The Department of Defense

Historically, DoD’s information technology (IT) investments have been made to meet the needs of individual projects, progr

AMS, organizations, and facilities. This decentralized approach has resulted in large cumulative costs and a patchwork of capabilities that create cyber vulnerabilities and limit the ability to capitalize on the promise of new developments in IT. In August 2010, the Secretary of Defense directed the consolidation of IT infrastructure to achieve savings in acquisition, sustainment, and manpower costs and to improve DoD’s ability to execute its missions while defending its networks against growing cyber threats. The specific direction was received to consolidate IT infrastructure to optimize for the joint environment and to pursue consolidation in a way that does not preclude future consolidation of IT infrastructure at the DoD enterprise level. During the first quarter of FY 2011, more than 240 representatives from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Military Departments, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), National Security Agency (NSA), and United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) analyzed opportunities to consolidate DoD IT infrastructure through specific initiatives in five functional areas: Network Services, Computing Services, Application & Data Services, End-User Services, and IT Business Processes. Detailed descriptions, initial implementation timelines, and rough-order-of-magnitude (ROM) estimates of the required investments and potential savings were developed for 26 initiatives. Each initiative contributes to one or more of the IT Enterprise goals—increase mission effectiveness, improve cybersecurity, and deliver efficiencies. Preliminary estimates are that this initial set of initiatives will deliver efficiencies of between $1.2 billion and $2.2 billion annually by FY2016 and between $3.2 billion and $5.2 billion over the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP). This effort already has resulted in a direct budget reduction of $1.7 billion across the FYDP in the FY2012 DoD submission to the President’s Budget through specific IT consolidation actions by the Air Force ($1.2 billion) and the Army ($500 million). The DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) Executive Board (CIO EB) is DoD’s senior functional oversight body for IT infrastructure and will be the focal point for IT consolidation governance.

The Components’ progress against their IT consolidation performance measures will be reported through the CIO EB to the Deputy’s Advisory Working Group (DAWG) and the Defense Business Systems Management Committee (DBSMC) as appropriate. Specific changes to DoD’s three core processes—Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE), and Defense Acquisition System (DAS)—are required to address the systemic conditions that lead to DoD’s stove-piped IT infrastructure. The DoD CIO will work with the core process owners to implement the required changes. These efforts will be synchronized with the parallel DoD activities underway to reform DoD IT acquisition. Effective communication is critical to building the DoD-wide commitment that will be required to optimize the DoD IT infrastructure for the joint environment. This document is the initial communication of the Secretary’s intent and will be followed by communications that detail associated policy, performance measures, architectures, and standards.