Social Media Behind the Firewall Promote Army-Wide Collaboration.

摘要

Social media use is changing the way service members complete their missions and Department of Defense leaders are taking notice. General officers are urging Soldiers to use secure wikis to update field manuals with their lessons-learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Chaplains are communicating through a Facebookstyle forum to discuss suicide prevention, training resources and prayers. Engineers are soliciting online feedback on cutting-edge power and energy sources that won t weigh down troops. With the proliferation of Web 2.0 applications in the commercial world, the military is taking notice of how those same technologies can support a major cultural change: Less of the traditional top-down, need to know, and more of the responsibility to share. Underlying it all is milSuite, a collection of user-friendly knowledge management tools mirroring popular social media platforms but located securely behind DoD firewalls, so users can discuss sensitive but unclassified information. Initially launched in 2009 for a relatively small group of Army organizations, milSuite became available to the rest of the DoD in February 2011. I truly believe this technology can change the way we communicate on a scale we haven t seen since the introduction of email, said Emerson Keslar, director of the Military Technical Solutions Office (MilTech Solutions), a government organization of the Army s Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications- Tactical and one of the architects of the milSuite project. If I m working on a new mobile app, energyefficient technology or budget process for the Army, there is a good chance that somebody in the Navy or the Air Force is doing the same thing, he said. With milSuite, I can find that person and we can combine our efforts. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of processes that can be made more efficient by harnessing secure social media.