By Matt Heideman, Vice President of Public Sector at Mattermost
Government missions are complex, often involving multiple parties operating at a significant scale across many disparate obstacles. Regardless of size or objectives, warfighters must carefully orchestrate many interconnected components throughout each stage of any mission, with precise coordination often being the determinative factor between success and failure.
Warfighters across organizations are often tasked with unique, time-sensitive actions to enhance, change, or execute their various contributions to mission success. These tasks cannot be executed in a vacuum. The ability to have reliable, secure, real-time collaboration across various organizations is essential. Chat-based operations, or ChatOps, adeptly addresses all of these mission-critical needs.
Additionally, the military and other first responders must be able to integrate, correlate and leverage data from multiple sources at any given time. They require easy and secure access to information collected from disparate people and systems and the ability to quickly aggregate across workflow automation, project planning boards and checklists to ensure leaders have what they need to make informed, timely decisions. ChatOps accomplishes all of these goals as well.
Operators need a centralized platformâequally capable in enterprise and tactical environmentsâto serve as the connective tissue between systems. Empowering users to operate, execute and collaborate in one system streamlines command and control, significantly shortening decision cycles to provide overwhelming information advantages. Yet again, ChatOps is built to address these needs.
Here are four sample Department of Defense use cases where ChatOps will improve leadersâ ability to take decisive action:
Military operations planning
Military operations are carefully orchestrated and planned, but missions rarely follow those plans because objectives are often updated, enemies can relocate, and environments can change. Real-time communication and collaboration are essential for adapting to and overcoming the fluidity of operational missions.
In these cases, commanders must succinctly, securely, and quickly communicate plan changes to impacted team members on a need-to-know basis.
Communicating new directives requires a secure, real-time collaboration and information-sharing platform for distributed teams. In ChatOps, military leaders can create secure, dedicated channels to ensure that only team members involved in the mission have access. Those members can then securely share information about the new plan, including but not limited to any changes in roles, responsibilities and overall mission objectives. They can visualize who’s doing what and when. This ability for dispersed teams to communicate in real-time and even visualize how everyoneâs roles interact results in shared and complete situational awareness.
The ability to accomplish this in one platform aligns with DOD Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control requirements for delivering a secure, collaborative infrastructure that supports service-specific CJADC2 programs like the Air Forceâs Advanced Battle Management System and the Armyâs Project Convergence.
Emergency management and incident response
One of the National Guard’s most impactful missions is supporting state, local and foreign authorities during a disaster. Recent examples include military deployments to North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene and to New York City during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Humanitarian responses to these and similar situations require careful coordination between authorities and first responders. At any point, military personnel might work closely with FEMA, state and local government officials and other parties. These teams need a common operational platform for real-time communication, situational updates and tracking workflows⌠while often working in remote locations with limited connectivity.
ChatOps is built for these high-pressure environments that require an operational platform with digitized playbooks that clearly define team roles and responsibilities, automate tasks and alert individuals when itâs their time to shine. Concurrently, such a platform provides a centralized location where everyone can receive the necessary context and situational awareness to accomplish their objectives efficiently.
Cybersecurity operations and response
The DODâs Cyber Incident Response, or CIR, plan details the responsibilities and actions of various parties responsible for protecting the department from would-be cybersecurity threats. The CIR process includes four phases: preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication and recovery, and post-incident activity. Each phase requires close coordination between multiple individuals and agencies, often across air-gapped environments.
Cybersecurity response teams must move quickly and assuredly as in military operations and emergency response. They need real-time access to information and secure collaborationâeven in air-gapped environmentsâwith all their tools in one place so they can report and assess a potential breach at cyber speed.
Bringing these capabilities onto a shared operations platform can significantly reduce CIR times. By combining mission-critical applications and minimizing context switching, workflows are improved. Response teams can focus on their tasks instead of finding what they need to accomplish them.
Using a self-hosted open source operations platform like ChatOps takes security further by empowering DOD to control all end and middle points to mitigate the risk of classified messages being exposed on another organization’s servers. Furthermore, open source enables DOD to validate that the platform’s code is secure and vulnerability-free, with the flexibility to protect against future threats posed by quantum computing, artificial intelligence and threats still over the horizon.
Software development and IT modernization
DODâs commitment to gaining a tactical edge against foreign adversaries extends to its software development initiatives. This is signified by years of heavy investment in accelerated software development and IT modernization, focusing significantly on DevSecOps.
Indeed, DODâs 2021 DevSecOps Playbook outlines 11 key âplaysâ to successful modern software engineering. Play 1 outlines how to adopt a DevSecOps culture and specifically calls out the need for transparency, easy accessibility to all project resources, and ChatOps as âthe communication backboneâ for DevSecOps.
An operations platform that allows DevSecOps teams to chat, perform status checks and automate processes drives situational awareness for DevSecOps developers, provides a centralized hub for operational intelligence and offers the transparency needed to create, collaborate on and deploy secure applications effectively.
Transparency is vital for teams like the U.S. Air Forceâs Platform One because of their specific mission of providing DOD with DevSecOps and software factory services. Platform One teams can inspect source code, evaluate security risks and communicate with each other as they adapt code to meet stringent security and compliance requirements.
DOD provides the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security. Fulfilling these obligations to national security requires building connective tissue to improve communication and collaboration among increasingly disparate teams. It must also streamline operations to reduce response times, enhance mission information availability and drive situational awareness in high-pressure environments. An operational support platform that provides real-time secure collaboration, instant access to mission-critical intelligence, and automated workflows and alerts empowers the DoD to achieve any objective and succeed in every mission.
