As chief of the Mission Partner Engagement Office for the Defense Information Systems Agency, Col Roman Hund acts as the agency's "front door" – it's his job to provide customer engagement and outreach across all Defense Department and interagency mission partner organizations. That can mean fielding requests for DISA products and services, assisting in generating requirements and acting as a customer advocate across DISA.

In the year since DISA's major reorganization, Hund's role is emerging as an initial point of contact for DISA's customers, which include DoD and partner organizations.

"The intent here is to help our DoD partners and our government partners get access to services that we provide," he said in a recent interview with C4ISR & Networks Senior Staff Writer Amber Corrin.

C4ISRNET: The way you carry about business probably changed a good bit under the reorganization. Can you talk about that?

COL ROMAN HUND: Over the past years, typically the way that you got to continue your services was to follow a few process that allow you to come in and get to a particular type of service. We used to have a network services process, for example – but largely people got work done by contacting the people that they knew, or contacts from over the years.

So what we're trying to do is open that aperture a little bit to help people understand that they can come in the front door, they can get access to us through a single point of entry. And what that allows us to do within the agency is it allows then to see all the demands for different types of services that come to the agency in one holistic view. That helps us then identify the capabilities that the agency can consider offering that might help to support across DoD, instead of partner-by-partner request fulfillment.

C4ISRNET: So how do your customers, or potential customers, actually make that contact to fulfill their needs at DISA?

HUND: To the point of how do they get in touch with us, there's a couple different ways to do that. Our website is really the front way of entry for everything right now. We're trying to build that and connect it into all the key request fulfillment capabilities that we currently have, and we're working on making those more customer-friendly, including a storefront. We're still utilizing the DISA Direct Ordering Environment, and my office is set up in a way that we're able to capture those inputs that come electronically through the site. Also, my organization is set up by organization, so I have teams that are set up specifically to support organizations like the Defense Logistics Agency, the Army and the Air Force.

So we've always had combatant command field offices aligned to combatant commands, and in those combatant command field offices we actually do this mission directly with the combatant command, the joint combatant command that are out there in the DoD. So they are actually our representatives for DISA out in the combatant commands and they come back to us with input. So if it's coming from that tech organization, it comes to those field offices or field commands. If it comes from a service or an agency I have a team that's set up to support that. I do also have two liaisons: One that's embedded with the Air Force in Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and one that's embedded in the Army [Network Enterprise Technology Command] at Fort Huachuca.

C4ISRNET: How has what you do and how you meet customer needs changed since the reorganization?

HUND: A key part of the reorganization was in DISA we really didn't have good way to facilitate capabilities or services that we weren't providing at the time. So if I get a request that comes in that is for a capability that we don't provide today, I bring that – especially if there is demand for that across multiple partners – to the requirements and analysis office and they review that and look at that from an agency perspective. They get a look at whether or not DISA as an agency has the resources and has the ability to provide that as a service. What they do is go through do a business case analysis on [the requested capability] to make sure that we fully understand what it would take if we wanted to provide that as a service. And then we let leadership at a high level within the agency decide whether or not we're going to do that, as opposed to we may have done that in the past through a program manager deciding whether or not we were going to add a service to their particular portfolio.

C4ISRNET: What are some examples of the kind of services that you're providing and the kind of products that you're providing?

HUND: Because most of the folks that are in my office came from the computing resources background, they are very good at being able to bring your applications or your services to our computing hosting environment. That may not be what a lot of people think of as an enterprise service, but you know, that's one of our key tenets, providing that computing capability for the DoD. It can be a challenge for people to get their application into the computing environment; so that's what we help facilitate, is bringing those applications and services out of their computing center that they may have to run themselves and bring that into one of our core data centers. We're helping them migrate applications…whether that's in milCloud, whether that's in capacity services, we are able to help them get into those environments and take advance of the security and reliable services we provide through our [Defense Enterprise Computing Centers]DECCs. On the commercial cloud side, we will help them understand where they can go to get more information about commercial offerings.

RELATED: DISA Vision & Contract Guide 2016

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