Eric Pugh and I are at Day 2 of AFCEA‘s LandWarNet conference.  While we haven’t been in many sessions, we did get to sit in on LTG Sorenson’s lunch briefing today outlining the IT direction that the Army is taking through 2011.  One of the issues that he talked about was the difficulty that units and soldiers faced in portability of their applications from garrison to predeployment to warfighting.  Because connection to applications is not universally portable, maintaining continuity is problematic.

We also attended the Army Knowledge Online Single Sign On session.  They use SharePoint for the SSO solution and then push the SSO to the approximately 450 applications which tie into AKO.  As an aside, we’d prefer that they use JA-SIG’s CAS single sign-on solution.  Instead of needing to be inside a military installation to access AKO, users can sign in from anywhere.

It seems that once the infrastructure is in place, the Army could use a similar approach to allowing soldiers to link in to the applications they need wherever they are in the world.  Pushing applications down and out will grow more important as, as LTG Sorenson said in his opening speech, network centricity is pushed closer to the soldier.

Some other observations:

• Soldiers who in the field are given a broad swath of responsibility and find themselves with that responsibility reduced when they return to garrison are discontented.  That’s no surprise.  If we’re going to be successful at war long term, garrison ops need to adjust to more closely mimic in-theater ops.
• LandWarNet is in Second Life!  I’m glad that the military is learning the value of Second Life.  The SLURL is here.

Jason Hull posted this entry on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 1:51 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.