Under the Defense Information Systems Agency's recent reorganization, longtime official Dave Bennett was named director of DISA's new implementation and sustainment center. In the role, Bennett is charged with overseeing the operations of essentially all of DISA's products once they have been developed and launched.

It's a broad portfolio, and one that functions alongside three other complementary organizations: DISA's development and business center, resource management center and operations center.

"It's a life-cycle structure between these organizations, from writing requirements to developing to implementing and sustaining to operating. It's a constant, iterative process within and across these centers to make sure capabilities are meeting [customer] needs," Bennett said.

In a recent interview Bennett talked about his new functions and DISA's evolving approach to how it arms service members with technology and knowledge.

C4ISRNET: So, what exactly does the implementation and sustainment center do? How does it function in the reorganization?

DAVE BENNETT: It's a particularly complementary organization to Alfred Rivera's development and business organization, where they do the development of capabilities and modernize solutions that we have in field. My job is to take what they develop and implement that capability, and then sustain it while it's in an operational state.

As we go through that iterative process where they develop and we field, implement and sustain, we get to a point when we realize we need a new feature in a certain capability that's in the field, or we think it's time to significantly modernize because the technology has radically changed. So we basically generate requirements back to [the development and business center] to generate a demand and say, 'I need a solution to provide this capability, and have it available at the point in time I need to sunset older equipment.' So, it's a complementary organization, and we spend a lot of time ensuring we have synchronized activities and priorities and planning for the way ahead, so we're both operating with the same site-picture.

There's a third piece to that as well. Mr. Rivera and I also work with the operations center to ensure what we're implementing and sustaining in the field can be monitored and provide an operational view so we can understand what's out there. That way we can be aware of and respond to operational issues in a timely fashion and provide feedback and ensure we're adjusting properly to satisfy any shortfalls.

C4ISRNET: What's an example of a responsibility of yours that has changed?

BENNETT: I've consolidated all the resources, contracts and manpower at my level so I can optimize resources and priorities based on center-level needs. From a DISA perspective, say, here's what DISA needs to meet these requirements, and I can leverage contracts and resources to tailor to a very specific need. By bringing that to the center level, we provide more opportunity for synergy across resources to meet the demands that tend to pop up. We've seen lots of value added already, even just 60 days into the reorganization. I've made decisions that, before the center, would have been splintered across the organization. But now I have folks do the homework, and I make the decision, and we're able to save resources in the process.

C4ISRNET: So, besides that example, what's changed the most for you under the reorganization?

BENNETT: One of the biggest things is by creating the center, we've been able to integrate things that previously were really stovepiped views of the world: the computing view, the network services view — each optimized for their own environment and not optimized for an end-to-end perspective. So, that's one of the major changes this reorganization has given us: the ability to tear down barriers between stovepipes and optimize across organizations. Now we can focus more broadly across the whole set of activities and make some decisions that allow us to save money and do things faster.

And, most importantly, we can clearly understand who has responsibility for things. It's a very clean set of channels to quickly get to understanding who owns what and is responsible for what, and being able to hold people accountable at that level.

C4ISRNET: What do you think are some of the most important benefits, especially as it relates to what you do?

BENNETT:The simpler and greater visibility, but the other piece is … the ability to reduce costs. There are two primary missions in my mind:

Implementing and sustaining what the agency has put out via our service catalog; that's job one. But right behind that is the need and the mandate to reduce costs so that we become more efficient, more effective and reduce resource requirements, so we can drive down costs of delivering capabilities to our customers and to the department as a whole.

By restructuring, we have the ability to do that from a variety of ways. One is by bringing the budget and resources up to the center level, I make those tradeoff decisions and dictate where things need to go to ensure we reduce costs and generate savings from a macro level, as well as lower levels. The other piece is by coming together in a different way — such as infrastructure and services — we're able to optimize how we do business from a technology perspective. We can drive costs down by getting rid of redundant capabilities, which we frequently had because one organization didn't know what the other was doing.

Now can we can look more broadly from horizontal perspective across the mission space and say, this is the one approach we're going to use, and optimize for that. In the past, for example, we would end up with multiple contract vehicles that would do basically the same thing, but be nuanced to serve discrete activities. Now we can contract for multiple use cases, organizations and missions without investing in the overhead to put together a bunch of different contracts that are similar.

By putting more capabilities in a contract, we have the ability to drive down vendors' costs based on volume buying. If there's a contract with a big set of requirements tied to it, vendors tend to be a little sharper with their pencil in figuring out what their costs will be. So I'm able to get better costs that way. We've got to be able to do more with less, and I'm doing everything I can to make the less happen.

But we're not done yet. I've already told folks that with this reorganization, we're on a journey and we've only really taken the first couple steps. Looking a year down the road, there are additional plans I'm cooking up that will allow us to further consolidate activities and get more in sync with the infrastructure and services view that allows us to make additional changes and get more savings going forward.

C4ISRNET: What are you cooking up? How do you see things evolving?

BENNETT:There will be a lot of focus on questions like, what are the capabilities we provide as an agency to the Defense Department; what are those that we need to sunset; what do we need to modernize; do we have duplicative capabilities out there that we can draw down to a single solution? I think that will be one of the parallel activities we'll be going through over the next 12 to 18 months, and focusing on as we go into the [program objective memorandum] planning process to shape what the mission environment is going to look like.

We're going to have to look at what capabilities we're going to be able to fully support, what needs to evolve, and what we need to stop doing because it's no longer the right answer or because resources are going toward higher priorities. That's one area we have most difficulty in — turning things off — because everyone will fight for their particular capability, whether they're the program manager or the end user. There're going to have to be some tough choices to be made … but DoD has to move more toward leveraging enterprise resources versus standalone,
tailored capabilities. That's the only way to reduce costs at a significant level.

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