Building the Big Portal
ARMY KNOWLEDGE ONLINE SELECTED AS FOUNDATION FOR DEPARTMENTWIDE WEB ACCESS SITE.
Army Knowledge Online (AKO), the Web portal that has become the linchpin of on-line life for nearly two million Army and other users, will become the foundation for the departmentwide Defense Knowledge Online (DKO).
The DKO board of directors in September chose AKO the portal of choice for the next generation of DKO.
DKO’s mission is to provide an Internet- based portal for department users to access information on DoD networks. The alternative to adapting AKO into DKO was to create a small independent portal and build competencies around it.
“Certainly an overriding factor was that it’s the biggest operational portal that any of the services have right now, with over 1.8 million account holders,” said Colonel Thomas Hogan, deputy program executive officer, Enterprise Information Systems (EIS). “I always believed that AKO was the only way to go. We’re already scaled to two million, so adding a couple more million is not a big deal for us.”
DKO developers are working out the details on an implementation timetable. “There was a contingency to the decision: The program office has to show that our path to a solo-compliant portal product is executable. We’re going to do that; it’s a non-issue and I’m sure we’ll be able to satisfy everybody’s question about that,” Hogan said.
“We’ll go as fast as money and contract activity allow us to do. We will start migrating people in the next 90 to 120 days,” Hogan reported. “It’s not a joint program, so the funding will come from each service and agency for their employees, both military and civilian.”
Always with a change of this magnitude there will be cultural challenges, and DKO plans to work through them. “As a PEO guy, I’m more concerned about the technical challenges. We’re very confident that the portal scales well. To take on an operation of this magnitude, there’s an ‘unknown unknown’ out there and we’ll deal with it when we get to it,” Hogan said.
“I know of nothing right now that we can’t overcome technically. My ultimate goal is to meet the desires of [Lieutenant General Charles E. Croom Jr.] and [Lieutenant General Steven Boutelle]. Simply stated, to have one DoD portal where we can give the biggest bang to the buck to the taxpayer and ensure that all of us in DoD can freely share information to help us fight the global war on terrorism,” Hogan continued.
Croom is director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which is overseeing the project along with the Army. Boutelle is the Army chief information officer/G-6.
Colonel Jim Barrineau will be the new project director for AKO. “Colonel Barrineau’s got a great resume and he’s got a lot of technical background. The plus that he brings to the office is that he’s coming out of DISA,” Hogan added. “He’s got a good relationship with the folks in DISA and obviously we’ve got to work closely with DISA to make this a success.”
Developers want to make the PM office a multi-service office, Hogan said, and have been working with the Air Force and Navy to bring personnel in. “Right now they have a few DISA employees in there but it’s pretty much a pure Army office. They’re working with all the services to bring in both military and civilian employees from the services to make it a multi-service office.
“I believe we’re a few weeks away from having an Air Force lieutenant colonel assigned. We already have a sailor in the office; she is a DISA employee. We have one or two other DISA civilians in the PM office,” Hogan concluded. “This is a cooperative venture with all the services. We feel it will be the right way to organize the offices with all services represented.”
MIGRATION STRATEGY
“Instead of us building a portal in the Network Centric Enterprise Services program office, we looked across the DoD and saw that the Army had a very robust portal,” said Becky Harris, DISA’s director of Global Information Grid Enterprise Services. “Working with the Army we signed a memorandum of agreement to adopt their portal for DKO. That memorandum was signed this past spring, and we’ve been partnering with the Army.
“Through the leadership of General Croom and General Boutelle, other services, organizations and initiatives have joined in the evolution of DKO—the Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, the Director of National Intelligence chief information officer and the Horizontal Fusion Programs of Record,” Harris said.
DISA is working with the Army to identify requirements and to work out a migration strategy to expand the capabilities of DKO and leverage what other good products or capabilities already exist in the department.
The migration strategy “will be a continuous evolution for us because our portal will be not only providing information and content, but will allow us to access our Web services through the portal,” Harris said. “If Web services are identified and it’s decided that these be accessible through the portal, the portal will continue to get more robust, have more content and provide more access to information over time.”
