[iwar] [fc:DISA:.One.Plan,.140.Actions,.500.Days.to.Execute]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-11-12 19:16:18
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Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:16:18 -0800 (PST)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:DISA:.One.Plan,.140.Actions,.500.Days.to.Execute]
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November 2001

ŠSIGNAL Magazine 2001

One Plan, 140 Actions, 500 Days to Execute

U.S. Defense Department service provider puts on a new game face.

By Sharon Berry

Information assurance, preserving radio spectrum, ensuring interoperability
and establishing secure wireless links are just some of the tasks on the
menu for the Defense Information Systems Agency. The agency's Defense
Department-wide mandate has placed it at the nexus of the infosphere that
increasingly is defining military operations worldwide.

Faced with growing customer dissatisfaction and criticism that the
organization was failing in its mission and might even be obsolete, the
agency has embarked on a 500-day journey of conversion and renewal. Using a
master plan that takes into account the needs, requests and suggestions of
top military leaders and staff, the agency is finding its way to efficacy.

In 1997, the U.S. Defense Department issued a directive that requires all
military services to use the agency as their network services provider and
manager. But when the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) failed to
respond with high-quality service and support, many customers took the
initiative to find a loophole in that policy. Through that narrow window of
opportunity, managers of the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet demonstrated that
commercial service providers could step in and take over the organization's
mission. As a result, a new agency director was brought in and "DISA 2002: A
500-Day Action Plan for Supporting DOD Decision Superiority" began. The
plan, which contains 140 action items, aims to renovate the agency's
approach to customer service, improve services and address challenges in the
areas of wireless communications, information assurance and
interoperability.

DISA is responding to input from commanders in chief; senior military
leaders in command, control, communications and computers; and agency
directors. The evaluations cite what DISA has done well, where it has fallen
short and what customers expect from the agency in the future.

Today, more than halfway through the plan, Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr.,
USAF, director of DISA and manager of the National Communications System,
Arlington, Virginia, maintains that emphasizing the customer and fostering
accountability are essential to the agency's transformation. "Our customers
want to see a living process rather than a one-time effort," Gen. Raduege
says. "That's what we're working with them to produce. We don't want this to
fizzle out."

When Gen. Raduege arrived at DISA, the organization's biggest challenge was
to serve the warfighter in the area of network services. The nature of
warfare continues to change to a network-centric model, he says, and
information networks have become an integral part of warfighting. To address
this requirement, DISA had to meet network challenges and demonstrate its
resolve to its customers better. As the kickoff event for DISA's
transformation, the agency created the Directorate for Network Services.
"This is about re-engineering our entire network implementation, operation
and support processes into something that supports the CINCs [commanders in
chief], services and agencies in the Department of Defense," he shares.

Before creating the directorate, DISA established strategic goals in two
areas: improving customer focus and concentrating on best-value services for
the warfighter. The network services team focused on organizing proactive
customer advocacy and providing quality of servicežspecifically reliability,
availability and performance. It also aimed at integrating processes for
design, engineering, provisioning, resource management, operations,
maintenance, acquisition and planning. To prevent overlap and discover areas
that have been overlooked, DISA appointed a director for technical
integration services who ensures that processes within DISA work
efficiently. 

Creating the directorate is just one step toward becoming a more efficient
agency as well as the military's application service provider of choice.
Defense Department consumers also have concerns about equitable
representation and want their needs, including spectrum requirements, to be
heard in Washington. "Some action items are open-ended because we need to
solve problems such as intractable funding issues," the general explains.
"What we are doing in these cases is becoming the customer advocate during
inside-the-Beltway deliberations."

Managing wireless technology is among the organization's tasks, including
articulating the case for preserving specific spectrum for the military.
Portions of the spectrum are coveted by the wireless industry, which
regularly lobbies Congress to make the Defense Department yield some of its
frequency. Some DISA leaders have warned that this action could endanger
mission-critical systems.

DISA is charged with jointly developing a Defense Department wireless
strategy with the National Security Agency. "This partnership is critical
because wireless capabilities present a new spin on network security," Gen.
Raduege states. "The weakest link of any network will be the most targeted
area for intrusion, and the current crop of wireless devices do not contain
as robust encryption as we would like to see. The plan is to concentrate on
setting an internal DISA policy for wireless and handheld devices and use
that as a model to create an effective long-term DOD policy that will allow
secure and flexible use of the devices."

The DISA team also is focusing on information assurance on a broader basis.
It is working to integrate existing sensor technologies into a cohesive
infrastructure known as the joint intrusion detection system. The system is
a tool for network-based intrusion detection, monitoring and analysis across
the Global Information Grid. "We at DISA are living up to our Defense
Department directed responsibilities as the technical integrator for the CND
[computer network defense] sensor grid. We currently have a project underway
to provide 100 percent coverage of the Pacific Command's theater networks,"
the general relates. The system has been installed throughout the
department's networks such as the unclassified but sensitive Internet
protocol router network and the secret Internet protocol router network.

