The US Department of the Navy today issued a new top-level Information Superiority Vision to guide its IT initiatives, updating the original 2020 ISV with a distinct new emphasis on data, Breaking Defense reports.
“ISV 2.0 represents our continued commitment to securely move information from anywhere to anywhere to enable our warfighters to act at the speed of mission,” said Navy Department CIO Jane Rathbun, who oversees IT for both the Navy and the Marine Corps. The evolution from the 2020 original to this new version, she wrote in her LinkedIn post releasing the strategy, “reflects the learning that has occurred and the progress we have made in the last four years.”
The new priorities added in ISV 2.0 cover topics from zero-trust cybersecurity to divestment of outdated tech, what the Navy calls (with a certain grim humor) Operation Cattle Drive. But the biggest, recurring emphasis across all these initiatives is the importance of data: making it accessible, organized, and intelligible to human users and automated systems across the Navy and Marine Corps.
The new strategy aims to “transform the DON [Department of the Navy] into a modern, data-fluent organization that produces and consumes data effortlessly in execution of both warfighting and business missions.”
One word in that sentence bears a heavy burden of ambition: “effortlessly.” Today, sharing data in the Department of the Navy — let alone across the entire Department of Defense — tends to require laborious and often agonizing efforts.
The military does have vast amounts of data, going back decades, on everything from maintenance to manpower to munitions. But officials have long bemoaned the fact that most of it is siloed in aging and incompatible systems, optimized to perform specific missions rather than to share information, and with access restricted by security classifications, Pentagon regulations, or even federal law.
Migrating these “stovepiped” databases from government-run mainframes to the cloud can help ease access, but there’s a lot else to do: purging irrelevant or erroneous entries, reconciling different descriptions or shorthand codes for the same thing, labeling data for easy consumption by AI, and creating a unifying “architecture” or “mesh” with common standards for how data is encoded, transmitted, and shared. Only once the foundational data is in decent shape can high-tech tools like big-data analytics and artificial intelligence be built on that foundation.
The Navy document admits as much. “Delivering decision advantage through authoritative analytics and AI products requires robust and sustained effort to mature our Naval data architecture, adopt mission-enabling governance and standards, and advance DON’s data skills,” the vision says.
Specific action items call for upgrading Jupiter, the Navy’s “enclave” within the DoD-wide Advana data system; “rationalizing” other data analytics platforms; establish common DoN-wide “standards for using, managing, representing, and sharing data”; and using improved governance and high-level leadership to create a workforce culture of sharing data rather than hoarding it.
The Vision also calls for wider, yet more secure sharing of classified information — including to authorized users outside the Navy. “Deliver a secret data-centric ecosystem,” reads one imperative. “Implement a single fabric that supports data of all classifications based on the principles of Zero Trust. Increase our decision advantage by speeding access to data of different classifications for us and our mission partners.”
The document also calls for improving user interfaces, more flexible “portfolio” management of business and cybersecurity systems, and fighting to “protect [electromagnetic] spectrum critical to DoN’s mission.”
