PD EC2M Discusses the Future of Army Collaboration and Communications at AFCEA Small Business Networking Session

John Howell, Product Director for Enterprise Content Collaboration and Messaging (PD EC2M) presented an overview on Project Director Enterprise Services/PD EC2M’s current focus, including upcoming activities with Unified Capabilities (UC) and Army Knowledge Online (AKO) at the February AFCEA Fort Belvoir small business networking session. “We have an affordability issue between all the legacy systems and requirements,” Mr. Howell said. “If we’re going to get to the next generation of service the Army must prioritize its enterprise requirements.” As the Army moves toward greater use of managed, enterprise services he stressed the need to focus on getting to the next generation of technologies, not on just replacing current capabilities. “AKO was the first Army Enterprise capability and it continues to serve us well. However, the days of owning and operating are numbered. Most capabilities within AKO will be eventually be replaced by managed services” he said. The one capability that must continue to be maintained, and at high rates of availability is Single Sign On (SSO), as it is critical, to both end-users and more than 600 applications with SSO integrated into their design. Eventually SSO will be replaced by a future authentication/authorization service; but until this is defined and funded, SSO will remain the primary service for this. For UC, Mr. Howell shared that, due to limited resources, the Army would likely not seek to initiate an acquisition for UC as a Service in fiscal year (FY) 2015, but instead continue efforts on market research and requirements development, with an eye towards releasing an RFP in FY 2016. “We’ve been here before- last year we asked you (Industry) specific questions about deploying a limited set of capabilities on a very limited timeline. Now that we’ve got the time to re-define the requirement we need Industry’s help in showing us what’s possible.”