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homeland security to benefit from Army IT collaboration push?
By WDavidStephenson | December 6, 2007
Along the lines of my recent post about the cheap communication device DARPA is developing for grunts in the field, it also appears the Army is leading the way on collaborative approaches to IT, as this GCN article points out. That’s critical because of the Pentagon’s disproportionate share of the government R & D budget (so we need to migrate applicable Pentagon advances to DHS and FEMA), and because of Stephenson’s Law #1:
find a solution to your problem by thinking of someone who shares the same problem, but to the nth degree, because their pain has probably motivated them to find an answer.
– there’s nothing like having your life on the line to focus your attention on effective techniques!
It’s an interview with Major. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, nominee for the post of staff chief information officer. He pointed out that they’ve gone from 18 different collaboration systems at the division core to only 2: “.. we cannot afford to continue to buy independent systems that don’t relate or operate with anything.”
Sorensen said that the Army “wants to be able to train [soldiers] as they fight,” and that will require them to “.. have the ability to reach back for services, but we have a lot more work.”
It remains to be seen how this kind of idealized approach will actually work in battlefield conditions (I’ll be writing about Noah Schactman’s piece in the current Wired, “How Technology Almost Lost the War: in Iraq, the Critical Networks are Social — Not Electronic” [which squares with my son’s experience there] soon — it shows that Rumsfeld’s network-centric macro approach failed miserably in Iraq). It might also be a step toward achievement of the “Open Source Warfare” approach that I helped contribute to at the Institute for the Future.
So, the burden of proof of true collaboration, whether in its IT purchases or in battlefield operations, remains on the Army brasses’ shoulders, but at least their rhetoric is good!
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Topics: Networked Security, collaboration, policy and politics, technology
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