Wanted: More Intel

How do the nation’s warfighters stay ahead of improvised threats? They need more data from intelligence analysts—now.

In today’s evolving battlefield landscape with rapidly changing threats, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA) knew their legacy system wasn’t up to the task.

Working with JIDA and using Agile and DevOps methods, our developers created an adaptive technology platform and a suite of analytics tools. It gives JIDA’s analysts a secure and reliable solution with quick access to more than 1,000 percent more data than on their old legacy system, ultimately saving warfighter lives.

JIDA selected Booz Allen because we know JIDA’s mission and we can rapidly innovate. As the Department of Defense’s (DoD) agile response mechanism, JIDA develops iterative technology solutions that accelerate and streamline battlefield adaptation and facilitate rapid responses to warfighter needs.

The agency needed a platform that could react as quickly as the organization does, answering emerging questions and countering increasingly resourceful, improvised threats.

More important than speed, however, the solution needed to protect JIDA’s information security, ensuring compliance with all DoD security requirements for software delivery on mission-critical systems.

Putting Agile and DevOps into practice meant focusing from the outset on things like user access, enterprise services, and infrastructure—classic core capability goals and environmental constraints. Before designing the system, our team developed the full concept of operations, so once complete, the system could be deployed rapidly. Going from concept to full operational capability—with full security accreditation—took less than a year.

Our team identified all security controls at the beginning, tracking and managing compliance and validation until it went live. And at that point, we collected customer feedback to monitor risks. To protect information security, we designed a Secure Agile systems development lifecycle.

Continuous process monitoring and validation, and a fully automated delivery pipeline, enabled developers to take the project from backlog to production delivery in near-real time.