The documents also outline goals such as successful mission operation in the face of advanced cyberthreats that will require establishing resilient cyber defensive posture, enhanced cyber situational awareness and assured survivability against sophisticated cyberattacks, along with providing a DoD cloud environment, something Halvorsen has hit on many times. This includes providing a hybrid cloud environment, which Halvorsen has described as on- and off-premise clouds, and a shared DoD enterprise IT service.

Additionally, 748 data centers were closed between FY10 and FY16, with an average estimated cumulative cost savings of $271 million. The documents estimate annual savings in FY18 of $64.1 million.

Other key segments DoD provided figures for include:

• $549 million for acquisition.
• $2.8 billion for battle-space networks.
• $14.9 billion for DoD IT infrastructure.
• $1.7 billion for “health”

Service IT requests, according to the documents, breakdown as follows:

• Army: $11 million.
• Navy: $9 million.
• Air Force: $7 million.

• What are you trying to do? (No jargon!)
• How does this get done today?
• What is new about your approach?
• If you succeed, what difference do you think it will make?
• How long do you think it will take?
• Can your work transition (to DoD or others)?
• How much will it cost?

Regli warned against confusing the first question and the third.

“The common mistake is to conflate ‘what’s new in your approach’ with ‘what are you trying to do.’ People come with their technique that they want to work on and don’t think about the problem they’re trying to solve, at the right level of abstraction,” he said. “Can I come up with a problem for which your technique provides a new insight?”

Regli suggested responding to specific RFIs rather than cold-calling. DSO does sometimes get unsolicited proposals, but those are rarely, if ever taken up, he said.

The best way to build a successful partnership — i.e., get funding for your ideas — is to partner closely with DSO’s program managers.

“What you want to do is identify program managers who overlap with your interests and get to know them. Figure out what they’re interested in and whether your ideas can help them solve the problems they’re working on,” Regli said.

He also suggested finding the newest program managers to join the office, as they’ll be most interested in building new partnerships and are more likely to be in the early stages of a project, when new proposals are most crucial.

“Let’s see if we can keep fomenting revolutions together by creating a greater community of people who know how to work with DARPA,” he said.

“DoD appears to have reclassified a significant percentage of its IT spending as National Security Systems, which are not covered by FITARA. This lack of transparency is unacceptable.”

Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at the Government Accountability Office, said that the DoD moved $15 billion in IT spend to the classified National Security System, which has an exemption to FITARA reporting.

“To have $15 billion magically appear under that umbrella doesn’t seem right,” he said.

The committee members agreed and promised to take the agency to task for the move, which many deemed as a skirt around transparency.

“We are being asked to fund DoD above the $603 billion that the president has requested,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC. “Take the message back to them that unless they get their heart right on this, there will be no support for increasing that.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., a co-sponsor of FITARA, echoed the sentiments, saying that the displeasure toward DoD spread across party lines, especially compared to the agencies that improved their scores.

“All of us agree, on a bipartisan basis, to insist that they improve their performance, that they come into compliance like every other federal agency,” he said. “And the burden on them is even greater because they have the dollars.”

Other agencies, like Health and Human Services, remained stagnant overall, despite showing improvement in categories like improving the authority of its chief information officer.

HHS has also made progress toward its data consolidation goals, but hasn’t shown savings because Deputy Assistant Secretary and acting Chief Financial Officer Shelia Conley said the money went right back to bolstering other IT projects.

“In many cases with these data center consolidations, we have gaps in IT spending, meaning that there are things we need to do within our IT portfolio,” she said. “Often times, those savings realized through data consolidation and modernization efforts are plowed back into those respective systems and infrastructure to provide things we know need to be done.”

HHS officials said they expected to see improved scores in the next 12 to 18 months.

“GSA is seeking to provide a one-stop-shop as new commercial imagery providers, capabilities and data solutions emerge in the Information Technology market to meet the needs of Federal, State, Local, Regional and Tribal governments,” agency officials said in an April 28 post on its Interact site.

“By leveraging strategic sourcing and shared services, GSA’s IT Schedule 70 is in compliance with OMB guidance and offers opportunities for cross-government savings.”

GSA will host a webinar at 10 a.m. EST on May 18 to inform industry about the changes resulting from the new SIN.

The EOS SIN follows GSA’s March announcement that it was pursuing a new SIN for the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program with a request for information from industry.

With this conceptual framework, there is no formalized program of record for JIE; rather, there are joint modernization initiatives for which the military services bear the funding responsibilities. By and large, many currentand formerofficials both from DoD and the services have confidence in this structure and model that goes through each individual service.

Halvorsen expressed confidence in the governance structure for JIE going forward.

