According to Barry Duplantis, vice president and general manager of Mattermost’s North American public sector business, the wide variety of technology solutions needed by different military stakeholders has posed a challenge to the services as they work to maintain their preparedness for modern conflicts.
In a piece published to Homeland Security Today late last month, Duplantis said that the U.S. military must embrace a unified collaboration platform that streamlines technology tools, data and communication in a “secure, user-friendly way,” to bridge the gaps between stakeholder demands.
Duplantis shared three steps the military can take to diminish the political and technical barriers slowing the deployment of a centralized platform, the first of which is providing teams with technology tools that can remove bottlenecks.
Understanding the communication styles of younger talent is also essential. Duplantis noted that there is a generational gap between military leaders and technical users, who communicate and organize and consume data “in radically new ways.”
“If military leaders want to recruit and retain the technical talent that will help advance their missions, they need to equip them with the devices, apps, and instant-message functionality they’ve been using their entire lives,” he said.
Successfully implementing a unified platform requires confidence in its ability to satisfy military security demands. To meet these standards, Duplantis said that the platform should operate privately in an on-premises data center or private cloud and be deployable in Department of Defense environments.
“That gives military organizations complete data sovereignty and control to meet the strictest compliance requirements,” he explained.
“These collaboration technologies have been tested, proven, and are already in use by military ‘software factories’ such as Platform One, the innovation hub of the U.S. Air Force,” he added.
Duplantis said that connecting every stakeholder in one digital location will boost understanding, empower informed decision-making and help the warfighter respond with the right actions at the right times.
“A unified collaboration platform can help ensure the military isn’t trying to fight the next war with the last war’s information technology,” wrote Duplantis.
