DOD prepping portal for info sharing

The Defense Department is preparing to unveil an Internet portal in November

designed to help the department's chief information officers share information

and improve interoperability among DOD's computer systems.

Paul Brubaker, the Pentagon's deputy CIO, is leading the fledgling project,

known as the Information Knowledge Exchange portal, for the CIO executive

board.

The executive board, which is made up of Defense CIOs and chaired by

Pentagon CIO Art Money, is set to discuss the project at its next meeting,

during the week of Oct. 29. The board then plans to test a prototype at

its following meeting, in November. Once the system is tested and perfected,

it will be made available to CIOs governmentwide.

"The game plan over the next year and a half is to get it out to the

folks in the CIO community," Brubaker said. "We're really excited about

it.

"The prospects of making the organization a heck of a lot more efficient

and effective are really great. The idea is that all the CIOs will have

access to this portal, where we can share our experience and things that

we do related to the federal government," he said.

Despite the Pentagon's efforts in recent years to improve information

sharing and the ability of the military services' and defense agencies'

systems to operate together, good information still isn't always effectively

shared.

"For example, we just came back from Hawaii, and not everybody knows

[the Enterprise Software Initiative] exists. That's the kind of information

we want to disseminate," Brubaker said.

ESI is a joint project to identify, acquire, distribute and manage software

that is common across an organization.