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A New Vision for IC Information ODNI chief information officer details plans for consolidation of intelligence agency information architecture. The chief information officers of the nation’s key intelligence agencies are moving towards a consolidated information architecture that will lead to common systems and information throughout much of the intelligence community, the CIO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Wednesday morning. Al Tarasiuk of ODNI, who moderated a panel session at the GEOINT 2011 Symposium that featured agency CIOs, offered a picture of what he described as “a new vision and strategy for IT in the IC.” Tarasiuk also laid out a timetable that calls for a plan to be presented to IC leaders in December, for implementation of that plan to begin in the current fiscal year, and for full implementation to be achieved by fiscal 2017. While the catalyst for the transformation being embarked up is the nation’s budget
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situation, Tarasiuk said, its developers see it also as an opportunity to achieve greater integration and efficiency in IT operations. The current process began in March, when the CIOs were approached by agency leaders “to see how far we could take costs out of IT in the community. We decided as a team not to approach this as a budget exercise, but to use it as an opportunity to improve mission support and at the same time drive down the cost of IT. “It was an opportunity to transform our federated architecture and take advantage of advances in technology—virtual desktops, clouds, server virtualization and thin client. It took smart people off line for about 30 days, and we built a proposal,” he said. The proposal calls for a new architecture with characteristics that include a single Continued On pAGE 4
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Defense Intelligence Vickers Discusses GEOINT’s Future In a keynote address, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers outlined the past, present and future of GEOINT. He noted that the discipline will be increasingly important because of the need to project power using a smaller footprint, the rise of the cyber domain as a concern, and the need to optimize and rationalize the intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance assets that have been developed over the past few years. “GEOINT is a critical, critical strength,” Vickers said. At the same time, he acknowledged budget realities and the need to be smart in meeting them. Vickers noted there could be a parallel with the 1950s, when it was necessary to set the stage so as to maintain a healthy industrial base during a long cold conflict punctuated by several hot interludes. At the beginning of his keynote, he listed several strategic objectives of the United States, the first of which was the defeat of Al-Qaeda. Beyond that were prevailing in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, countering weapons of mass destruction threats from such rouge players as North Korea and Iran, Continued On pAGE 3
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