DISA to open shop: The long-discussed IT storefront scheduled to open for business

摘要

What if the military services and agencies had the ability to order their IT services a la carte, as though shopping for household goods on Amazon.com? That's the ultimate goal of the Defense Information Systems Agency's storefront capability, expected to begin rolling out this fall. The idea of a DISA storefront has been in the works for years, a next step in the agency's offerings of enterprise services. It's taken some time to come together as DISA helped implement defense enterprise email and is helping to lead the Defense Department-wide transition to enterprise services, but after several years of discussion, the storefront appears about to become a reality. "The experience is really bringing something that we're used to at home into government IT - a user-friendly experience, a common interface across the services, an intuitive way of purchasing that looks very much like how we'd order shoes or other goods to be sent to our own homes," said Chris Kearns, director of DISA programs for enterprise IT solutions at Lockheed Martin, the lead contractor on DISA's Global Information Grid Systems Management-Operations (GSM-O) contract. "It's transparent in the sense of real-time visibility into estimates for pricing, your order status. That's very valuable in this environment."