DISA Reiterates Agency Needs and How Industry Can Help
The drumbeat might not have been new, but the message to industry attendees at a luncheon hosted Thursday by AFCEA's Washington, DC Chapter certainly was worth repeating as top officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, took to the stage to resound their needs and wants from an agency perspective as they work to shape and secure communications for the nation’s warfighters.
High priorities remain the need to capitalize on the current currency that is data, to have commanders be able to make sense of the daunting amount of it while paving the solutions roadmap that is a strategic combination of technology and workforce development, the experts shared.
Christopher Barnhurst, DISA’s deputy director, outlined four pillars DISA leaders say are critical to the agency’s success—and each representing a forthcoming industry opportunity.
The first pillar involves unifying operations for an agency of 18,000 people who operate in more than 42 countries and support millions of endpoints.
“When I say unifying operations, the key challenge for us as an agency is how do we bring all those datasets together to form the kind of common operational picture … to be effective in conflict or crisis and to make real-time decisions globally,” said Barnhurst, who spoke as the luncheon keynote.
A second area is cyber defense and making sense of the massive amounts of data. “Having enough data is not a problem at all,” he said. “The challenge we have is how do we bring that data together to gain useful insights from it and make sense of it, all at the speed at which our adversaries are operating.”
That need dovetails with the third pillar, that of data analytics and capabilities to make sense of both business data, such as human resources and finance, and operational data.
“In today's environment within the agency, [the datasets are] mostly siloed,” Barnhurst said. “What we need to do is bring all that together so that we can ask some harder questions and gain some additional insight into how we are actually operating.”
Rounding out the four pillars is workforce development and streamlining the hiring processes, which can get stuck on looking through too narrow of a straw and hung up on whether candidates have a precise set of certifications so that hiring managers might inadvertently overlook the critical thinker who could be a perfect match.
Additionally, a panel of four top DISA directors—Jason Martin, director of Acquisition; Roger Greenwell, director of Enterprise Integration and Innovation and DISA’s chief information officer; Christopher Argo, the J-3/5/7 director; and Jeff Marshall, acting director of Hosting and Compute—addressed the audience, discussing challenges and solutions that revolve around data, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, cyber, advanced analytics and workforce development. Notably, common themes from each is that agency leaders work more closely and collaboratively, and each wants to acquire and field solutions much faster.
When it comes to the federal government’s use of AI, for example, the United States is “behind the times,” Marshall said.
“Our adversaries have already proven that they're utilizing AI better than we are, utilizing AI to do what we could be doing better,” he said. “At the J9 [Host and Compute], we're still in the review, planning and strategic focus phase of what can we do with this for our strategic partners.”
And the persistent presence of legacy systems stymies progress, Greenwell offered.
“Our technology gap isn't closing as fast as we want it to. We are still dealing with a lot of legacy technologies.”
