Pushing a Big Rock Up a Steep Hill: Acquisition Lessons Learned From DoD Applications Storefront

Abstract

The DoD and the military services are currently working to provide widget and app storefronts to disseminate applications that enable agile, composable, C2 capabilities. Leveraging the government-developed open source Ozone Widget Framework, web applications can be registered in a single repository, and discovered and composed by the warfighter. Through both process and technical means, the DoD Applications Store works to streamline the software acquisitions process. The DoD Applications Store as an Ozone Marketplace will include automated delivery of software patches, web applications, widgets, and mobile application packages. The envisioned application store will deliver software from a central repository, over the land or air, to the warfighter at the tactical edge, thereby increasing C2 agility. Through the last several years SPAWAR SSC Pacific, PEO C4I, and DISA have moved to implement this framework, and thereby have discovered a number of additional benefits and encountered previously unknown obstacles. As the DoD has moved to emphasize the importance of efficiency and cost savings, the savings presented by this agile C2 solution have grown even more important as the current methods of distributing software components to the tactical edge are time consuming and costly. The ability to distribute applications packages to the tactical edge is technically feasible; the entrenched processes and methodologies in DoD acquisition have been a roadblock to this effort. This paper examines the technical and non-technical acquisition lessons learned through the effort to implement the DoD application store on an Ozone Widget Framework.