Colonel John Hayes, chief information officer of the US Air Force Reserve command talks about tapping into the technology expertise of its recruits for the development of innovative ideas, like the military's new 'Emergency Notification' system.
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Now you've spent the majority of your career in the communications command and now you're heading up the Air Force Reserves on the communications side; how did you end up with this position?
John Hayes: Well that's a good question. I thought about it because the job seemed to kinda build on each other and prep you for the positions that you end up in your career in. In my last job, I was the CIO for Central Command Air Force's operations throughout the Middle East, so I was the CIO for a smaller scale organisation but one that was involved in Operation: Enduring Freedom, Operation: Iraqi Freedom. And then from there, I graduated into this program, here, where I'm the chief information officer for Air Force Reserve Command, a larger organisation, spread out across the entire United States.
It would seem Colonel Hayes that the job you had before, which was being the CIO of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, and then now heading up the Reserves, which has about 75,000 members; it seems like a very different kind of assignment. What would you say on the Operation: Iraqi Freedom side were some of the big challenges?
John Hayes: The challenge is and the really neat part of that job is basically building the plan to execute Operation: Iraqi Freedom: How many bases were we going to be activating over in the Middle East, what kind of coms architecture are we putting into the bases, what kind of applications are our users using at that, how can we build the background infrastructure, the backup capabilities, how do we hook up the communications to the unmanned aerial vehicles that we're flying over the top of Iraq and over the top of Afghanistan, how do you connect them back to the people that are exploiting and disseminating the intelligence information coming from those platforms.
What would you say were some of the most successful deployments of technology in that Arena?
John Hayes: Probably the biggest one is one that I really didn't expect and it was collaborative tools and what our command center that we had in Saudi Arabia and then it's been moved to another country, something as simple as text chat. We call it IM chat but the ability for various organisations to text chat over our secure networks allowed us to basically prosecute and attack time sensitive targets in a way that we never expected to see happen.
We had some other collaborative tools out there but frankly they were a little but difficult for the users to get their hands around, but something as simple as having about six different organisations all text chatting in one room would allow us to basically dynamically re-task our intelligence assets so that when forces were involved in ground combat, we could focus the intelligence operations and air power to support those ground forces in combat and that was the biggest thing that surprised me.
That the coms infrastructure and everything, we had enough time to plan the war, that we had all of that in and we had enough bandwidth laid in through tactical mains and some fibre connections. But the collaborative tools was the piece that we stepped back afterwards and said 'wow, that was a real war winner.'
Now is there something that you're following up on in terms of institutionalising what you've learned from that theatre?
John Hayes: We were in an environment where our allies were the Arab nations, our allies were the United Kingdom, Australia, some of the NATO countries and the ability to share information in a real time basis with those countries was a challenge. We learned some lessons from that but frankly it's still a challenge in terms of how you can safeguard you own national data but then share the essential data so that your allies that you're flying side by side with have the same intelligence information that we have.
Now we see the same thing in the private sector which is the federation of data working with your customers, working with partners and employees and in terms of working with the coalition were there any particular technologies that failed or was it mostly a people and political issue?
John Hayes: It was mostly a political issue. The technology was certainly there. The way we ended up sharing information was we created individual IP based networks and we would post information from one network to another. We basically posted it in Web sites and the people that had access to that network and that Web site were the people that were part of that allied coalition. We had a separate allied coalition for Iraqi operations. We had a separate allied coalition for Afghanistan operations. So we were basically posting information off of one of our national systems, either the United States system, or an Australian system, or a British system, and post it to the IP network that we were willing to share all that information amongst our allies.
And on the wireless front, obviously which such a mobile workforce or a mobile air force, you've deployed a lot of technologies in the wireless space. Are there any in particular that you think you're betting on such as the WIMAX future.
John Hayes: In our Air Force Reserve Command we have fielded wireless across all of our bases so we have a wireless infrastructure at the seventeen locations that we are the owners of the bases. But frankly I've been a little bit disappointed. When we put in the infrastructure, we thought it was a case that if you build it, they will come. What we found is they haven't come as fast as we would like them to do. So some of it is that we haven't got the clients out there, the secure clients that we need to interoperate with our wireless infrastructure. So we've got an infrastructure out there that we're gonna have to sit down and work with our user communities and help them grow into using that and that's an important part of innovation and technology that I've seen. Is that if you just go out there and field technology for the sake of technology, it's probably not going to get adapted or adopted. So what we have to do is I need some people that can sit there and work with the users to help them use this new technology that we're fielding.
What specifically is the new technology that you're fielding? Is it a voice over IP system?
John Hayes: Well we've looked at voice over IP and we worked that on a case by case business, case by case basis, when the business case makes sense. Frankly we're not in a position right now where the business case has made sense. And in our command, resources are pretty lean for Air Force Reserve Command. We like to say that we provide about 20 percent of the Air Force's capability with about a 4 percent of the budget and the way we're able to do that is a lot of our people are part time, military members, and their full time civilian members, so we provide an awful lot of capability for a very small share of cost. But what that also does is then it forces the CIO and it forces the Chief Operating Officer to figure out ways to do things very very efficiently. Business case analysis is a very important part of that.
