Army CIO LTGEN Jeffrey Sorenson spoke at a meeting of AFCEA Baghdad today, and repeated his call for a unified, universal information service for soldiers that would give them “a universal data storage point, with one phone number, e-mail, and one set of collaborative tools that will not change, even when one physically moves, and will be effective anywhere in the world.” Sorenson has made this goal part of nearly every major address he’s made in the last year, as he steers the Army toward a Network Service Center model for IT–essentially moving the Army’s networks toward a cloud computing model.
From the Multinational Force Iraq press desk:

Lt. Gen. Sorenson began by saying to the group, “When it comes to
information, it is not what you know, it is what you share.” He added, “The U.S. Army is transforming what its IT network will look like by developing a better expeditionary capability and by having the ability to establish collaboration as a way of doing business. The Army will be transitioning a lot of independent networks into a single network enterprise. In order to be effective, we in the United States have to be able to communicate with all our expeditionary forces. The current network we have is not a single enterprise and we have to do a lot to make it function to the expeditionary level.”

Also at the event were Iraqi Maj. Gen. Sa’ad Kadhum, Director General of Communications for the Ministry of Information; Brig. Gen. Aliwe Jassam, Director – Radio Repair Division; Brig. Gen. Mahmood Al-Anni from the Ministry of Information; Brig. Gen. Ahmed Hoan, Advanced First Responder Network Program Manager for the Ministry of Information; and Dr. Ali Taresh, Chief Information Officer for the Ministry of Defense.

Taresh asked what the Iraqi MOD could learn from the problems the MNF coalition had faced. Sorenson answered that “getting people to come to agreement on the governance and protocol and the network structure was a challenge. We now have a process where we have one single group that looks at the network structure.”

AFCEA’s Baghdad Chapter opened last November.