I have great respect for Dave Bennett and the task he faces as DISA CIO. He is on track in pushing for enterprise solutions that leverage COTS solutions without driving modifications that make them no-longer COTS.

Focusing on addressing ways to change business process to leverage available solutions is a big cultural shift and is likely to face some resistance from many system integrators whose business is based on butts-in-a-seat to tailor those solutions to existing in-house business functions. However, there is a business opportunity that DISA is still missing, which is a step beyond Infrastructure, SW, and Platform as a service.

The purpose of information technology is to improve the mission or business. Improving the business generally involves making decisions and that almost always involves data discovery and advanced analytics.  There is a business case to be made for DISA offering Analytics as a Service, allowing its defense user-base to pay for the end-game analysis directly, without worrying or caring about the infrastructure, platform, or SW that is behind the curtain.

Most CEOs and C-suite leaders will openly share they are not in the business of owning an IT infrastructure and if they can get someone else to own it, run it, and provide it at the level of service expectation they need to accomplish their mission they are really happy campers.

The operational users in DOD services and agencies don’t care that much about the technology behind the curtain — they just know they need to leverage all the data available to improve their mission or business function. Commercial businesses are ready to take on that task as cloud service providers. In defense solutions they need to meet security and availability requirements as part of the first consideration. Most of those vendors pursuing FedRAMP certification offer up IAS, SAS, PAS. DISA should look hard at standing up a line of business around Analytics as a Service.