Information assurance has been an issue simmering at military and civilian agencies for some time, but the Defense Department finally pushed it to the front burner when it issued a manual last December establishing a program to improve its IA workforce.

That manual also highlighted the difficulty of raising government standards.

DOD’s first and most important requirements will be to train and certify the people responsible for IA. That includes people directly responsible for information technology systems and those for whom IA is an additional or embedded duty.

It will be the first time that DOD has approached IA training and certification as a departmentwide endeavor involving all services and agencies and all military and civilian employees and contractors.

DOD plans to train and certify a workforce of at least 80,000 people in the next four years. Robert Lentz, DOD’s director of IA, said the purpose is to create a cadre of IA professionals that fit the military’s evolving strategy of network-centric warfare and imbue them with the pride that characterizes the military services.

“For so long we have seen how the pride of groups such as pilots in the Air Force have driven their discipline and training, and the same is true for parts of the Navy when it comes to certification programs,” he said. “You see that kind of mind-set in place all across the DOD, and now, with the [transition to] net-centric operations, we want to get to that same point of pride that a core of certified IA professionals have in keeping the network always up and running.”

DOD’s success with IA training and certification could have wider implications, said Jim Flyzik, president of the Flyzik Group, a consulting firm. If successful, DOD’s approach would probably be adopted in other areas of government, he said.

“It is a subject that all leaders in government have realized for some time as a priority, but they haven’t had the resources to deal with it,” Flyzik said. A former CIO at the Treasury Department, Flyzik was also an adviser in the White House Office of Homeland Security. He is chairman of the IT Association of America’s Homeland Security Committee.