U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of Defense Information System Agency and the commander of the Joint Force Headquarters, delivers remarks during the DISA Central Field Command change of command ceremony at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, July 7, 2023. (Airman 1st Class Zachary Foster
6th Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs)
AFCEA TECHNET 2023 — Within the next two weeks the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is slated to publish an implementation plan expected to describe concrete steps enhance the skills of the agency’s employees by focusing on two key tenets: critical thinking and a better understanding of data.
“I would love to hear from industry how you are getting after this thing we call critical thinking and how can we improve [and] professionally develop our ability as a force to critically think about the problem set that we have, the technology that we bring to bear and how we can bring those together in a marriage to get after the hard and complex problems that we have,” DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner said during a keynote speech at the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference today.
When it comes to the data piece, Skinner said the agency also has some questions for industry, mainly how to make sure individuals within DISA understand data and how to leverage it for objective analysis.
“If we can get after the critical thinking and data, then we will be much better off and much better aligned,” he added.
The upcoming implementation plan follows the Workforce 2025 initiative unveiled in June to up employees’ game. The plan also comes after the Defense Department unveiled its own plan to implement its cyber workforce strategy. That implementation plan, released Aug. 3, laid out a roadmap to achieve four broad goals to advance its cyber workforce. Today Skinner said DISA’s implementation plan “aligns” with DoD’s strategy.
While the implementation plan may focus on employees’ critical thinking and data, DISA’s Workforce 2025 strategy described a few specific lines of effort: new training tools and programs for employees, expanding employee’s knowledge through information rotations to learn new skills, improving the agency’s hybrid work environment for employees and modernizing its offices, and elevating the agency’s brand to recruit more talent.
At the time of the strategy’s release, Skinner said cyber threats from China were “at the top of the list” for the United States. “If we focus solely on the technology required to do this and forget about the people who operate it, we will become stagnant and outpaced,” he said then.
Also in his keynote today, Skinner provided an update on another effort overseen by DISA: the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). So far, 13 task orders have been awarded totaling over $200 million and 13 more are in the works, with nine directly related to the Pentagon’s sprawling Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort to connect and share data through all domains, he said.
Though Skinner didn’t go into detail about how the task order are specifically aligned with CJADC2, he said DISA is working “hand-in-hand” with the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Migration Agency and other service cloud offerings “to see how we can work together to make sure that the department continues to get best value for their cloud capabilities and cloud hosting.
“A lot of work has gone on with JWCC, I think that’s a success story of all that we’ve been able to do and we’re continuing,” he added.
