It’s been a decade of major change for the Military Health System in general, and the Defense Health Agency in particular. From its beginning as primarily a shared services provider, DHA has grown to become the sole operator of all of the military’s hospitals and clinics, the overseer of the TRICARE health plans and a central player in most other aspects of Defense health care. On this episode of On DoD, Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, DHA’s director, talks with Jared about the agency’s new strategic plan – including her intent to move DHA from a long period of transition to the “execution phase ..read more

On this edition of On DoD, Jared talks with two leaders from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) who are experimenting with technologies like 5G and proliferated low-earth orbit satellites. We'll talk about the massive increase in bandwidth those technologies allow and the improvements they might enable -- both for quality of life issues when sailors are underway, and for mission requirements. Our guests: -- Rob Wolborsky, NAVWAR's chief engineer -- Ron Wolfe, the Navy's technical warrant holder for mobility  ..read more

On this edition of On DoD: Up until a year ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a bit of an outlier when it came to IT management and governance. Despite having 19,000 employees, there was no single person in charge of making sure those workers had a decent user experience, and no one in charge of delivering common IT services. That changed last October, when Danielle Metz became the OSD chief information officer. She joins Jared Serbu to talk about what’s happened and what’s ahead, including the impending rollout of Microsoft 365 at the classified level. Later in the hour, Federal ..read more

Up until this summer, it wasn’t uncommon for Navy IT users, even at the most senior ranks in the Pentagon, to plan part of their mornings around the 10 minutes it took for their computers to boot. But as part of a concerted effort to improve user experience, the service has shown it’s possible to cut those maddening daily waits to only about 30 seconds. On this episode of On DoD, Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy's acting chief technology officer talks with Jared about what the Navy's learned from its digital experience pilots so far, and how quickly they might be able to scale throug ..read more

The Pentagon’s decades-old planning and budgeting process doesn’t have a lot of fans – least of all the people who work within it every day. The American Society of Military Comptrollers has been surveying the DoD financial management workforce for their views about the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process as part of a task force on PPBE reform. Among other things, ASMC found 71 percent of the workforce thinks PPBE keeps the department from quickly responding to its mission needs, and strong majorities say the information technology tools they use to plan hundreds of billions ..read more

The Pentagon has a new plan to improve technology services inside the actual Pentagon – or big parts of it anyway. The first-ever enterprise IT implementation plan for the Office of the Secretary of Defense promises to take a user-centric approach to improving IT services for the 17 major offices that make up OSD. Danielle Metz, the OSD chief information officer talks about the specifics in a wide-ranging discussion with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu ..read more

Holly Joers, the program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems talks with Federal News Network's Jared Serbu and Jason Miller about DoD's ongoing deployment of a new electronic heath record, how the new EHR will work with other federal agencies, and the centrality of data in PEO-DHMS's future mission ..read more

The expert commission Congress has tasked with proposing overhauls to DoD's planning and budgeting processes is still a year away from delivering its final report. But the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has already gathered a huge amount of information. In its first progress report, the commission says it’s held 27 formal meetings, interviewed 280 people and organizations, and launched research studies on more than a dozen topics. For an update on the commission’s work, Jared Serbu talked with the panel's chair and vice chair: Bob Hale, a former DoD comptr ..read more

The Air Force believes it's made significant progress toward improving the cybersecurity of its weapons systems -- both brand new ones, and systems that have been fielded for decades.  On this episode of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two leaders from the Air Force's Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapons Systems (CROWS) about how the Air Force is working to bake cybersecurity into new platforms, and bolt it onto the ones that have been in the inventory for decades ..read more

The expert commission Congress has tasked with proposing overhauls to DoD's planning and budgeting processes is still a year away from delivering its final report. But the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has already gathered a huge amount of information. In its first progress report, the commission says it’s held 27 formal meetings, interviewed 280 people and organizations, and launched research studies on more than a dozen topics. For an update on the commission’s work, Jared Serbu talked with the panel's chair and vice chair: Bob Hale, a former DoD comptr ..read more