One of the new technologies that we are fielding that we're pretty excited about is we call the emergency notification system and I think it's a system we'll probably be seeing more of on college campuses as a result of what happened at Virginia Tech. And the way we use it at our command is if we have to get the word out that we have a terrorist event at one of our bases or we're having a hurricane condition at a base or a natural disaster where we need to get the word out to all of our people to either evacuate the base or evacuate the area because of a hurricane is coming ashore, if we need to reestablish accountability of our people after we have had that kind of event.
We're fielding this kind of emergency notification system to do exactly that. We're fielding it on an enterprise basis where the servers for our entire enterprise is at our headquarters here at Warner Robins, Georgia but then we tap into the IP networks, we tap into the voice networks so that we can basically pass messages to our people through up to ten different ways, phones, cell phones.
Is this based on some unique technology that you've developed in conjunction with the private sector?
John Hayes: It's a technology that frankly the private sector came to us. We had a requirement that we had been working with since Katrina hit. We had some real difficulty reestablishing connectivity to our reservists along the Gulf coast and New Orleans area after Katrina hit, and we had no way of getting a hold of all of the people and this technology came to us through industry and frankly that's how we get a lot of our ideas for innovation. Industry will come to us with ideas, we will share information with other elements of the DOD and other elements of the federal government.
The other neat way we get innovative ideas within our command is through our reservists. As I said earlier, 20 percent of our people are full timers, 80percent are part timers and they're our citizen warriors and they work for companies like Dell, and they work for companies like Cisco, and Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.
They work for every company that we have in the country. So when I go out and visit these bases and they're not bashful about coming to me and saying 'Colonel Hayes, have you thought about looking at this kind of technology for use within Air Force Reserve Command?' It's interesting because I tell my active duty Air Force components when they are dealing with a reservist, the first thing you ought to ask a reservist is 'what do they do when they are not wearing their uniform,' because they will bring a wealth of experience and capability to the fight that you might not even know of unless you ask them what they do when they aren't wearing the uniform.
You we're talking about using collaboration out in the field in the theatre of war. Are you thinking about using collaboration and I'll bring up this term Web 2.0, where you can tap into that collective intelligence of the reservists in a way that's based on having some technology infrastructure as opposed to somebody having to come into your office and tell you?
John Hayes: I would say we're probably not as aggressive with some of the collaborative tools that the Web 2.0 can offer to us. We have been discussing with Cisco and we've been discussing with Microsoft how we can use open communications better, unified communications so that we can continue to maintain connectivity with our network and allow our people to do their job whether they're wearing the uniform or not. But I think what we'll probably see and technology advances like with Web 2.0 you'll see the military basically stand back I think and let industry tell us where it's going.
How do you avoid kind of getting into the situation that for example the FBI got into where their technology systems were way out of date and not capable of dealing with the kinds of problems that we had obviously post and pre 9/11? So if you're not innovating, do you have a command structure in place in which you can make sure you got core technologies, especially around areas such as security where you can't deploy mobile very easily unless you have that security in place?
John Hayes: Yeah we do and this is where it's basically because I'm the CIO of one of the nine Air Force Major Commands. We do take direction from the Pentagon in this case and from our commander of the Air Force Networks Operations Command to make sure that we are fielding the capabilities that maintain the security of our network and that's the part that I really worry about more than anything else is network security and we all understand that all it takes one weak link and if they're inside the network then we've got some real issues.
So we do take guidance, there is an approved products list out there that we stick very close to. There is a standard Air Force architecture that's being driven from the Pentagon that we follow so to a certain degree, the Pentagon will drive the architecture that we're going to but at the same time it's a very collaborative environment.
The CIOs were all of the Air Force Major Commands, we've all grown up together, we meet two to three times a year, we exchange e-mails and phone calls almost on a daily to weekly basis so as one command comes up with an idea or somebody in the Air Force has an idea that's fairly innovative, we will steal that from each other very easily. We're not worried about plagiarism in terms of that we're tracking carefully how current we're staying with our architecture, how current were staying with our infrastructure, we watch the tech refresh area very, very carefully.
The information assurance is being monitored all the time through Air Force Information Warfare Center and through teams that we have that basically go out, the Air Force Communication Agency, across the Air Force to make sure that our networks continue to be optimised and that we have the latest technology and the latest operating systems running.
One of the issues that we're wrestling with now is data rest. How do we secure the data on our laptops, so if we would happen to have a laptop stolen from somebody's house or somebody's car, how do we secure that data and the Air Force is right now is fielding a policy that will then be implemented evenly across all the Air Force so that we're all using the same data encryption standard.
