Innovations in Collaboration
DISA’S NCES COLLABORATION SERVICE CONTRACT PROVIDES ADVANTAGES IN SERVICE, PRICING AND STRUCTURE.
Network-centric operations require that diverse groups of actors be able to collaborate in real time in a variety of situations, from the immediacy of combat to the longer-range mission planning. This involves gaining access to a common set of data over a network, and being able to communicate with other users via text, voice and video.
A pilot returning to base after a successful mission might observe a column of enemy vehicles, for example, but not be able to attack the target with the weapons on board. Instead, the pilot communicates information about the target via a network-enabled on-board computer to ground forces, regional and CONUS-based joint task force planners, various dispersed intelligence experts and other airborne aircraft. Redirecting gunships requires joint task force planners to confirm the coordinates and approve the strike while ground commanders simultaneously verify that friendly forces are clear of the area.
In a planning scenario, a joint task force might receive a mission, requiring staff to perform a multifaceted mission analysis. The consolidated results are presented in a briefing with between 50 and 100 active participants, including the task force commander and staff officers, and the commanders and primary staff of the services and functional components— adding up to as many as 500 more participants. In this situation, participants would need to be able to see the briefing materials and hear the discussion in order to build an immediate and common understanding of the situation. The participants and the extended audience would also require the ability to generate immediate collaboration sessions amongst themselves based on the content of the briefing.
To help in these and a wide range of other situations, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) recently awarded a $17 million managed services contract to IBM Global Services to provide a suite of collaboration capabilities.
CONTRACT FEATURES
DISA is not new to providing collaboration tools, doing so already through the Defense Collaborative Tools Suite (DCTS). Nor are the capabilities being provided by IBM unique. Nevertheless, there are several remarkable aspects to this contract, both in the infrastructure that it deploys and in the service model it pursues.
First, the contract leverages an existing commercial collaboration service. Second, it is the first use of a commercially managed service for an enterprise service. Third, use of a managed service allows DISA to apply a service model to the contract in which pricing is done strictly on a usage basis.
In addition, DISA is seeking a second contractor to provide collaboration services in order to foster competition between the vendors and keep the service relevant.
“All of the combatant commands have one or more instantiations of the DCTS or other collaboration tools to manage command and control of deployed forces,” explained Rebecca Harris, director of Global Information Grid Enterprises Services at DISA. “DCTS has served its purpose for a number of years, but DISA has recognized the limitations inherent to the local implementation, that collaborating across organizational boundaries remains a difficult challenge. It is our intention to promote cross-organization collaboration by implementing enterprise services that require very little, if any, customization to work in the DoD environment.”
There were two baskets of key capabilities requested by DISA. Within the Web conferencing capability, DISA wanted text messaging, whiteboarding, application sharing, file transfer, and audio and video communications. Within the instant messaging section, DISA sought file transferring, audio communications integration and group chats.
“Our current collaboration infrastructure is very platform-centric,” said Harris. “It carries a large footprint in which combatant commands are required to manage servers and respond to the need for software and hardware upgrades. This NCES collaboration service contract allows us to move from a thick-client to a thinclient environment, in which users click on a URL to access the service.”
The structure and content of the arrangement provides several important advantages. By leveraging an existing commercial infrastructure, the program realizes accelerated service availability, removes the need to perform integration and software development activities, and eliminates the need to procure and deploy hardware.
Users also benefit from immediate enhancements to the capabilities and reduced technical risks. Using a managed service removes the Department of Defense from managing the capabilities, thus facilitating a service model that provides the collaboration service as a commodity and allows for a usage-based pricing structure. This, in turn, allows for the selection of a second vendor that could provide similar services, based on the preferences of users, by clicking a button on the desktop.
“It is the government’s intention to provide collaboration services as a commodity,” Harris explained. “Authorization to connect to the DoD-owned network, whether military, government civilian or contractor, should come with the ability to exchange information with other users. The entire Department of Defense is our customer. If a person has a Common Access Card, he or she will be able to initiate a collaborative session.”
IBM was selected because it “represented the best overall value to the government in terms of technical solution, implementation, past performance and price,” according to Harris. “Each of these categories was exhaustively evaluated independently by representatives from each of the DoD combatant commands, services and agencies. We also had participation from interested intelligence agencies.”
One of DISA’s top technical priorities for selecting the collaboration service was the ability to reach the myriad of DoD networks with minimal impact on those networks. “IBM provides this capability by offering both a traditional software installation and thin browser-based client that does not require administrative access to the machine,” Harris said. “The government doesn’t need to worry about software and hardware upgrades.”
