Information Technology (IT) Community of Practice.

Sponsored by the office of the Department of Defense (DoD) deputy chief information officer (CIO), the Information Technology (IT) Community of Practice (CoP) is focused on improving the performance of the DoD IT workforce by providing access to best practices, lessons learned, and training and guidance information in a user-centered format. By incorporating netcentric concepts into everyday work through the cultivation of an information-sharing culture across program offices, the IT CoP is helping to leverage valuable expertise across the workforce for the benefit of all.

Learn While Doing

The IT CoP supports a learn-while-doing method of performance support that complements schoolhouse and distance learning. The IT Community also benefits from its collocated access to the functional communities of program management, risk, logistics, contracting, data, and systems engineering. By providing access to best practices, lessons learned, and examples that are tied to required policy and task guidance information, the IT workforce will have just-in-time access to required information.

IT CoP Growth Plan

The IT CoP is being developed by cultivating interaction within sub-communities. This evolutionary growth approach allows the IT CoP to grow as resources are provided for a particular need area. The goal is that over time, the IT CoP will become the golden source for the IT workforce. The Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA) Implementation Community is the flagship sub-community within the IT CoP. In addition to CCA, the Business Process Reengineering community has just started, and Information Assurance should come online in the next few months.

Clinger-Cohen Act Implementation Community

The CCA Implementation Community is dedicated to collecting and disseminating information about the CCA, a law that codifies best practices for the requirements definition and acquisition of IT programs. CCA applies to all IT systems including national security systems. The thrust of the community is to move CCA from being an after-the-fact paper drill to a tool that enables high-performance program management.

The CCA Community has a number of resources to help programs, including detailed task guidance for all the DoD 5000 CCA information requirements (such as outcome-based performance measures, post-implementation reviews, and the IT Registry). Along with key guidance documents, all federal and DoD policy information is integrated into the task support. Currently the community is working on collecting examples and templates for each of the CCA information requirements.

CCA Community Meeting--Avoiding Section 8084 Pitfalls

The first CCA Community meeting was held on June 24, 2004, and addressed avoiding the pitfalls of section 8084(c). Section 8084(c) of the Appropriations Act for FY 2004 re-enacted a provision that requires the DoD CIO to certify CCA compliance for major automated information systems to the congressional defense committees at acquisition milestones. Almost 50 people attended, facilitating discussion of many issues among a mix of oversight, program, and domain personnel: when new programs should start working CCA; what to do about inadequate sponsor involvement; the difference between outcome-based performance measures from acquisition measures; and others.

Joining the IT CoP

If you are not currently a member of the Acquisition Community Connection (ACC) but are interested in joining the IT Community of Practice or CCA community, please go to <http://acc.dau.mil/> and click on the "Join" link on the right side of the page. Then in the application's "Request Comment" field, indicate your interest in being a part of the new IT or CCA community. We are still looking for subject matter experts to become part of the community, so if you are interested in participating, please contact the IT and CCA CoP Community coordinator, Noel Dickover: [e-mail].