By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Nov. 8, 2013 – During a Nov. 8 black-tie gala in
her home state of Michigan, the Defense Department’s Chief Information Officer
Teresa M. Takai will receive the 2013 Excellence in Leadership Award, presented
by officials from the Michigan Chapter of Women in Defense.
The award, to be presented in Rochester, recognizes women
who have made significant contributions to national defense and security. Women
in Defense is a nonprofit professional networking and development organization
for women and men across the state involved in national defense and security.
Takai was born and raised in Michigan, and at the University
of Michigan earned a Master of Arts degree in management and a Bachelor of Arts
degree in mathematics. She later worked for three decades for the Ford Motor
Co. among other firms, and then spent five years as CIO for the state of
Michigan and two years as CIO for the state of California. She also serves on
the Harvard Policy Group on Network-Enabled Services and Government.
“In my time in Michigan I never envisioned that I would be
here at the Department of Defense doing what I’m doing,” Takai told American
Forces Press Service. “So it’s in some ways nostalgic.”
She added, “By the same token it’s a great honor to be able
to go back to my home state in a role at the Department of Defense and then to
have them recognize me. That combination of … things is really exciting and I’m
very thankful to [WID] for considering me.”
Takai said she appreciates Women in Defense and similar
local women’s organizations because they’re important sources of support and
professional development for women in defense careers.
“It’s a good mix of women that are in government and in
industry supporting government,” she said, “and it gives them an opportunity to
know each other and see what others are doing.”
The organizations also have women in many different career
stages, some interested in mentoring, some in networking, and nearly all such
organizations have scholarship programs for women’s educational development,
Takai said.
In terms of contributions recognized by the Excellence in
Leadership Award, Takai said she’s worked hard since arriving at the Pentagon
three years ago this month to better define her role as CIO in terms of
advising the defense secretary and the deputy defense secretary on the nearly
$39 billion a year spent on technology.
“That’s not to stop it or to say we shouldn’t spend that
much,” she said. “It’s more to say are there areas where we could spend it
better?”
Takai also works to evaluate technology trends for the
organization.
“We felt very early on that we needed to be able to
introduce commercial mobile devices, effectively smart phones, into DOD while
ensuring that we were managing the security risks. Each service was doing it …
in its own way,” the CIO explained.
The challenge, she said, “was that we weren’t going to get
uniform security, we weren’t potentially going to get smart phones that talked
to each other, and in fact we weren’t putting together the necessary infrastructure
to be able to do it.”
As a result, Takai said, her team championed an effort to
have the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, create a single way to
bring mobile devices in, test them and make sure they were secure.
“We’re now in the process of rolling that out,” the CIO
said. The DOD’s mobile device management solution will allow the use of
different kinds of smart phones that all will be programmed in the same way and
controlled in the same way and will work around the world. An application store
will be available for DOD and service-specific apps, she said.
Takai’s office also has been working hard, at President
Barack Obama’s request, the CIO said, to free up some of its exclusive-use
areas of the electromagnetic spectrum to be used by commercial industry.
“To do that is very challenging. We use that spectrum to
train our warfighters because the bulk of our training is done in the United
States,” Takai said. “One thing my team has done is to come up with some very
innovative ways to share spectrum with the commercial industries so we don’t
have to completely vacate it.”
That’s critical, she said, because the United States is
trying to promote its economic growth through the use of wireless devices and
is producing revenue by auctioning-off spectrum through the Federal
Communications Commission.
Takai said later this month DOD will roll out its
Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy in support of the president’s wireless
broadband initiatives.
“Right now we’re looking at the 1755 MHz to 1780 MHZ band
and that’s where our most innovative solutions are,” Takai said, “but the
strategy includes the entire spectrum.”
One of the department’s most forward-looking technology
efforts is the Joint Information Environment, or JIE, a framework for
modernizing DOD information technology systems and making them more secure.
The JIE consists of overarching architectures, standards and
specifications; common ways of operating and defending DOD networks; and common
engineered solution designs.
The CIO said JIE is coupled with two cybersecurity
strategies in progress -- one for defending DOD networks and the other for the
cyber workforce.
“The Joint Information Environment is being rolled out in
Europe now and we’re in the process of rolling it out in terms of planning for
all of our operations,” Takai said.
“The reason we rolled out in Europe initially is because
Europe had an initiative that was sort of the beginnings of JIE. They had been
working on it between [European Command and Africa Command] for at least a
couple of years so we thought they were a great pilot to … prove out the
concepts, look at some areas around the way operations centers would work, as
well as … for what JIE would cost, and then comparing that to the way we’re
currently running the infrastructure,” the CIO said.
JIE will improve DOD technology roll-outs and security,
technology efficiency and reliability, and redundancy and cost, she added.
To date, Takai’s team has proven a number of concepts in
Europe and developed a costing model, she said. DISA has the lead through its
Joint Technology Synchronization Office, the JTSO.
About 120 engineers, some from each service, are coming in
to develop engineering specifications and the services have been asked to
develop plans for implementing the engineering specifications in their own
networks, Takai said.
Each service also has committed to reorganizing their data
centers, she said. “They’re going to close some data centers down and some data
centers will need to be made more resilient to meet cyber threats, so we have
that planned for them. And we’re also working with the services on defense
enterprise e-mail,” the CIO added.
Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter has issued direction to
the services to include the JIE in their fiscal year 2015 budgets, Takai said,
and she’s working with DOD acquisition officials to determine exactly how to
characterize the JIE money in those budgets, how to manage the service
implementation plans and how to make sure future programs build to JIE
engineering specifications.
For a CIO who by necessity always has an eye on the future,
Takai is looking even farther ahead.
Over the next five to 10 years at DOD, she said, “we are
going to be much better at building cybersecurity into our technology and we’re
going to be much better at knowing how to run our technology so that it is
secure. I predict that we will do that.”
With JIE, Takai added, “we will change the way our networks
look and we’ll change the way that Cyber Command can actually protect our
networks. That will happen.”
The CIO also wants to be able to introduce new applications
of technology faster than is possible today by building on a secure platform
from the beginning so infrastructure doesn’t have to be rebuilt every time
something changes.
“With smart phones I’m hoping that for small things we can
start to put more of that capability in the hands of individuals who need it
and have to do less with really large acquisition programs,” Takai said.
“Some of our technologies will still have to be done that
way,” she added, “but we need a range of ways to do the technology and we have
to take advantage of the innovations that are going to be coming to us from
industry.”
(Follow Cheryl Pellerin on Twitter: @PellerinAFPS)
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