The Department of Defense is developing a “data dictionary” that aims to enable seamless interoperability without changing existing workflows that will be piloted at the end of this year.
That was the latest from Leslie Beavers, principal deputy chief information officer at the DoD, who shared that the department’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office and Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office have been working for the past year to develop the dictionary.
“Data is one of the unsung heroes and it has fundamentally been underappreciated – the level of deliberate effort that is required to make data interoperable,” said Beavers while speaking at the GovCIO Media and Research Federal IT Efficiency Summit in Washington on July 10.
“We’ve been on a journey … to figure out how to develop, essentially, a data dictionary capability which enables you to do the translation and do the matching with your data tags, so that you don’t have to redo how everyone does their job – it’s adding to that layer,” she continued.
Beavers explained that the dictionary will have “about seven blocks” and that the department has taken a specific approach to growing the initiative starting with piloting, strategizing, then rolling it out at scale. The pilot will launch toward the end of this year.
“Within the department, it is really easy to take on these big uglies at scale, and you collapse under your own weight,” she said. “So, the trick has been …to get down to a really narrow focus that theoretically should be easy, make that work, and then mature the capability and have it growp over time.”
“We have to think about solving our own problems but doing it in a way that works with everyone else,” she added.
In other recent data-improvement moves from the Pentagon, Katie Arrington, the acting CIO at the DoD, said last month that the department is launching a program dubbed “Mission Network as a Service” that will improve data interoperability across DoD components and will collapse disparate networks into a single network.