Remember that note from the DoD CIO that designated DISA as the priority choice for defense agencies seeking cloud services? Well, it may not be so any more.  For all the bureaucratic hangers-on, don’t kid yourself — this is really significant. Right now, every defense IT contractor is rubbing their hands and licking their chops.

DoD rescinds DISA Cloud-Broker

For years industry has shared, mostly at the bar and in side conversations at every IT conference, that they can do the job cheaper, faster, and more effectively than DISA.  But in public, no one wants to step up against the powerful establishment that can easily shut a business out of their business.  You have to be on the list to work with them and getting on the list means having someone vouch you in the door — essentially to get the job you have to already be doing the job with them.

This is not to downplay the good work that DISA performs for the DoD in working with an infrastructure that is struggling to rebuild itself while traveling inflight at warp speed. They have a huge challenge.  The problem is that too often the focus of the organization is on the infrastructure itself, rather than on the results that the rest of DoD wants and needs.

Combatant commanders, organizational leaders, and senior decision makers increasingly want to know how they can use all the data potentially available to them to improve their mission or business. That requires data discovery and advanced analytics in real-time ways at their fingertips wherever they are in the world.  They don’t care about the infrastructure itself — if fact, it should be transparent to them because that is what they’re used to with the rest of the world in the cloud.  DISA is an extraordinarily competent and technical agency, but when the bureaucracy can’t address the business and mission of their users, they fall back into discussions about the technologies and technical yada yada.

Industry and the information technology business has to go to school (and stay in class) in a quick study way to give their users and customers what they want — otherwise they’ll lose the business. High school kids don’t buy SmartPhones because of the infrastructure, they just want to connect to the world now and do it in ways that grandma or the CEO next door never imagined.

If DISA wants to offer cloud services, they need to talk less (read: nada) about the infrastructure and focus on how to directly provide services that improve their users’ missions. It’s great to claim victory on enterprise e-mail, but that is just one aspect of  the cloud and industry will continue to challenge that arena.  In the meantime, they may be missing the real opportunity to provide data discovery and analytics as a service, allowing the Services and Defense Agencies to really use their (and the rest of the world’s) data to improve the mission and see some return against their IT investment