CIO Archives

I can't do this job without the help of a lot of people, and this is the time of the year to thank them -- and they deserve it, because sometimes I can get cranky.

So, kudos to the following folks who exhibit true grace when dealing with me:

• Katie Roberts, Veterans Affairs Department press secretary
• Roger Baker, VA CIO
• Art Wu, Republican Deputy Staff Director, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, House VA Committee
• Laura Williams, public affairs officer, Defense Information Systems Agency
• Air Force Lt. Col. April Cunningham, Pentagon press desk
• Lt. Col. Lee Packnett and Lt. Col. Steve Warren, Army Pentagon media relations
• Paul Mehney and Dave Hampton, Army public affairs officers who help me my trips to Ft. Bliss/White Sands Missile Range
• Lt. Myers Vasquez, Navy public affairs, Pentagon
• Warren Suss, Suss Consulting
• John Garing, DISA/Suss Consulting
• Bernie Skoch, Consultant and fellow radio geek
• Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, former director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, and Dr. Greg Reger, Army psychologist with the National Center for Telehealth and Technology, for their insights into PTS/TBI at the Government Executive Leadership Breakfast in April

The answer: No one. That's because the Defense Department has neither a CIO nor an assistant secretary of Defense for networks and information integration (that job is slated for the junk heap as part of a grand money-saving reorganization scheme).

But that plan is going nowhere due to congressional opposition. One result is that there's no one around at a high level to fight for the 100 MHz of Defense spectrum that Lawrence Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said yesterday he wants to transfer to commercial cellular companies in connection with the national broadband plan.

Strickling said he will work with Defense and other agencies to ensure they have the spectrum needed to perform critical missions, but somehow those missions seem far less important than the ability of every 12-year-old in America to stream Hannah Montana videos to their mobile phones.

Will Defense mount a defense of its spectrum? I can't even get an answer to that question -- a reflection of the CIO leadership vacuum.

President Obama withdrew on Wednesday the nomination of California Chief Information Officer Teresa "Teri" Takai for the Defense assistant secretary for networks and information integration, a job that currently includes the Defense CIO title.

ASD/NII will go bye-bye under the massive restructuring of the Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates announced in August, but the CIO title is mandated by the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act.

This means that sooner or later the Pentagon will need to nominate someone for the job, which Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said will be even stronger than the current CIO role.

Will the new CIO nominee be Takai -- who has been waiting for this new job since March -- or has she tired of the process? And, what priority does that job have in the massive reorganization plan?

I predict the answers to these questions will not become apparent until next year due to the upcoming elections, the need to pass delayed budgets, and Christmas and New Year's.

I am picking up low-level signals that the administration may offer Takai a comparable job elsewhere, and I also have heard she still wants out of California before Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office at the end of the year.

In July, the Veterans Affairs Department shutdown most of its grand scheme to update its asset-and-bean-counting systems, the $400 million Financial and Logistics Integrated Technology Enterprise program, due to a high risk of failure.

At the time, VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker said he intended to proceed with the program's strategic asset management system, intended to replace multiple legacy applications and provide better control of the VA supply chain.

Maybe its time to rethink that, based on a department inspector general report released on Tuesday concluding the asset management system lacked proper adult supervision.

Among other things, the inspector general said VA managers did not adequately manage performance of the system's contractor, General Dynamics Information Technology, and did not develop written procedures that clearly defined roles and responsibilities related to interface development for contractor and VA personnel.

The execs overseeing the asset management system, the inspector general added, were unable to foster a collaborative environment between the contractor and VA personnel, and were unable to develop an effective working environment between both parties.

Have they tried getting everyone around a campfire to sing Kumbaya?

Navy Chief Information Officer Rob Carey approved an electronic signature policy for the Navy and Marine Corps on Aug. 27 in a move designed to save paper, improve security and save money.

Carey said the policy is not a mandate to replace hand-written signatures but rather a policy to adopt electronic signatures as the preferred means of conducting business transactions within the Navy and Marine Corps.

Electronic signatures will be certified by using the Common Access Card issued to all military personnel and qualified contractors, he said.

Ironic side note: Cary signed his new electronic signature policy with his old-fashioned hand-written signature.

The Veteran Affairs Department's paperless claims processing system ended up on the list of troubled IT projects that are up for review and possible termination. I wonder if federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has a back up plan if he delays or cancels the paperless project.

