Defense Department Publishes Data Strategy

The Department of Defense has published a new Data Strategy focused on accelerating the Department’s transition to a data-centric organization that uses data at speed and scale for operational advantage and increased efficiency, according to a department press release. 

The release explains that the strategy emphasizes managing data as a strategic resource, highlighting the criticality of data to build and maintain battlefield advantage, and the need to treat information systems on par with the priority given to weapon systems.  

“Data is the ammunition in the Digital Modernization Strategy and is increasingly central to warfighter advantage on and off the battlefield. The National Defense Strategy directed us to be more lethal, efficient and interoperable with partners. This strategy is our first step to making that ammo persistently available to the men and women of the DOD regardless of echelon or geographic location,” Dana Deasy, Defense Department chief information officer, says in the release.

Implementing the data strategy will require an automated orchestration of numerous data pipelines, such as discovery, ingestion, preparation, storage, processing, exposure and dissemination, in order to facilitate trusted and reproducible machine-to-machine data exchanges. Officials envision building a larger community of data leaders, via a deliberately expanded department data council that brings in the combatant commands, agencies and field activities. This empowered enterprise-wide team of DOD data leaders will work together to operationalize the objectives under the strategy’s seven goals of making data visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable and secure.