“If you ask all the services, they’ll tell you this is the best it’s ever been,” he said. This process involves the CIOs and 6s — or information offices — of each service along with the DoD CIO, the Defense Information Systems Agency, Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, to the point where they should all be participating in the decisions.

The JIE executive committee, or EXCOM, continues to be the main governance body, Halvorsen said. It comprises two-star generals and senior civilian officials and is chaired by Randall Conway, deputy CIO for information enterprise.

One of the important aspects of the EXCOM, according to Halvorsen, was that decisions are reached in a collaborative manner, signifying not agreement from all parties, but rather that all participants are able to provide input. Oftentimes, there is some disagreement, Halvorsen said, but there is enough consensus to come to decisions within this process.

One of the keystone concepts under the JIE umbrella is the Joint Regional Security Stacks, which is funded through the services. The next step following its full implantation, which is still ongoing, will be autonomous and artificial intelligence-based tools, Halvorsen said. “Given the volume and where I see the threat moving, it will be impossible for humans by themselves to keep pace,” he said.

In the past, Halvorsen has requested similar tools from industry to work at machine speed.

“We can and we’re very close to being able to put more autonomy into the security tools, and we will get to the point I think within the next 18 months where AI is becoming a key factor in augmenting the human analyst,” in making decisions about what to do, when to quarantine parts of the network and what parts of the networks can structure be changed, he said.

These tools, which he described as “an absolute real effort,” will be able to isolate portions of the network that become infected at machine speed and keep the network running to perform the mission, he said. They are looking at things like the Watson supercomputer solutions coming from the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, or DIUx, in Silicon Valley.

These solutions will also allow for greater predictability, though Halvorsen noted there will never be 100 percent predictability of every attack.

“The way people actually individually move the mouse becomes very distinctive, and there’s just a lot of things that AI is going to be able to do,” Halvorsen provided as an example.

John Zangardi will take over as acting CIO, Halvorsen said. Zangardi is now

principal deputy CIO.

Executive of the Year: James “Hondo” Geurts

The Executive of the Year award is given to a single person that, through their vision and strength of will, pushes the boundaries of government to deliver solutions to critical problems.

In doing our due diligence on this year’s winner, Federal Times spoke with a number of colleagues who said, to a person, that we had the right man for the inaugural award.

As the leadership behind programs like SOFWERX — an incubator successfully fostering collaboration between the government and private sector to solve tough problems — and the “Ghost Program,” also known as “Top Gun for acquisition,” Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (SOF AT&L) Director James Geurts is “reinventing how USSOCOM invents,” as one acquisition official put it.

Through these programs and other initiatives, Geurts and his teams delivered in the last year 116 aircraft/systems, 1,014 vehicles, nine maritime craft, 42,334 weapons/accessories, 235,116 operator survival items and 4,909 radios/equip — all with a permanent staff of fewer than 500 people.

Unsung Hero of the Year: Ryan Wells

In starting this awards program, Federal Times sought to ensure it was highlighting the people on the ground who are making a difference — the ones who see a problem and don’t linger, don’t wait to be asked, but act and in the process change lives.

While the other recipients of the inaugural Vanguard Awards are certainly deserving, Ryan Wells, laboratory information manager for a VA medical center in Missouri, perfectly exemplifies the true nature of this award: the ability to see a problem, identify a solution and forge ahead to get things done.

When Wells realized a colleague was forced to waste time with repetitive, rote tasks, he took it upon himself to write a program in his spare time to automate this task. That program is now being used throughout the medical center and at nearby hospitals.

“Mr. Wells was not requested to create this database,” according to the nominator. “He simply recognized an opportunity to improve care provided to the veterans in southeast Missouri and the surrounding areas through utilization of technology.”

Special thanks to the Federal Times Advisory Board: Dan Blair, president and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration, former deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management; Robert Carey, vice president of Navy and Marine Corps Programs at Vencore, former principal deputy CIO at the Department of Defense; Karen Evans, national director of the US Cyber Challenge, former administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and IT, Office of Management and Budget; Beth McGrath, director of federal sector at Deloitte Consulting, former deputy chief management officer at the Department of Defense; Paul Posner, director of the Graduate Public Administration Program at George Mason University, former Government Accountability Office director of intergovernmental programs; Franklin Reeder, founder of the Center for Internet Security, former director of the White House Office of Administration; Stan Soloway, president and CEO at Celero Strategies, LLC, former Professional Services Council CEO, former deputy undersecretary of defense; Linda Springer, former Office of Personnel Management director; Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, former deputy general counsel for litigation at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Robert Tobias, director of business development for American University’s Key Executive Leadership Programs, former president of the National Treasury Employees Union; and Steve Watkins, founder and president of Watkins Communications, former editor of Federal Times.