The Defense Logistics Agency, the Pentagon's combat logistics support agency, provides the military, other federal agencies and partner-nation armed forces with a full spectrum of logistics, acquisition and technical services. Last year, DLA, which generated more than $38 billion in sales and revenue in 2014, moved to a more enterprise service focus. Federal Times Contributing Editor Steve Watkins spoke with Kathy Cutler, DLA director of information operations (J6) and CIO, about the transition that helped standardize processes, reduce duplication and service customers more effectively.

What did the reorganization within J6 last year accomplish, what were the challenges and how did you address them?

Up until about a year-and-a-half ago, J6 was primarily organized by geography, which meant we had locations in Richmond or Philadelphia or Columbus in the different DLA locations. And there was a J6 entity at each one of those organizations that operated somewhat independently. They each had their own processes. They each had different tool sets. Some of them performed enterprise missions but it was not necessarily always consistent across all of those organizations.

As we were trying to position ourselves for the future, we [asked] 'Is that the organizational structure that will lead to success?' And we determined that it was not because it was causing a lot of inefficiencies and duplication of effort. So, about two years ago, we started on a journey to say let's move to more enterprise processes. So instead of being focused on geography, we are now focused on those enterprise processes.

One example is network and telecommunications. Each one of those geographic sites used to deal with their network issues locally. We now have one organization that looks at the network across DLA to standardize tools, processes, and all of that. And so we did that across the board. And we have roughly about 28,000 people in J6. So it really impacted mostly all of those folks. So folks that were used to being a very geographic base, seeing their supervisor every day, kind of knowing what part they performed on a local level now had to retool a little bit and understand that they now have an enterprise mission, that they weren't just servicing the folks that they see every day. They're servicing a number of folks across the agency that could be across the United States, that could be overseas, wherever they may be.

How many data centers does DLA have supporting it and what is your plan for consolidation going forward?

Currently, DLA has about 23 data centers. We are moving to reduce that to two. And so how we plan to do that is, first of all, we're going to eliminate applications. So we're looking at what we can decommission and provide our services in a different way. And then we're looking to DISA to host a number of our applications. A lot of our critical applications in DLA are already hosted by DISA. But then we're also looking at the milCloud capability that DISA offers.

We have about 180 applications teed up to go into milCloud. We hope to have about 40 to 50 of those up and running in milCloud in about the next 30 days. And then the remaining 120 would be in the next two to three months following that. So that will be the next capability to kind of get us out of the data center business. And then we will obviously look to commercial cloud offerings to see if that's another way that we can get out of that as well. But we're really looking to get out of the data center business by and large across DLA and move that into DISA or into a cloud solution.

There have been some big changes on the DoD policy relating to cloud, on the security as well as the acquisition side. What have those recent changes in policy meant for you in terms of considering the commercial cloud as an option?

We have been looking at cloud options for a while but we're doing a lot of what I will call talking in the department. So I'm very pleased to see the DoD CIO has come out and fully supported moving to the cloud environment and removing some of those security obstacles and things of that nature. I think that's great. I think that's an opportunity for us to really push the envelope a little bit further.

Our frustrations are, it's still a little bit of a lengthy process to get [authorities to operate] approved and certain cloud offerings approved for DoD use. DISA is part of that approval process. We're trying to push that as much as we can so that we have options that we can explore. Right now, from my perspective, we don't have enough of those options in DLA.

Now, it appears that some of the services have been able to crack some of those codes earlier than we have and so we are really trying to get in contact with the services to find out what they did. They have some provisional authorities where they can go to certain cloud providers and put some of their applications in the cloud. We have not cracked that code yet. So we really need to work with them on that.

On the acquisition side, while the CIO instruction really gives the components [and] the services more capability to go out and contract [with commercial cloud providers] on their own, we don't have any contracts in place. We really do want to try this to see if it's all that it's cracked up to be, if there really are the savings that everybody touts from cloud computing. But we've been unable to really move a whole lot in that direction because of the approval process in terms of the provisional authority as well as the acquisition process. But we're going to continue to press and we're looking for any avenue we can [even if it means] partnering with another service to take advantage of what they've already put in place.

About DLA:

38B in sales and revenue in 2014

$120M in achieved efficiencies last year

23 data centers support DLA operations today. Future goal: 2

40 to 50 applications moved to DISA's milCloud

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