Sharing the knowledge

purchase
reprint

link to
this page

categories

C4ISR

Network-Centric Warfare

Training and Simulation

Security and Intelligence

online resources

White Papers

RSS Feed

Military Links

1105 Media, Inc.

» Government Computer News

» Government Leader

» Washington Technology

» FOSE

| |

Sharing the knowledge

By Alan Joch
Special to Defense Systems

Defense Knowledge Online backers look to jump-start the departmentwide Web site by piggybacking on the Army�s successful Web portal

If you’re one of the 1.8 million regular users of the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) Web portal, you may have thought you were seeing double in January 2006. That’s when the Defense Department began its limited launch of the Defense Knowledge Online (DKO), a look-alike Web site with only some cosmetic differences to distinguish it from AKO, the Army’s popular portal for finding contact information, managing personnel records and handling many other tasks online.

For now, the home page still displays AKO and DKO logos, but big changes in the DKO are expected in the next two years. The multiservice DKO board expects that 4 million DOD employees will eventually use the portal for departmentwide collaboration and controlled access to various information and applications managed by one of the world’s largest and most complex organizations.

Breaking down informational stovepipes is a challenge that organizations throughout the public and commercial sectors are addressing with mixed results. That is why although DKO is already live, the real work may be just beginning.

‘ADOPT BEFORE YOU BUY’
If successful, DKO will help the military branches better coordinate their warfighting and noncombat efforts worldwide, senior commanders said. “We were looking for a collaboration and integration solution that we could use to tie all of our different systems together,” said Marine Col. Jason Young, a DKO project officer.

DKO taps into a central DOD employee database for cross-department contact information. A similar employee directory has been a key feature of the seven- year-old AKO. “From this point on, we will work with our joint partners to make the portal less Army-centric, more DODcentric and tailor it to the needs of those folks that are participating in the project,” said Army Col. James Barrineau, program manager of AKO and DKO.

Eventually, DKO will offer a single, secure access point to DOD services, applications and content, including Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), the ongoing strategy to distribute intelligence, warfighting information and other data across a secure departmentwide network.

Planners hope DKO will also help limit information technology costs. “Hopefully, we can merge [individual portals] and save money across the board,” Barrineau said.

DKO managers haven’t released cost or savings estimates. The current work is being carried out under an Army-sponsored $156 million development contract with Lockheed Martin and a smaller maintenance contract with CherryRoad Technologies. The Lockheed Martin contract limits spending to Army services, DISA and the Joint Forces Command, which leaves the Air Force and the Navy to finance their eventual move to DKO.

The strategy of piggybacking DKO onto AKO may be the first poster child for the adopt-before-you-buy philosophy championed by DISA Director Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, said Jeremy Potter, defense analyst at public-sector researcher Input. “AKO very successfully scaled to 2 million users. They saw that as an opportunity to integrate it into the entire DKO,” he said.

EVOLVING TIMETABLE
Despite its January test launch, DKO is still “very much in the requirements planning stage,” Barrineau said. In the remainder of this first phase, which will last through the current fiscal year, DKO managers will gather feedback from the 150,000 new non- Army users to determine



ART VILLE
Defense Knowledge Online managers will gather feedback from the 150,000 new non-Army users to determine what features may be required.

what new features may be required.

“They will have the opportunity to utilize the services that are currently in AKO and come up with recommended suggestions and improvements for what they can use in their particular missions,” said Lt. Col Skip Harborth, director of future operations and outreach for AKO.

The schedule for bringing each of the branches under the DKO umbrella is still being determined, Barrineau said. “It will be several years before [DKO] fully comes together. Each entity has a different timeline,” he said.

One problem is the varying lengths of service contracts individual branches are managing. For example, the Air Force’s Global Combat Support System- Air Force architecture, which includes hundreds of applications and portal capabilities, supports 800,000 users and predates AKO by about four years. Its current management contract with Akamai doesn’t end for another two years.

“The question that we’ve been addressing is at what point is [it] logical to do a transition,” said David Tillotson, deputy chief of warfighting integration and deputy chief information officer of the Air Force. User convenience and fiscal issues are concerns. “It looks to us that about the 2009 time frame is the point where the business opportunity would start to make sense,” he added.

A series of technical challenges may also slow progress. Because departmentwide information sharing is key to DKO success, planners must create a secure infrastructure for distributing information to authorized DOD employees. Tillotson said Air Force employees are focusing their concerns on how easily they will be able to access crucial information via DKO.

“The second tier of concerns has to do with making sure that information is there when you need it,” he said. “So not just that [access] is fast, but more importantly that it’s reliably accurate and reliably available.”

Like others working to eliminate information stovepipes, DKO managers expect that a service-oriented architecture using industry standard Web protocols will provide the availability and reliability answers. During the next year, the DKO designers will work to boost the portal’s ability to comply with SOA standards by upgrading to a new version of the underlying software from Appian, Barrineau said.

The security technology that will be used to grant individuals access to specific information within DKO has yet to be determined. For a while, DKO directors contemplated an upgrade from the AKO’s user sign-on service to DISA’s NCES credentialing system. But a directive from the Office of the Secretary of Defense told DKO managers to consider a range of credentialing alternatives to determine the best departmentwide fit. Barrineau expects a decision this calendar year.

CULTURE AND CONTEXT
In addition to technical challenges, the DKO board must also address the cultural differences among the service branches to make a single portal valuable across DOD. “The key is [making DKO] something that when Marines go out to, it meets their requirements,” Young said.

Along the way, Barrineau expects DKO will have to contend with its share of turf battles and requests for content tailored to an individual service, but ultimately budget realities, as they often do, will sort the critical from the less-important items on those wish lists.