Navy CIO Robert Carey: Navy’s Top 10 IT Priorities for 2010
Monday, February 22nd, 2010 by Jim Garrettson | 1 Comment
2009 is over and 2010 is already underway. Department of the Navy CIO Robert Carey wrote a post on his blog last Friday about the challenges facing the Navy in the coming year. These challenges are especially daunting due to the losses of John Lussier, Bob Grady and Dr. Richard Etter last year. Below are Robert Carey’s top 10 priorities for the Navy in 2010:
- Agile Decision-Making: The Navy looks to continue working toward a more agile decision-making model. The Navy “strives to perform like an enterprise, so we can leverage the buying power of the DON or DoD where appropriate.” Enterprise Architecture will be the main tool to drive interoperability and cost management, so look for it to be a major factor in Navy IT budgets in the coming years.
- NGEN: The DON is in the process of closing the current Navy and Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) and moving toward the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN). The Navy wants to completely phase out any legacy IT projects and begin the process of migrating to NGEN for 2010.
- Cybersecurity Capability/Investment Model: The DON wants a Cyber Capability Model and appropriate metrics and investment guidance to ensure that their contracting dollars go where they need to. Increased accountability means increased investment, as their forthcoming Cyber Capability Model will point out cyber vulnerabilities in the Navy’s IT architecture and guide spending accordingly, so watch out for this.
- Mobility: As ExecutiveGov wrote last week, one of Robert Carey’s priorities is teleworking. “The power of the smart phone and our ability to securely connect to the network and information needed to perform our jobs is expanding exponentially. This is freeing our workforce from the Industrial Age model of the “desk” and allowing us to securely work from anywhere.”
- Social Media: Social Media has evolved into “rather standard ways to share information.” CIO Carey promises to look for ways to leverage social media tools to improve collaboration and communication within the DON.
- Privacy: Since mobility and social media are priorities, protecting personally identifiable information (PII) has to be a major priority for the Navy. CIO Carey notes that deploying encrypted data cuts the risk of identity theft, and increases the security of Navy IT infrastructure, so look for data encryption to continue to drive spending in coming years.
- Cloud Computing: The Navy is moving toward the Enterprise User concept, where any authorized Navy employee can engage the Global Information Grid from any device at any location and access information. Like Casey Coleman told us last year, agility is one of the main value propositions of cloud computing.
- Cyber Skill Development: From CIO Carey’s blog: “Everyone is a cyber warrior and as such will require better and different training. The Cyber Age is here, and we must accelerate our knowledge of the network as a tool to perform our work.” Look for cyber training programs to loom large in Navy IT budgets going forward.
- Identity Management: The Navy, like the federal government at large, is striving to implement an “identity-based physical and logical access standards-based model” that is interoperable across the federal government and allied governments. Knowledge-based encryption, maybe?
- Critical Infrastructure Protection: If the BPC’s mock cyber attack showed anything at all, it showed us that we need a standard operations manual in the event of a major cyber attack. The Navy is working on one now, that will help leverage Navy and Marine Corps cyber assets to ensure that Navy/Marine Corps missions continue uninterrupted in the event of a cyber incident.
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