The Department of the Navy today issued a new top-level Information Superiority Vision (ISV) to guide its IT initiatives, updating the original 2020 ISV with a distinct new emphasis on data.
“ISV 2.0 represents our continued commitment to securely move information from anywhere to anywhere to enable our warfighters to act at the speed of mission,” said Navy Department CIO Jane Rathbun, who oversees IT for both the Navy and the Marine Corps. The evolution from the 2020 original to this new version, she wrote in her LinkedIn post releasing the strategy, “reflects the learning that has occurred and the progress we have made in the last four years.”
The new priorities added in ISV 2.0 cover topics from zero-trust cybersecurity to divestment of outdated tech, which the Navy humorously refers to as Operation Cattle Drive. However, the biggest recurring emphasis across all these initiatives is the importance of data: making it accessible, organized, and intelligible to both human users and automated systems across the Navy and Marine Corps.
The new strategy aims to “transform the DON [Department of the Navy] into a modern, data-fluent organization that produces and consumes data effortlessly in execution of both warfighting and business missions.”
One word in that sentence bears a heavy burden of ambition: “effortlessly.” Currently, sharing data within the Department of the Navy — let alone across the entire Department of Defense — tends to require laborious and often frustrating efforts.
While the military possesses vast amounts of data collected over decades on various aspects such as maintenance, manpower, and munitions, officials have long lamented that most of it is siloed in aging and incompatible systems. These systems are optimized for specific missions rather than information sharing and often restrict access due to security classifications, Pentagon regulations, or federal law.
Migrating these “stovepiped” databases from government-run mainframes to the cloud may help ease access, but there is much more to be done: purging irrelevant or erroneous entries, reconciling different descriptions or shorthand codes for the same concept, labeling data for easy consumption by AI, and creating a unifying “architecture” or “mesh” that adheres to common standards for data encoding, transmission, and sharing. Only after the foundational data is organized can advanced tools like big-data analytics and artificial intelligence be effectively implemented.
The Navy document acknowledges this challenge. “Delivering decision advantage through authoritative analytics and AI products requires robust and sustained effort to mature our Naval data architecture, adopt mission-enabling governance and standards, and advance DON’s data skills,” the vision states.
Specific action items include upgrading Jupiter, the Navy’s “enclave” within the DoD-wide Advana data system; “rationalizing” other data analytics platforms; establishing common standards across the DoN for using, managing, representing, and sharing data; and fostering a workforce culture that prioritizes data sharing over hoarding.
The Vision also calls for broader, yet more secure, sharing of classified information — including access to authorized users outside the Navy. “Deliver a secret data-centric ecosystem,” reads one imperative. “Implement a single fabric that supports data of all classifications based on the principles of Zero Trust. Increase our decision advantage by speeding access to data of different classifications for us and our mission partners.”
Additionally, the document emphasizes improving user interfaces, adopting more flexible “portfolio” management of business and cybersecurity systems, and advocating for the protection of the electromagnetic spectrum critical to the DoN’s mission.
