IBM Jump-Starts Homeland Defense

DISA helps the feds respond quickly during a crisis with the right teams and the latest information. That is particularly critical during a terrorist attack, when multiple government and civilian agencies need to share information quickly and formulate their best response.

The demonstration, which began last December, was designed to pull together a wide pool of talent from both government and civilian agencies in order to coordinate a rapid response to a simulated terrorist threat. The idea "was to be more effective with our homeland defense. If a terrorist strike occurs, we want to be able to coordinate the consequence management among a wide range of agencies," according to Glenn Cooper, the assistant technical manager for the Homeland Security agency's Command and Control, Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration team.

Coordination is critical. "In a war game, you are fighting one enemy. Here, you have to bring together various federal, state, local and civilian teams together, tell them what to do, and collect information as to what is going on," says Richard Johnston, IBM jStart program manager.

What was needed was a central repository of contact information--not just phone numbers but e-mail addresses and alternate communications such as instant messaging--that could be tapped in a time of crisis. "We need to be able to form various ad hoc groups when emergencies come up," Cooper says.

The team went to IBM's jStart group and Mitre to pull together a project that deployed three principal technologies for the DISA demonstration. First was IBM's Directory Integrator for data and directory integration that dynamically added, modified and removed organizations and participants, and worked to pull information from custom-built Department of Defense collaboration tools so that directory information could be shared with civilian users. Second, it modeled data within an UDDI registry to best suit the needs of the team participants. "UDDI was used to determine if a function was still present and not destroyed by the terrorists," Johnston says.

Finally, they used IBM's Sametime application toolset and a Web service to deliver alerts to Sametime Navy users. Sametime is currently used on various Navy ships at sea to keep in touch as they move about the world, and the IBM and Mitre technical consultants were able to demonstrate interoperability between Sametime and the DoD proprietary tools to perform tasks such as whiteboarding, file transfer and application sharing, as well as sending instant messages and alerts worldwide.

The technology demonstration showed that a complex collection of more than 200 people spread among 60 different military and civilian organizations in 20 different venues, including one Navy ship, could work. The organizations simulated simultaneous attacks at a Louisiana oil refinery, a Navy installation in Norfolk and other locales.

"We were able to connect all these players together and coordinate a response," Cooper says. "The need to provide dynamic teaming is very important, along with interoperability of DoD proprietary systems. We expect to continue to work with IBM to expand our taxonomy and security response."

"We designed our systems to be able to figure out how to add resource pools dynamically. For example, we wanted to be able to find chemical warfare experts in California," Johnston says. IBM also wrapped Web services around a proprietary application called DCTS that handles collaboration among DoD personnel for such mundane things as operational manuals and field documentation.

"If you are a vendor for the government, you can put your operational manuals in a central location, and anyone seeking or supplying documentation can do so all via Web services. It frees you from having to worry about the platform or interface," Johnston says. The IBM jStart team assembled this using an XML repository and WebSphere tools.

IBM's jStart is a rather unique organization that works with different types of industries. "We get our leads from all different organizations within IBM," Johnston says. "We partner with IBM's Global Services on 30- to 90-day engagements. We don't want to live with the customers for years. Our goal is to get the technology deployed and to partner with the customer so that we can reference them."

Surprisingly, the entire team comprises 13 people based around the world, yet last year the team accomplished more than 80 different projects. Johnston thinks of his team as Navy SEALs: "We get in, do something, and then get out and on to our next assignment."

"I don't always think that our Navy is on the cutting edge, but the project impressed me," Johnston says. "It is surprising how fast they are moving and how they can work together to identify the requirements and put solutions into place."