The Defense Department (DoD) today unveiled a wide-ranging plan to modernize the agency’s IT networks and compute infrastructure with the aim of providing better user-centric IT capabilities to warfighters around the globe.
The plan – dubbed Fulcrum: DoD Information Technology (IT) Advancement Strategy – “prioritizes user experience and investment in infrastructure that is both agile and scalable to meet the dynamic requirements of operations and opportunities offered by the most modern technologies,” the Pentagon said.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed off on the Fulcrum strategy on June 20, and Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Leslie Beavers unveiled the document at AFCEA International’s TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore today.
Beavers said during her keynote address that the department’s big challenge has always been making “our IT systems as interoperable as we experience in our personal lives.”
Executing on the Fulcrum strategy will follow four major lines off effort, DoD said today in announcing the strategy.
The first of those is to provide joint warfighting IT capabilities and deliver “user-centric IT capabilities that are functional, scalable, sustainable, and secure in today’s dynamic and contested global environments.”
The end result, DoD said, is to “improve the information available to the warfighter in order to gain decision and competitive advantage in high-tempo, multi-domain operations.”
The second line of effort involves an overhaul of IT network and compute capabilities targeting security and efficiency improvements. That effort, DoD said, “focuses on rapidly meeting mission and business needs, leveraging best-in-class technologies and data-centric Zero Trust cybersecurity approach to deliver a secure modernized network that has faster data transfer, lower latency, with improved global dynamic resiliency.”
The third line of effort centers on optimizing IT governance to drive efficiency in service delivery, achieve cost savings and avoidances, and streamline policy for system acquisitions. “This includes the use of robust data capabilities to empower better decision making,” DoD said.
The final line of effort, DoD said, aims to “cultivate a premier digital workforce” by, among other steps, broadening the “DoD Cyber Workforce Framework (DCWF) to focus on the greater digital workforce with the inclusion of work roles for data, AI, and software engineering.”
The goals of that effort are to “ensure that our workforce is ready to deploy emerging technology supporting the warfighter, and DoD continues ongoing efforts to identify, recruit, develop, and retain the best digital talent the country has to offer.”
Beavers explained that the journey to create Fulcrum began in January with a team of about 40 folks.
“This is a community effort,” she said. “It’s called Fulcrum because it sits at the nexus between our national security strategy, our strategic management plans, our really big thinking strategies, our workforce implementation strategies, our software modernization strategy, our cybersecurity strategy, and it gives you tangible steps to take to turn that strategic vision into an operational reality.”
Beavers said the 16-page Fulcrum strategy will be followed by an implementation plan.
“It’s not my vision, it’s the department’s vision,” Beavers said. “It’s the department’s guide to help us as a community get to an interoperable, integrated, digital platform, which cannot be done by anyone alone.”
“I will need your help, and everybody’s help, to turn that vision into reality by changing the decision that you make every day as you’re solving your own problems in the digital workspace,” Beavers concluded. “I need you to prioritize interoperability and security, and Fulcrum helps us do that.”
