BRIEFING BOOK
Can we talk? Managers of joint programs such as the Global Command and Control System and Global Combat Support System should communicate with each other about their service's separate efforts, said Bill Curtis, a principal director for the assistant secretary of Defense for command, control, communications and intelligence.
Managers of joint programs such as the Global Command and Control System and Global Combat Support System should communicate with each other about their service's separate efforts, said Bill Curtis, a principal director for the assistant secretary of Defense for command, control, communications and intelligence.Curtis, who spoke at the recent Software Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, recounted a talk with a Global Combat Support System-Army official who hasn't communicated with counterparts in the Air Force or Navy.'Certainly you want them to talk with each other,' said Dave Borland, the Army's deputy chief information officer. 'The fact that they're talking is not necessarily a symptom of a problem.' The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command was the first of the Navy's 23 commands to commit to paying for its share of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet for fiscal 2001, said Rear Adm. John A. Gauss, SPAWAR commander in San Diego.'It's the correct thing to do,' Gauss said at the Navy Connecting Technologies Conference in Norfolk, Va., last month.Only one command in the Navy had set aside funding for voice, video and data services under NMCI by mid-May, said David Litchfield, the Navy's deputy program executive officer for information technology.Gauss recommended that SPAWAR manage NMCI, but the Navy created the program executive office to manage it as an outsourcing procurement. The Marine Corp's CIO, Brig. Gen. Robert M. Shea, didn't mince words when he spoke about data integrity during a CIO roundtable at the Navy Connecting Technologies conference.Educating senior Marine leaders will bolster efforts to eliminate redundant databases and create accurate enterprisewide data sources, he said.'When you get to a certain point, even the Neanderthals have to come along or they die on the vine,' he said. Service contract officials must use the Defense Department Enterprise Software Initiative agreements when buying eligible software, said Col. Luis C. Linares, architecture division chief at the Air Force Communications and Information Center. Lawrence J. Delaney, Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, recently delivered that mandate, Linares said.The Air Force Standards Systems Group at the Gunter Annex of Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., is the service's ESI program agent, he said.
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