Navy Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen described the department’s focus on finding IT efficiencies in a blog post on Thursday as part of the Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy’s realization it cannot continue to do business the same as before.
Areas of increased efficiencies include data center consolidation, enterprise software licensing, application rationalization, an enterprise portal environment, review of IT acquisition programs for enterprise effectiveness, video teleconferencing optimization and enterprise IT workforce initiatives.
For the data center consolidation, Halvorsen plans to target mid-sized data centers that provide services to an individual command and could be migrated to enterprise-level data centers run by the Navy, Marine Corps, DISA or other military departments.
The department also has more than 1,600 applications currently running, many of which overlap. The Navy is developing a process for reviewing these applications and determine which should be optimized for use across the enterprise and which should be killed, Halvorsen said.
He also noted that the department needs to operate as a true enterprise and start using enterprise-wide software licensing agreements to save money. The Marine Corps will be leading this effort.
“All proposed IT efficiency courses of action will be supported by a robust business case analysis, and will be reviewed and approved by the DON Information Enterprise Governance Board,” Halvorsen wrote. “As necessary, the analysis will be reviewed by the DON Large Group, which includes the Under Secretary of the Navy, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations and the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps. In this way, we will ensure that we understand the potential costs and benefits associated with pursuing a particular IT efficiency initiative and ensure the Department’s leadership is fully supportive of pursuing proposed courses of action.”
