“We’re trying to drive to create an OSD IT enterprise,” Danielle Metz, director of IM&T within OSD, said of the new directorate Thursday at CyberTalks, presented by CyberScoop. Metz was publicly announced as the director of the new office last week, and she reports to Pentagon Director of Administration and Management (DA&M) Michael Donley, who was named CIO of OSD.

“I’m a big proponent of enterprises — I think it’s really important because there’s a lot more commonality than there is uniqueness. And if you’re able to baseline your, what we’ll call common IT, and then allow for that more exquisite mission IT to reside on top of it, really streamlining your processes and understanding and codifying the roles and responsibilities and who’s doing what to whom, and your expectations,” Metz said. “A lot of that is very nascent or nonexistent within OSD. And so here, we truly have a ‘greenfield’ to build upon.”

As such, Metz said her biggest focus in the early going to establish that IT enterprise for OSD is developing a governance structure.

“I know that sounds boring because when people think governance, they automatically think bureaucracy, but it’s not that,” she said. “It’s allowing for a forum for collaboration, for shared ideas to really understand and kind of create what we mean by a unified voice for OSD, and then representing that within a strategic plan, and then associating that strategic plan with resourcing so you can actually deliver.”

She added: “It sounds very simple — it’s always very hard to do. But if you’re clear-eyed about those sequential steps, that’s how you can get to an OSD IT enterprise.”

Metz revealed Thursday that the new IT&M directorate came about after she was tasked with investigating the landscape of OSD’s information technology. The top finding in the study that came out of that exercise was to stand up the new office.

“For a very long time, leadership just didn’t appreciate where technology fit in the execution of the department’s mission,” Metz said of her findings. “It was easier to … take dollars out of the IT budget line and place it into more strategic missions for the department. And all of that left OSD, in particular, without a chief information officer.”

The result was the components that fell under OSD had to “fight individually for themselves to figure out what they needed to do in the IT arena to be able to execute their specific mission and serve the secretary and deputy secretary and their mission — what we’re trying to achieve,” she said.

Now, Metz’s IT&M directorate will serve to advocate for those components and unite them, similar to what CIOs do for the military services, defense agencies and field activities, she said.

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In his new capacity, Donley tapped long-time Pentagon IT executive Danielle Metz as director of the IM&T function, which will oversee efforts to strategically modernize OSD’s complex information enterprise.

“Recent cost-driven IT consolidation efforts, coupled with increased demand due to remote work environments and rapid advancements in technology, have highlighted the need for strengthened oversight of OSD IT resources,” Hicks wrote in an internal DOD memorandum on Sept. 30. “This includes identifying and integrating IT requirements across Principal Staff Assistants, speaking with a unified voice in coordinating OSD IT requirements with the Joint Service Provider, and providing for regular cybersecurity and technology updates.” 

The Pentagon on Thursday made a public announcement of this shift and released Hicks’ memo.

In this new capacity, Donley will serve as OSD’s cyber risk manager, drive collaboration between the office and IT service providers to improve capabilities and pave the way for system revamps. On the heels of its establishment, his team will first focus on creating a framework for the integration of IT activities across all OSD components resource requirements baseline for the office, and a standardized memorandum of agreement for shared service support between it and the Joint Service Provider.

The components under the purview of the new OSD CIO will include functions like the various undersecretaries of defense focused on budget, policy, personnel and readiness, sustainment, acquisition, and research and engineering, among others, as well as other administrative elements.

This role differs from that of DOD CIO John Sherman, who serves as the principal adviser to the secretary of defense on mission-critical IT functions across the entire Department of Defense. The officials within IM&T will work to help implement policies from other Pentagon entities including the Department of Defense CIO and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, which Hicks previously launched.

IM&T progress updates and recommendations will be delivered through OSD’s management forum.

“Our OSD senior leaders and workforce must have access to a modern digital experience in providing their advice to the secretary in conducting the business of this department,” Hicks wrote in the newly released memo. “Within 60 days, the DA&M will submit an implementation plan describing the key actions and phases supporting the orderly initiation and focused execution of an effective, efficient, and enhanced OSD IT Enterprise.”

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The software tool, known as the Secret and Below Releasable Environment (SABRE), was designed to facilitate information sharing between the computer networks of the U.S. and other militaries during joint operations, and it will be integrated into the DOD’s Mission Partner Environment.

“The initial operation operational capabilities for what we’re calling SABRE … will be delivered this spring or summer. I think it is the summer. And then we need to continue to work with the combatant commands — [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] being the first — to be able to start with their implementation paths,” said Danielle Metz, chief information technology strategist in the office of the secretary of defense.

Combatant commands and international partners will need to migrate their mission applications into that environment, she noted during remarks at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference.

The Pentagon’s CIO “needs to ensure that we’re working with the mission partners to be able to refactor and decide how they’re going to move those mission applications into SABRE, because that’s how this is all going to work. It’s not enough just to have the technology. We need to make sure we have mission applications in there, and that the users know how to use it, and that it is all working together,” Metz said.

SABRE will tie into what the Pentagon calls the Mission Partner Environment (MPE), which aims to facilitate collaboration between combatant commands and foreign allies.

“The Mission Partner Environment provides the ability for DOD and mission partners to exchange information with all participants within a specific partnership or coalition, as well as supports commanders’ execution of critical jointwide warfighting functions,” Metz said.

The initiative requires intensive collaboration between the U.S. and partner governments across vast geographic divides, multiple time zones and a diverse technology set, she said.

The Pentagon has struggled with the MPE, she acknowledged.

“The combatant commanders have been screaming for the need to be able to seamlessly be able to collaborate not only internally … but across the mission partners. And that mission partner can mean anything to anybody, depending on where you are located and depending on what that actual mission is. And so, quite frankly, the department has struggled for years to be able to articulate what was meant by Mission Partner Environment and then to be able to transition from a very physically network-centric type environment to a more cloud-based one,” she said.

The Pentagon has been working on the initiative for the past three years. The secretary of the Air Force has been serving as the executive agent, while the DOD CIO is the principal staff adviser working with the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

“The idea is that we want to be able to blend the intel aspects as well as the [command and control] aspects together in a cloud-based approach,” Metz said.

She added: “I think that we’ve moved along from having a perfect solution, or what we thought would be a perfect solution, and then delivering it to being able to set minimum viable products that we can easily build upon and get that user feedback so that we can improve when and where it’s needed.”

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