Fulcrum Strategy Matches IT Needs Throughout DOD

The National Cyber Strategy supports a Defense Department-wide effort to harden the department’s cyber posture. The DOD CIO office issued the new Fulcrum strategy in June to solidify the strategy’s goals.

Fulcrum brings together the CIO’s IT goals for 2025 through 2029 to bring digital modernization and emerging technology directly to the warfighter. Diverging from normal DOD naming convention, Fulcrum is not an acronym, which many in leadership have emphasized suggests its overall importance to department policy.

“Fulcrum is a cross-cutting strategy,” DOD Deputy Customer Experience Officer Robert Franzen told GovCIO Media & Research. “It’s an integrated approach where we build upon the workforce, further improve governance, also addressing the big rocks for modernization, which all really leads into the fact that Fulcrum is about leveraging technology as a strategic enabler to improve decision advantage for the warfighter on the battlefield.”

Putting the Warfighter First

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract and Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) concept serve as the foundation of decision advantage, Franzen said. Fulcrum “bridges the gap” between higher-level department strategies and others across the department.

“It’s that centerpiece between all these strategies in how you take those efforts and realize them through strategic direction in Fulcrum and how that aligns to the larger strategies for the department and for the country,” Franzen said.

The strategy, which DOD Deputy CIO Leslie Beavers said in June sits “at the nexus” of the DOD CIO’s IT strategy, consists of four lines of effort:

• Provide joint warfighting IT capabilities.
• Modernize information networks and compute.
• Optimize IT governance.
• Cultivate a premier digital workforce.

According to Franzen, Fulcrum’s key difference comes in its vision of putting the warfighter user experience first. He called the strategy a “natural maturation” of the Digital Modernization Strategy and emphasized that functionality, interoperability, sustainability and the ability to scale are paramount in Fulcrum’s implementation.

“It doesn’t matter if we have a secure network if it’s not functional. And it doesn’t matter if it’s functional if it’s not sustainable. And it doesn’t matter if it’s those things that we can’t scale it because we’re global. We have to scale it everywhere. And it’s not that one of those priorities takes a front seat over the other. It depends,” Franzen said.

A Collaborative Effort

Beavers told GovCIO Media & Research that more than 40 people contributed to creating the strategy. The group represented all major stakeholders in the strategy, including 5G implementation, user experience, edge cloud, satellite communications, workforce management, AI and data.

Franzen noted that experts across the department, including the Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO), Department of the Navy, Department of the Air Force, National Guard Bureau, Joint Staff, the defense agencies and DOD field activities all contributed to authoring Fulcrum.

Beavers said DOD is approaching Fulcrum implementation in three key ways:

• Championing specific initiatives to jumpstart the process in each of the lines of effort.
• Providing annual capability planning guidance and budget certification efforts.
• Bringing together stakeholders again to solidify objectives, synchronize existing plans and develop new implementation plans where deemed necessary.

Beavers warned that growing pains might stem from Fulcrum, but called it a “cooperation problem, not a technology problem.” The CIO is collaborating with entities like the CDAO, Army and Defense Innovation Unit to experiment and try new innovative technologies.

“Our role within this space is to do pick-and-shovel work to enable the access to the data and integration, and they get to do the flashy tools piece,” Beavers said at TechNet Cyber in June. “What I think we’re looking at within our cybersecurity division in particular is, how do we incorporate some of those tools into our insider threat or user activity, or just to elevate our ability to accomplish our cybersecurity mission without having to add more people?”

Modernization for Cybersecurity

DOD Director of Cloud and Software Modernization George Lamb said that Fulcrum’s push for software modernization has helped shift mindsets to do away with legacy programs, take risks and work toward systems that continuously authorize users in the background as part of a larger zero-trust infrastructure.

“I think the cyber world has been so protective, so afraid of making a mistake that they really say no to a lot of things. [We need to get] that mindset changed in the cyber world from saying, ‘No, it’s too risky’ to ‘Yes, and do it safely,’” Lamb told GovCIO Media & Research at AFCEA TechNet Cyber 2024.

Franzen said Fulcrum’s next steps will include the development of implementation plans for the strategy to “sustain the gains,” which includes revamping old strategies and creating new ones.

“Some would say that writing the strategy was the easy part. Now we have to put our money where our mouth is. We have to mobilize the commitment and the way that we mobilize the commitment is through the development or the updating of existing or new implementation plans,” Franzen said.