Why government should take advantage of private sector's technology investments.

• Author: Clark, A.J.
• Position: Industry Perspective

The U.S. military's information systems represent a significant amount of innovation, effort and well-intentioned planning. But leaders are constantly met with new technology in the commercial space that is faster, more efficient and easier to use.

The government clearly needs a better way to tap into commercial innovation. There are available technologies that could be rapidly inserted in defense systems but it takes anywhere from three to five years to see them gain traction.

Mapping and intelligence systems are areas where military technology could benefit from improved and lower cost commercial tools. Many of the current systems used by the Defense Department render two-dimensional maps and imagery at a general wait time of five to 10 seconds for each area an engineer is looking at. In contrast, commercial imagery and mapping software provides 3D data in one to two seconds. Terrain is visible in three-dimensional and the fourth dimension of time is available to show imagery literally changing.

An illustration of this challenge is what U.S. Southern Command officials experienced during their response to the Haitian earthquake. Individual departments were handicapped by tools that were single scope, not web based, and not interacting with one another. This led to duplication of effort throughout the command and a lack of real intelligence being aggregated and brought to the commander. A system's ability to support an entire organization's data is oftentimes related to how current it is. Even five-year-old systems did not have the mandate or the technical ability to connect seamlessly and share data.

Current technology is converging different tasks at a rapid rate. Gmail smartphone users can click on a restaurant address, for instance, and the phone provides directions in Google Maps. Those seamless little connections take a fair amount of technology in the background but once implemented they make a user's experience much more efficient and enjoyable.

Military mission planning and mapping tools are most certainly not connected to email and other communication systems, so the concept of getting a military command through email to move to a location and then just clicking on it to see how to get there on a map is not a common feature in existing defense systems.

Defense IT engineers will almost always have different ideas on the way to build a system. Individual experience with the customer's environment, training on certain tools, past...