Data Strategy at the Department of Defense

CIO — As director of information policy for the Department of Defense, Michael E. Krieger assists the CIO in managing, directing, executing and implementing information policy across the DoD. He is responsible for providing policy and guidance for implementing its Net-Centric Data Strategy and enabling the transition to an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA). He has broad experience in information technology and command-and-control Systems. Krieger served as a U.S. Army officer for 25 years with operational assignments in communications and command and control. He commanded the 121st Signal Battalion, 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kan. He also served in the Joint Staff J-6 and OASD-C3I. He holds a BA from the United States Military Academy, an MS in physics from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MS in national security strategy from the National Defense University. Writer Ben Bradley talked with Krieger about the challenges of implementing the DoD's data strategy, which calls for separating data from applications.

Ben Bradley: I've reviewed the DoD's Net-Centric Services Strategy. The promise of transformation depends on "un-isolating" systems and making information available to the people who need it most. At the center of this promise is the idea of interoperability and data sharing. It seems the Achilles' heel is data consistency. There must be thousands of different data standards in thousands of different applications in an organization as large as the DoD. How are you dealing with this?

Michael E. Krieger: In the past, the DoD tried to standardize data definitions across the entire organization. This didn't work because the DoD is a large and extremely complex enterprise. The fact that there are many different data sets is not our weakness, it is our strength. Our weakness is that we build systems that are too tightly coupled to the data. To get that data into different systems, we have to pay integrators to move it out of one system and into another. We do this as a point solution. So we end up with a bunch of point-to-point solutions. This is what we're fixing.

We're starting to see programs build capabilities that anticipate unanticipated use by decoupling data from applications. That means data is available as a service, and applications are independent of the data. Applications should be able to discover and pick the data assets they need. We can't anticipate what local problem a 19-year-old soldier on the night shift wants to solve. But making data available as a service pushes problem solving out the edge of the network where it is needed.

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