PRE-EXISTING TOOLS
IBM‘s offering to DISA was based on a pre-existing set of collaboration tools, explained Linda Marshall, director of IBM’s DoD agency initiatives. “IBM happens to have strong technology and service offerings that coincide with what DISA was trying to accomplish,” she said. “So when DISA put out a request for proposals for the NCES collaboration service, the IBM team was able to provide an offering that met and exceeded their needs. It is all commercial off-the-shelf technology that is able to scale to DoD’s huge requirements. That is why the offering is so powerful.”
IBM is hardly new to providing collaboration tools and services. Its Lotus offering provides a collaboration capability to many commercial clients, including large organizations. On the military side, IBM has provided collaboration tools similar, although not identical, to the NCES offering to the Navy for the last few years.
The structure of the contract calls for the government to pay for collaboration services on a usage basis. “Instead of paying for software licenses, the contract allows the government to pay for services actually used,” Harris explained. “It is similar to a cell phone plan and we are excited about it.”
DISA’s pricing scheme differs from the typical commercial model, according to Marshall.
DISA actually considered three pricing models: per seat, per minute and concurrent usage. The per-seat model charges a set license fee for each named user. DISA decided this model was cost prohibitive because DoD has a very large potential user base, many of whom will use the service infrequently. The per-minute model charges a rate for each minute of service used. This model provides for an uncertain and fluctuating monthly bill.
The concurrent usage model, on the other hand, charges a set rate to allow up to a given number of users to use the service concurrently. This model provides a predictable monthly cost while allowing for a very large user base to include the unanticipated user and some users continuously logged into the service. Spikes in usage are being handled by paying the vendor based on an averaging of concurrent usage over a period of several months.
“DISA came up with a creative approach to smooth the peaks and valleys of usage,” Marshall explained, “especially if there are major surges because of a particular incident or event. You can have wild swings in usage in the DoD environment, and that is a difficult thing to deal with financially. This model provides some level of reasonable predictability in the charges to avoid gigantic peaks and valleys and have a smoother payment curve. Our system can keep track of usage based on the pricing scheme that DISA asked us to bid against.”
The DISA approach contrasts with the traditional method of acquiring hardware and purchasing an enterprise software license for a specific number of users. The service model presents a number of advantages. “Users would get the benefit of the natural progression of the capability,” Marshall said. “If clients are not happy they won’t use the tools, so there is a natural incentive to continue offer best possible capability. Also, DISA is essentially placing systems administration, training and help desk operations on IBM’s shoulders to manage.”
FOSTERING COMPETITION
DISA is looking for a second service provider in order to “foster competition while providing the DoD users with their choice of service,” Harris said. “The concept is that users would have two collaboration choices on their unclassified and classified workstations from which to choose. It is DoD’s intention to pay the two service providers based upon the frequency with which their services are utilized.”
Users would choose their preferred collaboration service by clicking the appropriate button on their desktops. Both providers would be paid based on usage. “The competition will be centered around improved capabilities, ease of use and other things important to users,” Harris said. “It would take DoD out of the requirements business and get the vendors to continuously improve their services in order to get more users to hit their button rather than the other button.”
IBM’s perspective on the prospect of a second vendor is that “this it is DISA’s prerogative to pursue,” said Marshall, adding, “IBM has an incredibly robust offering and we anticipate that users will be satisfied with it.”
How and when DISA will choose a second vendor has not yet been established, according to Harris.
The service offering embodied in the NCES collaboration service contract is a first for DoD, to Marshall’s knowledge, and it is “certainly the first offering of its kind IBM has done for DoD.
“This is a logical model for this kind of capability,” Marshall added. “It is very doable for a collaboration capability. Other applications are much more complex in that they must interface with other systems and have a lot of other issues. That is why DISA decided to tackle collaboration first. Its elements make it very straightforward and lend itself to this type of offering.
“I think it is an absolute milestone in terms of the wave of the future,” Marshall continued. “The great expansion of information on demand requires the ability to take heterogeneous capabilities and offer them as services to clients. It is an opportunity to reach many users, all of whom will have access to one ubiquitous capability. The alternative often is to implement diverse capabilities that often don’t work together.”
The collaboration capability also has the advantage of facilitating working remotely. “People cannot be in the same room for meetings,” Marshall noted. “This is true whether it is driven by the far-flung locations where personnel are deployed, or whether it involves base realignment and closures and the ensuing shifts in DoD population centers. For all of these reasons, it will be beneficial for them to have these capabilities.”
As for DISA’s way forward, Harris explained that the agency will gain approval to operate the service at the enterprise level, and then work closely with officials from those organizations who require additional assistance. “DISA is responsible for managing the implementation of NCES Collaboration Services,” she said. “However, multiple organizations from across the department have contacted us regarding their interest in fielding a similar or identical capability within their own environments.
“As an enterprise service that is browser based,” she noted, “the concept of a traditional rollout no longer applies.” ♦