DISA has increased the monitoring of regional network operations and
security management centers, step sites, and command and control enclaves.
"To achieve the vision of information superiority as outlined in Joint
Vision 2010 and decision superiority as described in Joint Vision 2020, we
must be prepared to take the next step, which is to create an enterprise
sensor grid with common attributes," the general prescribes. "We need a
shared view of sensor status with locations, and this means a collective and
collaborative process to share signatures and vulnerabilities so all
incidents are detected and reported consistently."

Interoperability is yet another challenge. Although the topic is one that
must be addressed continually, the general points to the common operating
environment, or COE, as an interoperability success story in warfighter
equity. The COE is an integrated approach that allows rapid application
integration, point-and-click installation and fast turnaround. It manages
engineering services across the Defense Department and supports the
construction of systems from components that disparate organizations have
developed. The COE is planned for use by systems such as the U.S. Air
Force's theater battle management core system, the Army's battle command
system, and the global command and control system-Army.

"Every major service C4I [command, control, communications, computers and
intelligence] system currently under development is using the same set of
application programming interfaces. That's a huge success story for joint
standards and interoperability," Gen. Raduege states. "We must not forget
the historical and military economic lessons like Grenada, Desert One and
Desert Storm that drove the department to establish joint enterprise
capabilities, especially when speed of operation is essential, lives and
national security are at stake, and dollars are short."

In addition to its work toward transformation, the agency must continue to
address cynics. Acknowledging that some view DISA as an unnecessary
middleman. Gen. Raduege notes that the perception is not universal and
misses the point of the agency's military mission. Because DISA plans,
develops and operates joint enterprisewide capabilities for the entire
Defense Department, it can provide unique benefits such as Type I
military-grade encryption, diversity in network routing, diversity in
telecommunications media, guaranteed interoperability and global tactical
extensions to places where commercial infrastructure does not exist.

The capstones to these capabilities are the organization's procedures for
accreditation and certification, defensive operations, and vulnerability
identification and alerts. "Setting these mission-critical factors aside,
the right answer for DOD economically is to procure enterprise network and
information technology [IT] capabilities rather than procuring a massively
confused array of duplicative capabilities that, at the end of the day,
don't work together well, are more difficult to defend, and don't get the
joint mission done," he asserts.

DISA is working on metrics to ensure that its goals are being met and
customers are satisfied. Customers have been given not only a hard copy of
the plan but also access to a Web site with daily updates on each of the 140
actions. The items are displayed in chart form so customers can review the
program status of resources, item action summaries, milestones and exit
criteria. The organization also has a performance contract with targeted
goals and performance measures developed through negotiations with its
customers and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Gen. Raduege personally meets with many consumers of DISA services and
tracks the status of the plan using a large board that contains all 140
actions, each with color-coded pins. Red pins represent funding
difficulties; green pins, which delineate most of the actions, he adds, mean
that progress is good. Yellow pins indicate that some concerns need to be
addressed. Blue pins, now starting to appear, denote completed actions.

"At our review we look at the track record--the current month plus the
previous two months. You can see whether the trend is improving, not
improving or staying the same," he explains. "We now have a corporate board
structure here so that we discuss the heavy issues of the day in a corporate
fashion. The General Accounting Office is looking at how effective our
500-day plan is. We're getting some good additional oversight."

Many changes that have occurred over the past year are internal and may not
be readily apparent. "We established the CONUS [continental United States]
Regional Network Operations and Security Center to coordinate network
management, security and contingency support for all of our CONUS
customers," he explains. "The feedback is positive. We measure network
restoration in minutes, whereas this time last year, it was in hours or
days."

The organization also is writing service-level agreements into every
contract and through consolidation and modernization has driven down the
cost of mainframe processing from more than $1 billion per year to $348
million per year. "Along the way, the billets devoted to this function have
been reduced from 10,000 to 1,000 while taking on a significant increase in
workload," the general adds. "As important as the savings, we've reoriented
the defense enterprise computing centers [DECCs] to provide go-to-war IT in
terms of security, reliability and global connectivity. Our DECCs now serve
as JTF [Joint Task Force] beachheads, providing enormous reach-back
capabilities for deployed warfighters while enabling them to reduce their
forward footprint."

Gen. Raduege emphasizes that the 500-day action plan is one of several clear
signals that DISA is "extraordinarily focused" on its military consumers. It
now offers tailored services that were not available a year ago such as
community of interest networks. "Customer support is one of the core values
that we are infusing throughout the organization," he asserts. "If skeptics'
views are based on mission performance and cost, all of these steps should
help. Our plan says that we're here to listen, to commit and to deliver.
We've put our intentions in writing."

This fall DISA began its effort to refresh the plan and map out the way
ahead for the succeeding 500 days--part two--scheduled for publication by
the end of 2002. "We're going to continue to deliver solutions and keep the
focus of the plan on customer needs while being responsive to top-level
guidance that now is emerging from the Quadrennial Defense Review," he
offers.

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