now available as a webcast. One of the foremost advocates of the Citizen Enabling Open Government initiative, Forman titled his segment “An Alternative Approach for Reorganizing the Federal Government.” He stated early on that “Government exists to service the people,” and over the longer term, “government must change structures and accelerate its responsiveness … over the last 30 years, this has gone the other direction.” He also added that it was important to engage the public because programs and the federal Government are so complex, and because citizens know what they need from government.

Forman advocated that the “real redundancy is in the programs and not the IT,” explaining that GAO found that 45-50 programs may be providing the same services under different agencies. A GAO report states, “eight of cabinet departments are involved in water resource management.” Forman said that people involved in EA have proven EA’s value through consolidation. “We know currently government is unaffordable; we need to refocus government efforts, streamline and focus and do that in a way that changes the traditional deficit reduction focus,” he said. “We must match up cutbacks in funding with improvements in performance” such as by using cloud computing.

During the same program, Dennis Wisnosky described how the DoD is looking for different ways in which to conduct its business, especially since 51 percent of its money spent on managing backroom operations such as how to pay soldiers and logistics. Wisnosky has championed defining business process and technology components into their simplest form and creating patterns of usage to save money and modernize the DoD. The DoD is, he said, “supporting the troops by not inventing new technologies”–but instead using other capabilities. The DoD is creating a common language, interoperability between systems, a Service Oriented Architecture, and using cloud computing to reduce costs and increase efficiency. As a result, the DoD Business Mission Area and DoD have a successful track record in modernizing business functions.

The Citizen Enabling Open Government initiative intends to make government more responsible to citizens. To that end, your participation personally and professionally would be welcome through the American Council of Technology and Industry Advisory Council and the LinkedIn CEOG group.

Christine Robinson is president of Christine Robinson & Associates, LLC; an enterprise architect with a security background; advisor to Arlington County; and advisory board member to EmeraldPlanet and its global television show. Robinson writes extensively and speaks about security to audiences worldwide.

The views expressed by our guest bloggers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of AFCEA International or SIGNAL Magazine.

By Elaine Rogers

Today, as our country celebrates its independence, let us also celebrate our service men and women and their families who stand ready to protect the freedoms that make this country remarkable. For 235 years military families have endured tremendous sacrifice to ensure our freedom and security. In the past ten years, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our troops have regularly deployed to the far reaches of the world while their families remained in our communities eagerly awaiting their return.

President Obama recently announced that 33,000 troops will return home from Afghanistan over the next year. The Metropolitan Washington area is home to one of the largest military populations in the world. They are our neighbors; their spouses are our teachers, colleagues and business owners. As a community we will celebrate many homecomings – opportunities to express our gratitude to our troops and their family members for the decade they have spent at war on our behalf.

As military families ready for the return of a loved one, the USO of Metropolitan Washington will be there to support them throughout what can sometimes be a difficult transition. The USO’s role is to lift the spirits of our military and their families and do the little things to boost morale and let them know they are supported and appreciated. We need your help to do that. Celebrating its 70th year, the USO is the way for the local communities – you – to support the troops and their families. Throughout its history, the USO has developed new and innovative programs to meet the ever-changing needs of service members and their families while holding true to its original mission. With state of the art facilities and simple acts of kindness, the USO is a “home away from home” for those who sacrifice to ensure our freedom and security.

This Fourth of July, take a moment to honor our heroes in uniform as well as our heroes on the home front. As we head into our 235th year as an independent nation, we must stand ready to welcome our heroes home and support military families. This is how America will continue to salute the finest our nation has to offer.

Elaine Rogers is the president and CEO of the USO of Metropolitan Washington. USO-Metro is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization chartered by Congress and dedicated to “Serving those who serve, and their families” in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia. For more information please visit www.usometro.org.

The SIGNAL staff wishes all our readers a safe and happy 4th of July. Share your tributes to or plans to honor the military here or at www.facebook.com/homefronthelp.

The Air Force and Arlington County, Virginia, are taking preventative measures against hackers such as the ones that recently attacked Sony, costing them over $170 million. It’s not just money at risk for government networks, however.

The Air Force has the lead for the Next Generation Airspace and lead for the Department of Defense. Arlington County, which collaborates extensively with the department on many levels, has undertaken continuous monitoring and risk analysis and is currently evaluating its supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.

