Stanton is driving a new teamwork mindset at DISA

BALTIMORE — Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton is redefining the concept of teamwork at the Defense Information Systems Agency. The director of DISA said the interdependency of technology systems and the speed of artificial intelligence are driving this change.

“By design, we have to put solutions together in a meaningful way, which means that those solutions are derived from different companies, which means that we have a dependency, our nation has a dependency, on your solutions working together that requires teamwork culturally. We all have to accept that,” Stanton said during a speech June 2 at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference. “When you consider the speed, scope and scale of current and future operations, it’s time for us to rethink how we approach teamwork. Every one of us needs to understand our position. Everyone needs to understand our role on the team.”

This interdependency is most evident across the DoD Information Network (DoDIN). Stanton said this complex infrastructure includes transport, host, compute, cloud based capabilities, a public key infrastructure, identity control and access management solutions and other cybersecurity solutions. He said DISA and its vendor partners are all critical to the DoDIN’s success.

“How do we work better with each other? How do we directly communicate within the bounds of a left and right limit to meet the requirements of the changing operating environment? Where are there dependencies of other systems which your solution is dependent on? From where do you derive your data? To whom are you offering data? From where are you getting your configuration? Answer all of the questions and develop an understanding of the dependencies,” Stanton said. “You should know your role, know where your system fits and then work as a team to drive towards synergistic effects.”

A lot of the questions Stanton is posing are both for DISA and its vendors to answer as part of this new approach.

Stanton said all of his priorities — readiness, campaigning, continuous modernization and lethality — are helping to drive this culture change of what teamwork means.

“You got to work collectively as a team, being proficient at your individual task, but fitting it into the collective. If you are part of the DoDIN, if you are contracted in support of DISA or DoD Cyber Defense Command [DCDC], you’re on the team, and you must be trained and ready, and you must understand how your individual responsibilities fit into the collective,” he said. “That’s what we mean when we reference readiness. Readiness helps us drive mission effectiveness, brilliant at the basics, yes, operationally relevant and effective is a must. It also helps us drive accountability. The days of letting your certificate expire and breaking the DoDIN in are over. Period. If you make a configuration change on the firewall and you put in ‘any, any’ rule in and you cause a flood of traffic, not good enough. The stakes are too high. We cannot take down our operating environment when we’re in full-scale combat operations.”

At the same time, Stanton said he recognized he can’t drive accountability until employees and contractors know what it means to be trained and ready.

“Once I’ve done that, we’re good at it and we’re operationally effective. If we break it, there’s accountability. There’s a method to the madness,” he said. “If you’re contracted with us, you’re on the team. But we have to put individual tasks and collective tasks together towards an actual mission, towards an objective and towards an outcome.”

Stanton added the team must drive toward the same outcome versus just delivering their capability without understanding the bigger picture.

You can’t deliver IT in isolation

This new approach is a significant shift away from the approach DISA relies on today. Stanton said teamwork is very transactional and almost one way — DISA to industry.

“We write contracts. We develop task orders. We ask you to do something and you do it. If something breaks, we call you and ask you to fix it, or you detect it and you fix it, and then you call us. That’s pretty much how it works,” he said. “It’s not good enough to meet the speed, scope and scale challenges of today and into the future.”

An example of this is how DISA works with the combatant commands today, which isn’t as effective as it could or should be.

Today, the DoDIN supports 11 different combatant commands, and there are 11 different implementations and instantiations of a solution. Stanton said that doesn’t work in a global fight. He said when a vendor makes a change or an innovation to their product, they have to understand how it affects both that software or system, but also the second and third order effects of the systems that all connect to each other.

“It does no good to deliver a widget in isolation. There’s not a single commander at any echelon of our warfighting forces that wants a bag of ICAM. They want a functionally relevant solution delivered at time and tempo of their warfighting requirement that requires us to put systems and solutions together and deliver them with a trained and ready force at time and tempo of the requirement,” he said. “We got to understand what the requirement is, but then we must deliver it. That means that your solution has to fit into the system-of-systems. It has to be configured properly. We have to train on it effectively, and then we have to deliver it. We have to deliver it in time to be incorporated into the operation, the mission, the execution from the warfighting community that might force us to adjust cost, schedule and performance.”

This latest concept of teamwork plays into Stanton’s other priorities like continuous modernization as it allows DISA and the commands to be more agile in adjusting as the mission changes. He said understanding how the data flows enables the lethality goal.

“We must get the right data to the right place at the right time to make a better and faster decision than our enemies. That requires us working together,” he said. “Additionally we have to think about the cost imposition on our adversaries. How are we designing our systems to gain and maintain contact with our cyber adversaries? Does your solution have a vulnerability in it? Is the vulnerability of your solution jeopardizing the system of systems? Are you the weak link in the team? I hope not.”

Training, education changes the culture

This concept of teamwork has been discussed for decades across DoD and civilian agencies. Stanton said he has to change the culture of both at DISA and with industry. That, he said, all comes back to his readiness priority.

“I developed the approach that establishing and holding accountability has a dependency on preparation, training and development. I have to make it clear what my expectations are. I have to provide an environment that supports training and validation and qualification before I can hold you accountable,” Stanton said after his speech during a briefing with reporters. “But let’s be clear, once the standard is now established, the training environment is rapidly in development. Qualification is part of the readiness and the training. If you then make the mistake, there are absolute repercussions, and those repercussions will be based on an individual industry relationship.”

He added DISA will have to add clauses to contracts to help further drive home these changes.

It’s clear this cultural change will not happen overnight. Stanton said it’s going to require relationships, team building, development as well as the new contract language. But, he said, without this shift DISA and DoD are not going to be able to operate at the speed, scope and scale that is necessary these days.

Of course, this culture change also means improving the DISA workforce.

“We have a leader development program that we’re instituting within both DISA and DCDC. If I could strike the term supervisor from the vernacular, I would. I don’t want a supervisor, I need leaders,” Stanton said. “But I can’t expect just because you have been a member of the agency for a number of years, have demonstrated your competency and gotten a promotion into a position that you now have ‘supervisory responsibility’ that we have developed you as a leader. We have to do the leader development and once we’ve done the leader development, now my team that I’m leading is contractors, it’s civilians, it’s military service members. It won’t happen overnight.”

Stanton added that this culture shift will take some time. But given how AI is changing the way DoD fights, he said it’s going to require DISA to think a little bit differently, to interoperate a little bit differently in the military and talk about doctrine and organization and training a bit differently.

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