Enterprise Web 2.0 and the Department of Defense

As we've mentioned in the past in this blog, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is a JackBe customer and an avid adopter of Web 2.0 technologies. Just this past week I had the pleasure to speak on the CTO Panel at DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Chicago, the IT show sponsored by the DIA. It only took a few minutes on the exhibit floor to appreciate the emergence of Web 2.0 as a important initiative in government.

One of the mandates of John Howard, Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (the title is very telling in itself!), is that users need to get information in their hands as quickly as possible without government red tape getting in the way. Executive mandates aside, the interest in Enterprise Web 2.0 within this community is not very surprising when you consider that Intelligence analysts are defacto Tacit workers. They are a great example of ad-hoc workers that do something different every day and benefit from correspondingly dynamic and adaptable supporting software systems.

Specifically, this community has shown great interest in using Ajax as an interaction technology and SOA as a business functionality-sharing technology. There's also a lot of buzz around mashups because, I believe, they see the value of ad-hoc integration. Two other issues that were frequently discussed were security and governance. How does an organization, government or not, support common credential authentication and propagation? And these aren't merely rhethorical questions. We heard one speaker give a great practical example: they will support DEERS, a DOD X.509 common credential and attribute service, which is key for any workable multi-service consumption or mashup use. As each service has its own set of user credential, users would have to login to each service which would be unusable.

And like a lot commercial enterprises, the DOD is struggling with other strategic issues related to Web 2.0 technologies like SOA. As the CTO from JFCOM put it, they are already experiencing "SOA silos". Best practices and implementation rubrics are becoming crucial to avoid these kinds of problems. That might sound obvious but most of the big SOA vendors want to own the entire stack and 'integratation' often stops at their own product set. As Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun Microsystems and a keynote speaker at the Conference) said, "Integratable" is important. I couldn't agree more.

As always, the DIA (and the DOD in general) has a lot to teach us commercial folks.