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Enterprise services help Navy increase ‘value per user’
When it comes to shared services, the Navy isn’t taking a “build it and they will come” approach to enterprise services.
Instead, the goal is to find a lead office, build something so good that other offices want to use it, and make the shared service become boring and invisible to the mission.
Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer, said the service has six enterprise services after having none a year ago.
Justin Fanelli is the CTO for the Department of the Navy.
“We want them, even the ones that are through, to perform at a higher level. On the front end side, we are looking at both Horizon Two to pilot those efforts, as well as here solutions, workarounds, and other activities at the edge at operations. So we’re scouting within that, essentially deployment across all of our different sites for what are the highest performing activities,” Fanelli said on Ask the CIO after speaking at the West 2025 conference, sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute. “Between private sector offerings and existing capabilities, where do we scale them? That scaling process has been essentially updated in a pretty significant way where we say we are making choices based on how much better the solution is versus how we’re doing this.”
The Navy’s enterprise services run the gamut of capabilities that every command or organization would need from identity, credentialing and access management (ICAM) services — which the chief information officer designated in May 2024 — to the most recent one for messaging and collaboration.
Fanelli said the goal of enterprise services is simple: stop building certain services or functions many times over and offer a single instance that is so good the users don’t even know it’s there.
“As you go through convincing people to trust that service when you build something like that, and it will be there when they need it, is a big part of this job. I’ve spent a lot of time over the first few months connecting with those stakeholders, understanding their needs, understanding their concerns, and then going back to the people executing that I know from my former life, and saying, ‘Hey, we need to take this into account,’” he said. “We need to understand how it’s going to be resilient, how it’s going to make the user experience better. How are we going to know? How are we going to measure and show these partners that it all really works? So some of that dot connecting, and I guess negotiation in some cases, is really where I think at the DON CIO we’re at our best.”
Users seeing a difference
One of the ways the Navy measures the impact of an enterprise service is based on the simple metric of “value per user.” Fanelli said that is from an operational resilience perspective and overall performance improvements.
“For instance, one through this shoot is the Satellite Terminal (transportable) Non-Geostationary (STtNG) program, a proliferated low Earth orbit. Here is a case where, at very good value, we are using something that is commercial, where we only used to use military. The goal for outcomes is exponential performance improvements on the current budget, and then where we can scale activities,” he said. “I’d be hesitant to put a cap on the amount of positive disruption that we’re looking for, but we have a community of unleashed people and that continues to grow as we find them. We’re looking for 50% or greater improvement. We’re looking for as many of these efforts that we can use to accelerate our key priorities as possible.”
At the same time, Fanelli said some enterprise services have resulted in improvements that are eight or nine times better than the old services.
The potential of modernizing existing capabilities and then offering them to the entire DoN is part of the bigger Operation Cattle Drive effort to turn off old or duplicative systems. Operation Cattle Drive began in 2020 and aims to eliminate redundant systems and applications across the Department of Navy. The focus for 2025 is around the business mission area with a goal of turning off 55 to 60 legacy systems.
“I think we recognize that this is a time for rapid change. This is a time for technology to inform the concept of deployment, so that we can work differently, so that we can support our warfighters in a drastically different way and a better way. I think with that we are recognizing that it is a good time to be comfortable being uncomfortable learning by doing and just expecting outcomes,” Fanelli said.
Breaking down siloes
To manage this rate of change, the DON is employing a portfolio approach to technology services. Fanelli said it’s part of how they are breaking down organizational siloes that have built up over the years.
Fanelli said from an acquisition perspective, the portfolio approach could mean a pilot started by one program executive office could be picked up and brought across the goal line by another program executive office.
“This is the idea of having a more transparent inventory different efforts and then structured pilots in general, so that we can say you are piloting for one use case, this group is piloting for a different use case, but it looks like those are closer than we think. We’re talking to the same vendors. We want it to be based on merit and impact, not based on where it’s invented or who’s working on it,” he said. “The cross-PEO work is really starting to pick up. I’m very excited about that because there are more things that we can do together. The number of opportunities where we can do one plus one equals three for command and control, for network activities, for connectivity and just foundational work as a whole, has really picked up in the last very short period of time.”
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