The Department of the Navy (DON) Chief Information Officer is being directed to partner with the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and Director, and the Director for Office of the Chief Management Officer to take proactive measures to identify, assess, and eliminate redundant systems and applications throughout the organization.
Operation CATTLE DRIVE is meant “to accelerate the modernization and transformation of our IT capabilities by ensuring that decisions made to sunset or rationalize unneeded, obsolete, unproductive, insecure, and un-auditable IT systems and applications are realized.”
Under the operation, portfolio managers and IT capability owners will be responsible for “developing transition plans with clear system and application sunset dates with no extension.” The plans will require the endorsement of key stakeholders and eliminate investment redundancy and overlapping business and operational capabilities.
“The [DON] maintains an excessive number of Information Technology (IT) systems, networks, and applications in an overly complex architecture, which affects the Department’s ability to transform operations and remain agile in responding to and gaining a competitive edge over our adversaries,” a memorandum for distribution said. “The abundance and variation of these IT capabilities creates unnecessary complexity that hinders our ability to achieve an advantage by perpetuating isolated data silos, resulting in an increased cyber-attack surface, and enabling unnecessary operational risks and potential material weaknesses.”
