DISA Chief to Industry: Help Us Reinvent Ourselves

It’s going to be a challenging year for the Defense Information Systems Agency. When DISA Chief Information Officer Henry Sienkiewicz was asked to name the biggest challenge his agency would face in 2011, he spoke for nearly 12 minutes, and listed four.

“BRAC [the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission’s plan to move many DOD offices] is here,” he said. “For everyone who thought that DISA would never move, or clean out its archive, I am getting ready to start de-installing equipment,” Sienkiewicz confirmed. Several hundred workers have already relocated to more secure facilities at Fort Meade in Maryland, he said.

Sienkiewicz spoke to a capacity crowd of IT business leaders, despite a snowstorm outside, at INPUT‘s Federal Executive Breakfast in McLean, Virginia this morning.

He also cited budgeting challenges involving Other Contingency Operations (OCO) funding – the second budget the Defense Department maintains in wartime. “We have to figure out where we are going with our partners,” he said, “supporting multiple engagements around the world.”

Constraints on the main DOD budget are on his mind as well. “At the top level, we know that budgets are going to be reduced. We’re forced to become better with what we’re doing, with fewer resources. We recognize that, for our partners, a lot of their operations are based on a working-capital business model,” he said, “and as the dollars need to move to keep that flow open, we will move them appropriately.”

DISA CIO Henry Sienkiewicz talks about the agency’s plans for the Defense Department’s IT architecture

[The full article can be found on GovWin]

Authored by Sean Tucker