Maj. Gen. Edward L. Bolton Jr., USAF, director of cyber and space operations, office of the DCS for ops, plans and requirements, led a discussion with B.G. Ranck Jr., director of warfighter systems integration at the office of the Secretary of the Air Force, and Mark Orndorff, PEO for Information Assurance and NETOPS for DISA at the AFCEA D.C. chapter’s cyber security luncheon on May 20 describing the Air Force’s approach.

Gen. Bolton asked everyone in the audience to say at what level they thought we should protect. The audience answered that we should protect “every link at every level.”

He also suggested that Air Force’s biggest issue with communications is the “lack of transportability” of the equipment and parts driven by its inability to interoperate between stovepiped systems. He described a soldier as having to carry a pack with three computers, multiple batteries, and multiple wires in order to communicate.

According to Bolton, the Air Force will focus on three main areas: capabilities, employment, and people. He also stated that the Air Force will change the discussion from aircraft allocation to “what information do I need vs. how many airplanes do I have in the air?” It also maintains that, “every airman must have a certain understanding of cyber.”

The Defense Department envisions a joint architecture and joint services information-sharing requirement that is not specific to a particular agency that promotes interoperability and information sharing across previously discrete domains. In keeping with this vision, the Air Force will migrate away from the plethora of often proprietary and stove-piped systems and transition to a single standards-based network. These systems often do not interoperate with other systems both in and outside of the Air Force. The Air Force will channel the resulting savings into building operational capability.

Gen. Bolton also asked the defense contracting community to help the Air Force by not perpetuating proprietary and controlled environments and boxing the Air Force into a technology or proprietary solution.

Though the panel focused primarily on the network and interoperable systems, it did not address the issue of SCADA systems, which are an integral part of Air Force and Defense Department infrastructure. We often don’t realize that our traffic lights, transportation systems, bridges, dams, power systems, water treatment plants and other systems contain digital information vulnerable to attack and theft even though they are not a part of other network systems.

Arlington County has undertaken an initiative to evaluate its SCADA systems and mitigate any risks found. In a public forum, Chief Information Security Officer David Jordan mentioned an article that described how U.S. officials who initially were going to conduct a public forum to discuss the risk of SCADA systems quietly decided the risk was too great to bring it to the public’s attention and cancelled the forum. “We started with the critical infrastructure systems; those connected to the network and are conducting other evaluations according to priority. SCADA systems are vital in the support of day-to-day life in a city,” Jordan stated.

But there are other important systems not directly under the control of the jurisdiction or the Federal Government; such as local phone switching center operating systems, cable, and wireless broadband operating systems and their related command and control networks, he continued.

The Defense Department would do well to conduct similar analyses across the Defense Department, if these are not already under way.

Through the Department of Defense National Survey of Employers, the department hopes to better understand the benefits and challenges of employing members of the National Guard and Reserve. Now that the survey has reached its halfway point, the defense department would like all employers who received the survey to respond, as their feedback is needed to develop future Guard and Reserve policies.

According to the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR), a Department of Defense agency, who is administering the survey, Guard and Reserve members comprise nearly half of the military’s total strength. The nation has relied heavily on Guard and Reserve service members in the almost 10 years since the September 11 attacks, frequently calling them away from their civilian jobs for military operations and humanitarian efforts around the world, including the 2004 tsunami in southern Asia, 2010 earthquake in Haiti and ongoing relief efforts in Japan. Their service and the support of employers are critically important. “If we are going to sustain their participation, we need to sustain the support of the employers,” said Dennis McCarthy, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. “Finding out what we need to do to get that support is of vital national interest.”

ESGR sent the survey to 80,000 randomly selected employers in the mail. The sample includes employers of every size and industry, from all across America. Survey participants should visit ESGR.mil and click on the survey link to provide their feedback on employing members of the Guard and Reserve. More information is available here.

Our cyber adversaries threaten us as individuals, communities, nations and members of the global community. We risk ruined credit, emptied bank accounts, government privacy information held hostage or destroyed, disabled defense systems and destruction to our infrastructure. Many recognize that our existing organizational and acquisition models can’t respond quickly enough to meet the cyber challenge. Why not establish a neutral entity to act as an impartial system integrator that collaborates global efforts and resources to anticipate and defend against our cyber adversaries?

