The current budget environment and Defense Secretary Robert Gates' efficiency drive are forcing the Army be smarter when it comes to information technology, said the new Army chief information officer in her first public address.

"We cannot continue to do business as usual as we did in the past. We can't acquire IT the way we have in the past. And we're going to have to do it with a tailored, smaller force, because we are going to draw down the Army as we go through this," said Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence during a March 18 AFCEA NOVA event.

Consolidation, standardization and better data management are priorities, said Lawrence. The Army will consolidate 28 data centers by October 2011 and is on track to close over 250 by 2014 or 2015, she said. As more data centers are consolidated Lawrence is trying to standardize the network.

"We can only have one network and it has to be an operationalized network," she said.

Enterprisewide email is part of her vision of highly-integrated Army IT, and 1,000 email accounts have already migrated to a new cloud-based system. Army leadership--"the bosses"--were the first to see their email accounts move as a way to preempt pushback from the field, said Lawrence. By December 2011, all designated email accounts, around 100,000, will move to the enterprise email system.

Data consolidation and standardization also allow for cleaning, said Lawrence. The Army has "thousands and thousands of applications that are hanging on by a string just because 10 people are using it," she said. "We've got a lot of house cleaning."

Determining where to streamline, though, is an ongoing challenge, said the Army CIO. "At the end of the day it has to be about effectiveness. We cannot be so efficient that we cannot provide the capability that our warfighters need to be out protecting us."

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