The U.S. Army is focusing on cloud migration, user experience and data as an enterprise asset as the service moves forward with its Digital Transformation Strategy, first published in October 2021.
Raj Iyer, chief information officer for the Army and 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said that while the service has already transitioned three of its key ERP systems to the cloud, optimization will be a key priority for the Army’s complete migration.
Iyer is scheduled to speak during the Potomac Officers Club’s 3rd Annual CIO Summit on April 26. Registrations are open now.
“We have an aggressive path forward this year to start to look at shutting down our data centers,” Iyer said during Army IT Day in January. “But we know we’re going to need certain capacity on-premise to be able to handle certain workloads.”
The Army, Iyer said, is integrating this on-premise infrastructure with the commercial cloud to establish a hybrid cloud architecture.
“But more importantly, what we did last year and what we’re going to do even more this year is to operationalize the capacity that we have,” Iyer shared of the service’s 2022 priorities.
Currently, the Army is working on deploying a hybrid tactical cloud system to support its forces in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Army CIO is also working to improve the user experience for the service’s operators and warfighters, which he said is often considered an afterthought.
“What seems to be missing is ‘how is the user going to interact with the system?’ And ‘how can we make this really easy for them?’” he told The Stack.
David Markowitz, deputy CIO and chief data officer for the Army, has also said the service is working to restructure the way it tags data in order to make it more accessible.
“We normally thought of data as owned by a system and permissions and who gets access tied to that system, not as data as an enterprise asset,” Markowitz explained.
The Potomac Officers Club’s 3rd Annual CIO Summit brings together leading CIOs across government and industry to discuss the chief priorities, initiatives and opportunities driving U.S. organizations today.
John Sherman, the Defense Department’s CIO and acting chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, is slated to keynote the highly-anticipated in-person event. Register today to lock in your spot!d
