Emerging Technologies for Defense Applications conference: notes and commentary

On Monday, October 27, 2008, I attended the Emerging Technologies for Defense Applications conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, Arlington, VA. 

 

I was sad to see that I was the only one at the conference expanding the conversation beyond the walls of the Ritz via Twitter.  You can see my Twitter feed by searching #etechd.  I wanted to create a summary of the conference here on my blog and tried to find a good way to do this by leveraging this Twitter feed, but no luck.  So, using old fashioned editing, here are my notes summarizing the Techipedia portion of the conference.  I hope that you find this useful.  Please comment if you have any questions. 

 

The Honorable John Young, Jr., Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics (AT&L), explained that the landscape is changing: threats are emerging that have new tools and technologies.  To outpace our adversaries and secure our nation, we need to get the information sharing, speed, and technologies that will enable us to be agile and respond rapidly.

 

He underscored the importance of collaboration in all dimensions of our business to our success in the future.  Embracing collaboration requires a shift in ideas, values, behavior, and processes.

 

DoD has three key challenges in achieving its imperative to support the warfighter:

 

1.    Internal communication: research and acquisition functions need to communicate more effectively

 

2.     Process agility: we need to shorten the time it takes to identify and procure solutions

• We need to develop a more strategic and effective budget processes

 

3.     Collaboration with external entities: government needs to tell industry what it needs; industry needs to tell the government what it is doing and can provide

• Working with smaller companies who are focused on different technologies is critical for our global success and security.
• We need to proactively identify and adopt new tools to confront emerging threats.

 

DoD Techipedia provides solutions to these three challenges by linking warfighter requirements with the best innovations that exist.  Techipedia has three components:

·        Internal wiki: rolled out October 2008

·        Defensesolutions.gov portal will enable external entities to submit solutions to DoD and enables to DoD to respond quickly: will launch January 2009

·        External wiki: will roll out Spring 2009

 

Technipedia will initially be limited to a small number of solution areas in which we’re seeking solutions, e.g. fingerprinting, DNA management, battlefield forensics

·        All solutions, from high-tech to simple, will be considered

·        All available sources of information, including non-traditional, will be used

 

Techipedia is launching with a pilot program also called the Open Business Cell (OBC).  This will be within the Rapid Reaction Technology Office where the culture is already lean and anticipatory. 

 

Though I am impressed with the clarity of AT&L’s objectives and the foray that the organization is making into social media, I am concerned that they are missing a big piece of the point of social media: to participate. 

 

 

AT&L is creating valuable destination site that is certainly Web 2.0-enabled, but to realize the success that they’re hoping for, there is really going to be a need for a) a communication plan about the existence of this destination; b) participation across the web to mine for ideas, technologies, participants. 

 

 

If you build it, they will not necessarily come.  Social media is about reaching customers, partners and enthusiasts where they may be.  The fourth component of Techipedia really should be a distributed social media strategy that monitors the blogosphere and engages appropriately to yield value for DoD and its next generation of not-necessarily-traditional partners and suppliers. 

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