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It’s been a decade of major change for the Military Health System in general, and the Defense Health Agency in particular. From its beginning as primarily a shared services provider, DHA has grown to become the sole operator of all of the military’s hospitals and clinics, the overseer of the TRICARE health plans and a central player in most other aspects of Defense health care. On this episode of On DoD, Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, DHA’s director, talks with Jared about the agency’s new strategic plan – including her intent to move DHA from a long period of transition to the “execution phase.”

On this edition of On DoD, Jared talks with two leaders from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) who are experimenting with technologies like 5G and proliferated low-earth orbit satellites. We'll talk about the massive increase in bandwidth those technologies allow and the improvements they might enable -- both for quality of life issues when sailors are underway, and for mission requirements. Our guests: -- Rob Wolborsky, NAVWAR's chief engineer -- Ron Wolfe, the Navy's technical warrant holder for mobility 

On this edition of On DoD: Up until a year ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a bit of an outlier when it came to IT management and governance. Despite having 19,000 employees, there was no single person in charge of making sure those workers had a decent user experience, and no one in charge of delivering common IT services. That changed last October, when Danielle Metz became the OSD chief information officer. She joins Jared Serbu to talk about what’s happened and what’s ahead, including the impending rollout of Microsoft 365 at the classified level. Later in the hour, Federal News Network’s Jason Miller talks with Leo Garciga, the Army’s new CIO. We’ll hear details about his plans to institutionalize and simplify cloud computing across the Army, and a big push to get the service to start moving toward DoD’s new JWCC cloud contract. 

Up until this summer, it wasn’t uncommon for Navy IT users, even at the most senior ranks in the Pentagon, to plan part of their mornings around the 10 minutes it took for their computers to boot. But as part of a concerted effort to improve user experience, the service has shown it’s possible to cut those maddening daily waits to only about 30 seconds. On this episode of On DoD, Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy's acting chief technology officer talks with Jared about what the Navy's learned from its digital experience pilots so far, and how quickly they might be able to scale throughout the fleet.

The Pentagon’s decades-old planning and budgeting process doesn’t have a lot of fans – least of all the people who work within it every day. The American Society of Military Comptrollers has been surveying the DoD financial management workforce for their views about the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process as part of a task force on PPBE reform. Among other things, ASMC found 71 percent of the workforce thinks PPBE keeps the department from quickly responding to its mission needs, and strong majorities say the information technology tools they use to plan hundreds of billions of dollars in spending each year are woefully inadequate. On this episode of On DoD, we get an update from ASMC on the broader PPBE reform conversation -- including some new insights from the practitioners ASMC surveyed. Our guests are: Rich Brady, the CEO of the American Society of Military Comptrollers Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt (Ret.), former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for contracting and member of the ASMC PPBE Reform Task Force Michael Conlin, former DoD chief data officer and chairman of the ASMC PPBE Reform Task Force Full results of ASMC's PPBE surveys are available in the most recent issue of the organization's quarterly journal, available at this link.

The Pentagon has a new plan to improve technology services inside the actual Pentagon – or big parts of it anyway. The first-ever enterprise IT implementation plan for the Office of the Secretary of Defense promises to take a user-centric approach to improving IT services for the 17 major offices that make up OSD. Danielle Metz, the OSD chief information officer talks about the specifics in a wide-ranging discussion with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu.

Holly Joers, the program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems talks with Federal News Network's Jared Serbu and Jason Miller about DoD's ongoing deployment of a new electronic heath record, how the new EHR will work with other federal agencies, and the centrality of data in PEO-DHMS's future mission.

The expert commission Congress has tasked with proposing overhauls to DoD's planning and budgeting processes is still a year away from delivering its final report. But the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has already gathered a huge amount of information. In its first progress report, the commission says it’s held 27 formal meetings, interviewed 280 people and organizations, and launched research studies on more than a dozen topics. For an update on the commission’s work, Jared Serbu talked with the panel's chair and vice chair: Bob Hale, a former DoD comptroller and chief financial officer, and Ellen Lord, a former DoD undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment.

The Air Force believes it's made significant progress toward improving the cybersecurity of its weapons systems -- both brand new ones, and systems that have been fielded for decades.  On this episode of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two leaders from the Air Force's Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapons Systems (CROWS) about how the Air Force is working to bake cybersecurity into new platforms, and bolt it onto the ones that have been in the inventory for decades.

A new study by George Mason University's Center for Government Contracting chronicles the ways in which the Defense budgeting process has become increasingly inflexible over the last seven decades, how it's shackled technological innovation in DoD, and what to do about it.  On this episode, co-authors Jerry McGinn and Eric Lofgren talk with Jared Serbu about findings and recommendations from their report: Execution Flexibility and Bridging the Valley of Death

No one particularly likes the way the Defense Department andCongress handle the DoD budgeting process. It’s rigid, inflexible, and veryslow. But the PPBE process, as it’s called, has been encoded into the DNA ofthe Defense bureaucracy for more than 60 years, and turning the ship around isgoing to be very tough.   That’s why there are at least two panels of experts who’llbe working on the problem over the next year or more: one chartered by Congress, andone organized by the American Society of Military Comptrollers. On this week’sshow, Jared Serbu talks with several participants in the latter group:  -- Michael Conlin, former DoD chief data officer and chairmanof the ASMC PPBE Reform Task Force   -- George Kovatch, former DoD deputy comptroller and ASMC taskforce member  -- Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt (ret.), former deputy assistantsecretary of the Air Force for contracting, and member of the ASMC task force  -- Rich Brady, a retired Marine Corps colonel and the CEO ofASMC  

 We start this week’s show with an exclusive interview withGabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, about several new initiativesthe Army’s launching to incorporate small, innovative businesses into its technology ecosystem.  Later in the program, Kenneth McNeill, the National Guard’schief information officer, talks us about a big expansion of the Army’s pilot tolet soldiers use their personal devices to access Army networks.