On May 9th, 2013 it will be the 10th anniversary of the issuance of the DoD’s Net-Centric Data Strategy. In honor of this, I would like to highlight a collection of slides that were used (many, many times) to illustrate the concepts of net-centricity, the data strategy, Communities of Interest, and User-Defined Operational Pictures.
These slides are quite dated… last updated in 2006, but there are some great illustrations and concepts that remain relevant. The Data Strategy was a brilliant work that had great promise for changing the way people see IT in defense, in my opinion. It’s tragic that various personnel changes and other events shifted the focus elsewhere.
Sooo… What are your thoughts on JIE? http://defensesystems.com/articles/2013/04/22/jie.aspx
Well. I have a few thoughts on JIE, but they are not worth sharing at this time.
Anything I have to say today would probably be unkind, unfair, and unwise.
This article from Defense Systems sounds slightly … off … to me. I suspect that either the PR guy from LM exaggerated a bit, or Defense Systems misquoted him, or both. It seems likely that it was a BPA with a $217M ceiling – possibly multiple award. Which is not to say that the PR guy was wrong; but the article makes it sound like LM won a contract to build JIE, which is not, I suspect, precisely what happened. (I was not involved in writing the SOW or source selection.)
I’ll be curious to learn what contract type it is. It seems like there’s much pressure to do as much as possible FFP, (as at least one current DoD CIO support contracts is) which makes no sense for this type of work, IMHO. I’ll be interested to see if wisdom prevailed. Using an inappropriate contract type creates all sorts of shenanigans.