Collaboration may not be pervasive in the government space, but it's becoming more of a priority that federal information technology officials are working toward, said a panel June 15 during a Washington, D.C. event called the Government IT Leadership Forum.

"We have embarked on that journey and I think we've made significant progress," said Margaret Graves, deputy chief information officer at the Homeland Security Department. "We want this to be business led and IT enabled...That will allow us to move toward that ubiquitous sharing that we know we require at this time."

Right now, Casey Henson, chief technology officer, directorate for information management and CIO of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said she's looking at "small applications" and widgets that fit into the community framework and can be used across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

Integrated services, uniform identity access management and similar architectures are being built in collaboration so they can be used in collaboration. This is a first step toward creating policies around sharing, said Henson.

Beyond focusing on architecture, Graves said agencies should think about what services or data they're using that other agencies might find useful. Agencies should also create an information sharing governance board to help manage these collaborative efforts.

Don Burke, Intellipedia doyen at the Central Intelligence Agency, said across government there should be incentives for contributing, sharing and enhancing unique structure to make them usable by other departments. He said he hopes a "cultural" incentive structure can promote collaboration. Henson later added that standards are helpful in directing collaboration, but ultimately, "standards don't mean interoperability."

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