The Department of Defense (DoD) plans to roll out a new roadmap in the coming months that will guide the department in its use of technology to drive business outcomes, a top Pentagon tech official said today.
Danielle Metz, chief information officer of the DoD Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), said at a March 26 Federal News Network DoD Cloud Exchange event that her office is currently drafting the OSD IT Digital Roadmap for fiscal year 2026 to 2030 and plans to roll out the new roadmap in the coming months.
Last year, OSD submitted a similar IT digital implementation plan to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. The 2023 plan outlined three strategic goals for better technology governance — flipping IT delivery model from service provider-led to customer-led, treating OSD as an IT enterprise, and maximizing the use of technology to support the OSD mission.
According to Metz, the goals outlined in that plan are still germane and are part of the upcoming roadmap. However, the roadmap set for release later this year intends to be more than a “technology IT how to.”
“What we really wanted to do was ensure that we were better storytellers of the importance and relevance of technology,” Metz said. “So, we didn’t want to focus just on technology, we wanted to focus on how technology drives business outcomes.”
Metz explained that the new roadmap outlines five business outcomes: reliable remote experiences, consistent network performance, continuous access to current technology, reliable service status, and protecting DoD data.
Metz did not delve into specific details of what will be included in the plan, but she did explain that “all of the themes [in the roadmap] were born from user experience surveys” that OSD recently completed, as well as comments gathered during several listening sessions.
“It goes back to … ensuring that your users [and] your customer base are a part of crystallizing what the problem set is so they can actually be a part and empowered to come up with the solutions that that’s what I believe our roadmap is showcasing,” Metz said.
“And so, we were able to take [the surveys] and complement it with the listening sessions so that we were able to see a lot of these common themes,” Metz said.
Some of the issues identified in the surveys include frustration across the general workforce with the lack of communication and response from the DoD Global Service Desk, and network performance issues.
