Friday, October 15, 2010
IT and the United States Intelligence Community
The role of IT doesn't just impact car companies, energy companies, healthcare firms or other private sector entities. Even within the public sector, information technology isn't just relied upon to build "smart" cities and towns. The federal government, specifically the intelligence community, invests an exorbitant amount of money on IT solutions across numerous agencies. In recent years, there has been a public outcry that federal agencies have failed to communicate with each other and, as a result, have failed to share critical intelligence information. Enter DODIIS (Department of Defense Intelligence Information System). This IT framework connects 16 federal intelligence agencies and enables analysts to share knowledge, integrate and process information from various sources and, most importantly, provide timely and cogent intelligence to the U.S. military. Despite the improvements in the government's use of IT, there are still shortcomings that will hopefully be improved in the years to come. The federal government contracts with many private firms (Oracle for instance) in an effort to bring the best ideas and innovations to its IT infrastructure. This article provides a brief overview of the DODIIS conference that takes place each year.
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Speaking of the federal government, of which the US Navy is a part of, IT implementation and upgrade is both a huge undertaking for IT logistics planners and a huge frustration for the user.
ReplyDeleteIn many corporate enteprises, if you want to distribute a patch to upgrade IT facilities, then it's usually pretty easy to make do with a simple distribution across the network in the middle of the night. In the Navy (and other military operations), this is definitely not the case. For an many times as I would see Microsoft or other IT vendors make the long flight overseas to meet us in port just to deliver and install a something as simple as an MS Outlook update via CD-ROM (about once every 2-3 months), there would be just as many times that these cleared individuals would fly into the middle of the ocean via helicopter to be lowered by cart onto a surfaced submarine to do the same work (submarines rarely surface and don't pull into foreign parts as freqently as surface ships do). IT security is so important (even for MS Outlook updates, apparently) that upgrades/fixes can't be emailed or put into the cloud. Seems ridiculous, but hopefully there will be a fix to this aspect of IT security sensitivity soon...talk about a huge expenditure of tax-payer dollars.