Army software development should be more like a mobile phone apps store, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the service's chief information officer and G6.

"You take the Apple iPhone, they basically dictated [that] it's going to work on this device...they locked down the operating environment, the whole software development bit and told everyone to have a nice day," Sorenson said while speaking at an AFCEA Belvoir conference March 30. "Now you've got hundreds of thousands of applications functioning."

Google's Android does a similar thing, only it gives greater freedom to developers because Android allows for different end user devices, Sorenson added.

The Army will start to take a similar approach by creating its own standard operating environment that will "dictate how systems function in our environment, whether you're building a data center or an unmanned system," Sorenson said.

Software acquisition and development in military settings is beset by problems of long development times and tight coupling of data that makes information sharing difficult. The Army's goal is to transition away from a systems-of-systems environment into a common software framework in which applications can quickly be added.

A future Defense Department acquisition decision memorandum will establish that common applications environment, Sorenson said.

In the meantime, the Army is making use of the Defense Information Systems Agency's Rapid Access Computing Environment and Forge.mil capabilities to create a development environment in which Army programmers can develop and expose applications to the rest of the Army, Sorenson said.

For more:
- read more of FierceGovernmentIT's coverage of the AFCEA Belvoir conference
- hear an audio recording of Sorenson's keynote speech
- read an AUSA paper on software transformation (.pdf)

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