A fast growing population of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans pushed the number of claims filed with VA past the 1 million mark for the first time in 2009, and it expects claims this year to reach 1.2 million and in 2011 top 1.3 million, Michael Walcoff, acting undersecretary for benefits, told a House committee hearing in June.

VA has budgeted $145 million in fiscal 2011 for paperless claims processing, which Walcoff told the hearing it needs to keep from drowning in the applications.

I wonder how long Kundra can hold VA's paperless claims system hostage before vet organizations such as the VFW and their pals in Congress raise a ruckus?

Lt. Gen. William Lord, the Air Force chief information officer, said cyberattackers have shifted their tactics from trying to breach firewalls to penetrating applications and said the service has serious application vulnerabilities.

Lord said unspecified cyber enemies used to be banging away at our firewalls. They're not any longer. "The enemy is banging away at our applications," the Air Force News Service reported on Wednesday.

Lord, speaking to a business group at the Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., said the service's applications have been shown vulnerable to such attacks. The Air Force has more than 19,000 information technology applications, Lord said. The center's IT Center of Excellence at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex in Alabama examined about 200 of those apps and found "all of them had over 50 vulnerabilities," he said.

Lord said the Air Force needs to focus on IT security but not at the expense of usefulness. "Security without utility is of little value; and utility without security is far too dangerous," he said, emphasizing the service needs to strike the correct balance between the two.

A variety of speech transcripts and slides released by the Pentagon on Monday called for combining the Defense Department chief information officer ship with the Defense Information Systems Agency, but various crystal ball folks I've talked to are still trying to figure out the end game.

Does this mean that Army Lt. Gen. Carroll Pollett, the director at DISA, will end up dual-hatted as the Defense CIO? (And for those who argue this is a job for a civilian, others counter that Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson serves as the Army CIO.)

Or does it mean that Pentagon management will select a civilian CIO and install him or her in DISA, with Pollett serving as the deputy CIO, but still retaining his director title?

Finally, will Teresa "Teri" Takai, the CIO of California whom President Obama nominated for the Defense CIO job will wait until the Pentagon finishes re-arranging its deck chairs -- or will she jump ship?

More needs to be revealed.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates made official the elimination of the office of the Assistant Secretary for Networks and Information Integration - also known as the office of the chief information officer. At a Pentagon press briefing today he detailed cuts in the Pentagon budget to save $100 billion over the next five years.

Gates added that the Joint Staff will also shut down its central command, control and communications shop. He added that the work done by NII and the Joint Staff C4 operation will be "assigned to other organizations and most of their acquisition functions will transfer to acquisition, technology and logistics."

Gates also derided what he called the decentralized approach to IT throughout the Defense Department:

"All of our bases, operational headquarters and defense agencies have their own IT infrastructures, processes and application-ware. . . . This decentralized approach results in large cumulative costs, and a patchwork of capabilities that create cyber vulnerabilities and limit our ability to capitalize on the promise of information technology."

Gates told the press briefing he wants to see the use of more common IT systems and applications throughout Defense.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I thought standards and commonality was a key job of the ASD/NII organization.

The "removal" of Teresa "Teri" Takai, California's chief information officer, from her planned nomination hearing on Monday to become the assistant secretary of Defense for networks and information integration and Defense CIO was no accident.

Tara Andringa, press secretary for the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., wrote in an e-mail to me that Defense scotched Takai's appearance pending an overall review of the Pentagon's management structure.

Andringa said the panel received the statement below from Defense on why it removed Takai from yesterday's hearing:

In light of the secretary's initiative to reduce overhead and achieve efficiencies, the department is in the process of reviewing the entire organizational structure. While we are examining any number of options and avenues for the best way forward, we wanted to maintain some flexibility. Therefore, we determined that it was best not to go forward with this confirmation hearing until this internal review was completed.

John Grimes, the most recent ASD/NII who resigned in April 2009, told me that this definitely shows top Pentagon management may follow through with recommendations made last month by the Defense Business Board to eliminate the NII organization -- a move he views as a serious mistake.

Although Defense can eliminate NII, it cannot do away with the CIO job, which is mandated by the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act. But I wonder how long Takai wants to be on hold before Defense makes up its mind on NII.