Intel IT is coming together

Dale Meyerrose's attempt to bring the national intelligence machine out of the IT shadows is starting to pay off.

The CIO for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said from enterprise architecture documents to human resources integration to joint ventures with a number of non-intel agencies, things have begun to come together.

Meyerrose, speaking at the Government Electronics and IT Association conference in Falls Church, Va., said the fiscal 2008 budget they are putting together "tells a story of collectiveness and where interdependencies are."

He said ODNI no longer will write all of its own software and develop its own systems. Meyerrose wants to buy commercial systems first, borrow it from other federal agencies second and develop them internally lastly.

"Buying is the most efficient," he said. "Borrowing has some issues because we have to figure out how to support it. And developing our own systems is more costly."

He admits some in ODNI have pushed back against this new way of doing business, but he expected it and is dealing with it.

Meyerrose also said ODNI would start using software licensing agreements across the department as a way to standardize and take advantage of volume discounts.

One way he is dealing with the pushback is through the development of enterprise architectures. Meyerrose said ODNI director John Negroponte signed off on the first set of EA artifacts earlier this month.

"The artifacts will allow people to develop their own architectures," he said. "There are still a couple of policies that need to be signed off, but now the program offices can start developing their as-is and to-be architectures."

He added that the artifacts integrated the Office of Management and Budget's Federal Enterprise Architecture reference models.

"In the past, some said we didn't have to follow OMB dictations because they weren't appropriate for us," he said. "I don't see anything that isn't appropriate yet. We have to figure out how to be part of the team."

Meyerrose said the IT security certification and accreditation policy rewrite effort ends today. He said over the next two weeks the leaders of the teams would compile results and by early November present them to him, Defense CIO John Grimes and Ron Ross, a senior computer scientist and information security researcher for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

ODNI will release two or three security standards publicly before the end of December. Meyerrose's office then will issue four or five more during the first quarter of 2007 and then release the more complicated standards by the summer, he said.

Joint ventures with DOD and other agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, State and Justice, also have been progressing, Meyerrose said.

He said DOD and ODNI published a joint strategy to move to Internet Protocol version 6 in June. Additionally, Defense modified a number of its contracts, specifically those around net-centric services, so ODNI could use them more easily.

Jason Miller is assistant managing editor of Washington Technology's sister publication, Government Computer News.