http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/22/us-cia-software-idUSTRE81L03C20120222
Rather than stick with traditional all-you-can-eat deals known as “enterprise licensing agreements,” the CIA wants to buy software services on a “metered,” pay-as-you-go basis, Ira “Gus” Hunt, the agency’s top technology officer, told an industry conference.
“Think Amazon,” he said, referring to the electronic commerce giant where the inventory is vast but the billing is per item. “That model really works.”
The old way of contracting for proprietary software inhibits flexibility, postponing the CIA’s chance to take advantage of emerging capabilities early on, Hunt said.
He added that this made it harder to keep up with “big data” at a time that such challenges are growing while federal agencies are tightening their belts for deficit reduction.
“Don’t kid yourself that we can’t do this thing because we can,” he said, adding that the agency was seeking to build strong partnerships with its information technology suppliers.
“We’re not out there trying to screw you,” Hunt told representatives of the many vendors present. But “you really need to think differently about how we do these things,” he said.
Earlier in the day, Reginald Brothers, deputy assistant secretary of defense for research, told the conference that existing software tools for data analysis, management and interaction lagged the vast amounts of information that drones and other high-tech U.S. military sensors were vacuuming up.
“The big data problem is the analysis of it,” he said. Existing tools “do not aid users … in the mission timelines.”
