U.S. and allied forces operating in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan are receiving new handheld tactical radios designed to provide secure communications among the diverse militaries.

If you are an enterprise technologist in or out of the Federal Government, please take time to watch the entire presentation below. It captures the entirety of the presentations and majority of the conversations at the White House Forum on Information Technology Management Reform. I recommend you watch the entire presentation for several reasons. If you are a student of IT and its governance, you will see what a good strategy looks like. If you are a student of federal policy, you will gain insights into what may be some of the most important shifts underway in the federal space today. If you are an integrator or technology vendor who served federal users you will learn a bit more about how your customer will be shifting in the future and how you can better position to help. And if you are an enterprise technologist you will learn of some very important things under way that will make your life easier and more productive.

The Air Combat Command is offering an information-sharing approach and visualization tool to facilitate decision making based on knowledge rather than available technology. As this strategy moves out, it will affect not only the U.S. Air Force but also the U.S. Defense Department and industry.

The CTOvision.com list of Disruptive IT has just been updated. This list reviews the companies regarded as having very high potential to change the way IT is done in large enterprises.

This is a loaded question. I do not mean to suggest that we should take advantage of another's misfortune, even when it is the Department of Defense's. Real harm has been done by the Wikileaks perpetrators and the incident has certainly affected national security. Alliances and perhaps lives, may be at risk in real ways. However, my point in asking the question is this: the functionality offered by 'insider security monitoring' and role based cyber security has taken-on a new priority in the IC...and perhaps the entire federal government. And so it should. The implication is that in all federal agencies, big events (or screw-ups) typically precede big changes as well as big spending in certain categories.

U.S. military command and control (C2) systems developers are closer to enhanced interoperability after the release of C2 Core Version 1.0 in October. The core is an open, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based data exchange standard developed by the C2 community for capability implementation. These data standards change the current approach to military-systems design that results in unique interfaces, often with multiple standards for similar data, for each information exchange.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers recently released a new and improved bug catching system designed to more efficiently find software glitches during the development process. The Advanced Combinatorial Testing System (ACTS) generates plans for efficiently testing every combination of six or fewer interacting variables rather than the more commonly used “pairwise” approach to testing software, which checks combinations of only two variables.

Much has been written about maneuver in various domains of conflict—land, sea and air. As in many other fields, the thinking owes much to the late Col. John Boyd, USAF, who is well known for his concept of the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act), and who contributed materially to thinking about maneuver warfare vice attrition warfare.

After 10 years of service, it is time to say goodbye to the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet—almost. The massive network serves more than 700,000 sailors, Marines and civilians and makes up about 70 percent of the total Navy information technology footprint ashore. It originally was supposed to finish its time with the Navy in early fall to make way for the Next Generation Enterprise Network. Instead, the sea service has extended the life of the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet and will spend $3.4 billion on a continuity-of-services contract to keep the network around for another 43 months.

It is the objective of the U.S. Navy’s Information Dominance Corps to manage a global network that delivers instant integration of military data across a number of separate specializations such as geographic, intelligence, logistics and manpower, as well as provide information about red or blue forces. The semantic Web will be the engine needed to power the effort.