Moving from 'need to know' to 'need to share'

It's a new, connected world out there and government agencies need to shift mindsets and embrace service-oriented architectures, Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens (pictured) told the FOSE trade show yesterday, according to Washington Technology.  

“With regard to information flow, particularly sensitive information, we need to add a new element to our familiar practices, expanding ‘the need to know’ to include ‘the need to share,’” said Stevens. “For some, understandably, this is an unnatural act, the very concept being at odds with decades of doctrine,” he said.

. . . Stevens also called for changing government organizations and their cultures so that they support information sharing on an appropriate systems architecture that is open, interoperable and secure.

With a sound concept of operations in mind, appropriate service-oriented system architectures become critical.  This audience knows full well the essential dimensions:  open, scalable, robust, interoperable, secure.  The time that we spend in refining our understanding of requirements is time very well spent.  In almost every “lessons learned” assessment of what went right and what went wrong with our programs, including those evaluations conducted by independent non-advocate review teams, defining and controlling requirements correlated strongly with program success.  When requirements are firm and well understood, cost estimating is more realistic and accurate, and schedule development has greater fidelity, leading to the likelihood of greater funding stability.  Resources are allocated more efficiently, overall costs are lower, systems are deployed sooner, and expectations are more likely to be met.  As I said, time very well spent.