The United States Department of the Navy (DON) Information Superiority Vision is set to reshape how the service branch develops and deploys information technology services by embracing swift adoption of digital tools and shareability across the entire organization and its subcomponents.
Navy CIO Aaron Weis and acting assistant secretary of Research, Development, and Acquisition Frederick Stefany articulated the Navy’s strategic shift to the new system in a memorandum released last week.
“This approach focuses on building secure IT services and consuming these services broadly across the DON enterprise to increase agility and speed in the development, delivery, and management of capability to the warfighter,” they wrote.
Weis and Stefany also said the transition would be fundamental to reducing waste and duplication, increasing data availability, maintaining pace with modern industry practices, accelerating productivity, and reducing cyber risk. The DON enterprise IT services will be designed to be high performing, low cost, continuously secured, and easily accessed –making them a more attractive alternative than an independent investment.
Within the next 60 days, following guidance stipulated in the memo, the Navy chief technology officer will establish and lead a forum to feed information to the Information Superiority Advisory Board in order to define policy, roles, and processes required to identify and adopt an enterprise IT services.
Once established, the forum will draft, review and seek approval on “foundational policies and procedures for enterprise IT services.” Those will include identifying a standard IT service management reference model that covers cybersecurity assessment and authorization, an IT-aligned taxonomy for products, suggestions for areas to focus on in the near term, roles and responsibilities associated with such services, and more.
