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DIA chief: Take ‘proprietary’ out of your vocabulary

For Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, the biggest problem his agency faces can be summed up in one word: interoperability, the ability to transfer information between systems and partners.

As head of the agency charged with keeping war fighters and policy makers up to date on the military capabilities of foreign nations, Ashley knows it is important to share information with other members of the intelligence community and the services. As a result, Ashley said, technologies being developed by or for the Pentagon need to be designed with interoperability in mind.

“Data interoperability. So all the unique capabilities–the designs that you bring to the Department of Defense–everything has to talk to everything else. Otherwise, we will be suboptimized and we will miss opportunities,” he said during an Aug. 19 keynote at the DoDIIS conference in Tampa.

“In many ways, we can solve problems at speed, but our challenge is to solve the problem at scale. I can come up with a unique capability for a battalion or a brigade so they can operate at speed within that brigade, but can they talk to every other brigade? Can they talk to other services? Can they talk to other nations? … And buried within that scale problem is the challenge of interoperability.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2019/08/19/dia-chief-take-propietary-out-of-your-vocabulary/

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Critics warn DOD’s EHR contract could mean ‘vendor lock and health data isolation’

A defense think tank says the government may regret its plan to lock the U.S. Defense Department into a 10-year contract with an electronic health-record vendor.

The Center for a New American Security released a report that sharply criticizes the department’s procurement process for a new EHR system, which is expected to cost $11 billion over the life of the contract and has attracted fierce competition among four bidding teams.

“DOD is about to procure another major electronic (health-record) system that may not be able to stay current with—or even lead—the state-of-the-art, or work well with parallel systems in the public or private sector,” warn authors, who include retired Gen. H. Hugh Shelton and former Veterans Affairs Chief Technology Officer Peter Levin.

“We are concerned that a process that chooses a single commercial ‘winner,’ closed and proprietary, will inevitably lead to vendor lock and health-data isolation,” they conclude.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20150213/NEWS/150219965/critics-warn-dods-ehr-contract-could-mean-vendor-lock-and-health

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Procurement troubles still dog Defense Department

Congress has held hearings over the past 30 years seeking ways to fix the Defense Department’s poor procurement system.

A June 24th hearing offered interesting ideas.

No headlines afterward about stopping F-35 costs from skyrocketing, keeping new production of nuclear aircraft carriers on schedule or halting the failure of billion-dollar computer programs — in fact, there was hardly any press coverage at all.

Two worthwhile ideas that came from the four experienced procurement specialists who appeared before the House Armed Services Committee provided no silver bullets, but they made sense.

  1. Give the main contracting officer for major weapons projects absolute cradle-to-grave authority and responsibility and accountability.
  2. Interservice rivalry and even intraservice competition have far from ended, and they harm the procurement system.

 

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