Many efforts address the cyberthreat from different perspectives, but, none exists such as the one above. We are gradually addressing the cyberthreat but at a rate far less than our adversaries are outsmarting us. The Department of Defense recognizes the cyberdomain as its own separate domain along with air, space, land and sea. However, our existing acquisition and collaboration models can’t keep up. Our adversaries might be a single person with an inexpensive device that can disable a country like Estonia, or nation-states, criminals, terrorists and organized crime. The cost of entry is low. Whole underground networks exist to recruit as well as buy and sell illicit capabilities. Viruses, worms, trojans and more can propagate around the world instantly.

Robert Rodriguez, founder of the Security Innovation Network (SINET) says, “The time is yesterday to explore and invest in new collaboration models.” SINET unites cyber entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, government experts and academics to bring together entrepreneurs and academics who create cyber capabilities with those who can implement them. Stanford University is also a sponsor of and supporter of SINET.

A number of academic institutions actively pursue advanced training and research in cybersecurity. Stanford University and Georgia Tech collaborate. The Stanford University Computer Science Department has also partnered with the Secret Service. The Secret Service and FBI have their respective public-private partnerships. The NSA hosts centers of excellence at many of our nation’s academic institutions. There are other small efforts across the country.

“Cyber Security demands a community effort–deterrence starts with collaboration,” according to Riley Repko, Air Force Senior Advisor, Cyber Operations and Transformation. Realizing that current models weren’t enough, the Air Force asked Repko to come out of the private sector to develop a means of engaging the private sector, the true domain “owners.” Tom Patterson’s  October Government Computer News article “Inside the Pentagon’s Cyber War Games” describes Repko’s desire for “raising the awareness to the innovative competencies the warfighter could exploit by extending their reach into the private-sector–globally.” Why can’t we leverage resources via a ‘trusted’ and scalable mechanism that manages these capabilities? We have tested this model demonstrating considerable merit, but, we need Repko’s leadership and dedicated funds with the right mix of public and private sector talent to make it come to fruition.

This impartial entity could build on the many efforts under way through government, private industry, individual and non-profit entities. It could establish a repository of global resources, identified by capability, in a private and secure environment that could instantly reach out to experts around the world who could address a particular aspect of a cyberthreat. This model would protect government and industry’s need for privacy as well as protect suppliers’ intellectual property. Security and privacy are fundamental to the success. Unlike today’s models, we could potentially find solutions in a matter of minutes, hours and days rather than months or years after the fact. How then, do we get started?

Christine Robinson is president of Christine Robinson & Associates, LLC; an enterprise architect currently on assignment to the Air Force Strategic Visual Information Mapping (SVIM) initiative; advisor to Arlington County; and advisory board member to EmeraldPlanet and its global television show. Robinson writes extensively and speaks about security to audiences worldwide.

The views expressed by our guest bloggers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of AFCEA International or SIGNAL Magazine.

Back in October, AFCEA’s Professional Development Center hosted a series of speakers talking about issues facing today’s leaders. The Executive Leadership Series lives on in video form, as SIGNAL Editor in Chief Robert K. Ackerman spent a few minutes with each of the speakers prior to their presentations. The result is Lens on Leadership, six short videos in which each speaker shares wisdom from his or her area of expertise.

We’ve been featuring the videos on the SIGNAL home page, but just in case you hadn’t seen them, or weren’t aware that there are six of them, please stop by the Lens on Leadership page to see all the videos.

They include:

• Debra S. Orbacz, President and CEO, Orbacz Strategy Group, LLC, speaking on how to develop and track leadership skills
• Myron J. Radio, President, The R Group LLC, discussing how to unleash one’s potential
• Pamela Eyring, President and Director, The Protocol School of Washington, talking about etiquette in professional networking situations
• Hilary Fordwich, President and Founder of Strelmark, LLC, talking about gaining and retaining clients.
• George Capen, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Envisioneering, Inc., examining how to communicate effectively
• Alan A. Malinchak, VP/Chief Learning Officer at ManTech International, exploring how to lead and engage a multigeneral workforce