Apps4Army means more than the Apps alone

The US Army CIO/G6 is on the cusp of shattering a paradigm.


Lack of interoperability, high SW license costs, high specialized HW costs, proprietary code, high Dev / FSR support costs and, last but not least, poor UIs have hindered our Army's Battle Command (BC) capabilities for years. The non-POR rise has taken hold and in many ways surpassed the POR offerings (CIDNE, TIGR, Axis Pro, JADOCS anyone? - Not to mention CPOF came directly from DARPA as a non-POR). The CIO/G6 is posturing to align BC capabilities with commercial market offerings and change the combat / material developer.

Apps4Army is a game changer not because of the initial winning apps but because it has proven the Army may move forward with the "new" plan. Build apps - web (thin, thick), mobile and mobile native apps - in line with the Army's approved SDKs and APIs - and do it on 30/60 day dev / launch cycles. WIN-T (Increment 2 and beyond) will serve as an enabler to provide War-Fighters a ubiquitous network, robust bandwidth and hardware agnostic access to the cloud based services as well as authoritative data sources. End-User experience with "capabilities" will further catalyze this initiative as network permeation throughout Army echelons continues. In short order, the Army may be able to assemble mission specific apps in an on demand manner. This is End-User empowerment.


To see the existing mobile apps now, go to the US Army Marketplace (with CAC card). Some apps are available through Apple App store and Android Market. The BC environment is going to get real interesting in the very near future.

Enterprise Email is GNEC Linchpin

The US Army is going back to the drawing board with its enterprise email ambitions (reported by FCW on 28Jun10).

This enterprise email "campaign" is about much more than a single web based email account for soldiers to access anywhere in the world - it may very well be the linchpin for Global Network Enterprise Construct (GNEC) ambitions.

Right now, many Army users potentially have a minimum of 3 email accounts and they may or may not be linked and accessible from anywhere in the world: AKO (web based), local NEC (Outlook or Blackberry), and a tactical Exchange account (TOC based Outlook client). Of course you must necessarily duplicate this to a certain extent for SIPR side. Some AKO/DKO capabilities require yet another username for access. Multiple accounts and lack of access from anywhere goes against everything we know to be capable, productive and required in 2010.

What the Army is really after is a Single Sign On (SSO) - access to multiple enterprise based capabilities. Single email is really a single GNEC username. A singular username enables true cloud computing for information assurance, facilitates mobile adoption and does away with static IP addresses. All this via the rapidly maturing AKO/DKO Portal and a ubiquitous WIN-T network capability while addressing scalability and security. This is the enterprise capability for BPM / Battle Command and End User experience the Army is striving for.

This is a very complex situation and it would certainly benefit from a COTS solution.
End User Pipedream = We end up with something like Zoho.