Haft of the Spear

The Defense Department’s launch of approved collaboration tools has triggered rapid growth in networked interactions by its uniformed warfighters and civilian personnel, largely because of its unique approach of giving users a choice between two sets of commercially developed services, project officials said.

[…]

The collaborative tools represent DISA’s first attempt to provide a service that is built from commercial applications, as is the approach of offering two sets of side-by-side services developed and provided by separate vendors that compete for the loyalty of individual DOD users, DISA officials said.

The biggest benefit of DISA’s approach is that it removes the burden of creating, launching and managing the services from DOD and places it on the vendors, officials said. It also cuts DOD’s cost considerably because in contracting for the services, the department defined only the functions it needed, not the technical specifications of the services.