Army Bringing Their Own App Store to the Soldiers

The Army is opening up the digital doors for applications built by and for soldiers to get good ideas from the field through the headaches of network certifications and back out the field as fast as possible.

Apps for Army is a first step in a long term effort to reconcile enterprise control with local initiative. Apps for Army might not claim such high goals for itself, but in effect it is the Army's attempt to have its cake and eat it to. Open platforms, source, and data should greatly increase generativity and the potential for innovation inside the enterprise. However, by supplying and certifying the platforms and code that runs on them, the Army hopes it can do it without sacrificing enterprise controls or security the way it does with today's unmanaged local point solutions. This makes it look a bit more like Apple's app store processes embedded inside the enterprise than like the original Apps for Democracy. It also partially explains why it took six months to launch rather than the two months originally planned. Apps for Army simply couldn't happen before the platform provisioning and application certification stuff was worked out. The processes behind Apps for Army are necessarily more complicated than those involved in the outside the firewall Apps for Democracy.

By: Brant