When last February’s historic snow storm shut down most of Washington, DC, key decision makers for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) were able to keep working, thanks in part to a suite of social networking tools that includes a wiki, a blog, a video-sharing site, and milBook, the military’s secure version of Facebook.

“We held virtual meetings, worked on shared documents and didn’t notice much interruption,” said Dave Dejewski, head of customer relations for the Business Transformation Agency, which was created in 2005 to guide the Department’s business operations modernization efforts.

The suite of social networking tools known as milSuite—which includes milBook, milBlog, milWiki, and milTube—enables personnel to share information behind DOD firewalls. The tools, said Dejewski, bring “relevant, accurate, and complete information from all over the world to the decision-making table when decision makers need it.”

Overcoming Resistance to Change

MilSuite was developed by the Army’s MilTech Solutions Office as part of a DOD-wide effort to leverage Web 2.0 technologies and foster collaboration. The office utilized existing capabilities and security protocols of the Army Knowledge Online/Defense Knowledge Online portal.

Dejewski noted that it will take time to encourage widespread use of social networking tools in the military, and believes the key is providing value to senior leaders: “If the senior leaders are using the technology, the people who work for that leader will either learn how to use it, or they will become irrelevant.”

Sharing Information

For the DOD, security is the first priority for any tool that involves sharing information. Subscribers need to provide an ID card called a Common Access Card as well as a PIN number to gain access to the milSuite of solutions.

By making security rules available “in the cloud” via a security service, owners of data can publish their data sources and ensure that it will be accessible to the appropriate subscribers. This “publish-and-subscribe” model eliminates the costs and complexity of the old business model, which required a spider web of system-to-system interfaces.