There have been challenges to adopting the AKO portal, Harris acknowledged. “As you bring a diverse community together, every community has their requirements and priorities based upon their user population and the schedules they have in place.
“As we reconcile that and understand where we have requirements for common functions and which is the best way to go, then that’s one dimension. The other is the functions that are common: How do we prioritize them into the schedule and work through those issues? There are a number of working groups and boards that have been put in place to help facilitate the effort and the dialogue,” she said.
Croom and Boutelle co-chair the DKO board of directors. DISA’s senior level leadership is directly involved in this effort. They are strongly participating in the governance board; there is also a review board and a technical board. They are bringing in expertise from across the DISA family and working to help move the effort along.
“We have funding for each of our initial efforts and we’re trying to leverage that to build this joint capability. It’s going to be a good result of teaming,” Harris concluded. “It’s going to help us provide greater operational efficiencies, such as providing common tools and sharing infrastructure, by helping us identify where we have duplication/redundancy and over time working to eliminate and/or consolidate our efforts. In the interim, we still have to continue to support the legacy systems and that’s where our migration strategy helps us plan out our transition.”
SITE IMPROVEMENTS
The planned morphing of AKO into DKO will cap a remarkable period of growth for the portal, which had 97,000 users in October 2000, a year after it was online. After Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, usage grew rapidly. On March 17 of this year, a new record was established with approximately 755,000 log-ins in one day.
Ease of use is clearly a factor in the site’s popularity. Account holders can access AKO from any computer and use all services including e-mail and instant messaging. This has proven effective in building soldier morale and motivation. It has also allowed military to exchange information and lessons learned, which has been beneficial for soldiers deployed or those who are preparing for deployment so they can grasp issues they are facing.
It also facilitates rapid responses to emergencies. The day after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, for example, Boutelle ordered an online assistance center. Several hours later, AKO had a Katrina information center, offering a virtual community area where active Army, reserve and National Guard members and their families could contact each other and locate financial and housing assistance.
To further improve the user experience, AKO this summer launched a new homepage designed to help users easily navigate the site and find information quickly.
“We received a lot of feedback from our customer base stating that the old AKO homepage was overwhelming and had too much information,” said Colonel Taylor Chasteen, project director, AKO. “We thought that better organization and a more elegant design would facilitate the user experience.”
Users now see a new design, important news items on the top of the page and a change in how information is organized. There are easier navigation tools like scrolling tabs, drop-down menus and picture icons. The left navigation bar on the former homepage was removed to allow more space for content from administrators.
The AKO homepage, last revised two years ago, will have more frequent updates. “We tried to focus on the concept of continuous improvement and increased usability,” said Diane Bartley, leader of the AKO team. “We wanted to make things cleaner and easier to find, and we tried to eliminate the number of clicks and scrolling the users would have to utilize.”
AKO has received positive feedback about the new look. “We have a very vocal user community and we have received so many positive comments,” Bartley said. Those visiting AKO for the first time since the modification can click on the “AKO Homepage Upgrade Page” link for more information on the changes. Users can take an interactive tour of the new homepage and look at a cheat sheet which gives a before and after version of this page.
With the current upgrade complete, the team is now working to improve the search function, according to Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Fritzsche, chief of operations.
A major issue in establishing the AKO was accessing data contained in the high number of legacy systems the Army had built worldwide. Physically replacing or otherwise integrating those systems would have been expensive, so the Army instead chose a single data warehouse using Oracle.
The Army eventually built a second datacenter. It uses automation software so both centers can work together in configuring and coordinating the AKO infrastructure.
Lockheed Martin leads a team of subcontractors in managing and administering AKO. Subcontractors include Computer Sciences Corp., Internosis, Roundarch and SAIC.
The AKO Enterprise Services (AKO-ES) program calls for a single contractor team to take over the management and administration of AKO, developing and implementing a strategic plan for streamlining operations and improving service to warfighters. ♦
