When Jeff Marshall, director of J9 Hosting and Compute at the Defense Information Systems Agency, walked into the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Defense Logistics Agency, he could read the room.
Marshall recalls the start of that meeting clearly. DLA CIO Adarryl Roberts had a look on his face like, “Oh, what is this guy trying to sell me?” he said.
Marshall started off with a few simple questions: “How are things going for you? How is your cloud journey going?”
Almost immediately, Marshall said he could see relief spread across Roberts’ face.
“From that point, we were able to have a great conversation about his cloud problems that he was trying to solve for. From there, we realized that he didn’t just have cloud problems, he also had data center problems. He had mainframe problems. He had problems in understanding how to get from one step to the next step to the final step, which is a native cloud environment. We focused all on that,” Marshall shared during Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange.
“We spent most of the hour just focusing on the problem. Then we would come back, and we would talk to them about, ‘Hey, here’s some solutions and some ideas and pathways we can think about as we work through this.’ For me, because this is government not private industry and I’m not looking for a profit, if we just stopped there at the solution, I’d be OK because I helped DLA with optionality into getting ultimately where they want to get to.”
That small anecdote is an example of how DISA’s HaC team is changing its culture when helping military services and Defense Department agencies modernize systems and applications.
Two-pronged DISA strategy on CX
Marshall, who joined DISA in February 2024 after serving in the Army for 12 years and working in the private sector for another dozen years, said changing the culture of J9 to focus more on the customer, in this case the warfighter, has been his main priority over the last nine months.
“The people around me within J9, they still were holding on to that traditional mindset of appropriated funds. ‘Come in. We do things, and you just do what we need you to do, or you don’t.’ So we had to change that narrative within J9 to get everybody on board with customer centricity,” he said.
Mashall described the shift to the customer as a two-fold strategy — one part external and one part internal.
“On the internal side, we have to look at what we actually offer to the warfighter, and we have to decide, does it still make sense to continue to offer that? On the external side, we have an organization within the J9 that was put together before I got there. It’s the Hybrid Cloud Broker Office,” he said. “This broker office was initially designed to basically go out and let everyone in DoD know what we have, what our solutions are and then to basically set up the segue for a customer in the DoD to come to DISA and to come to J9 to get something like the Joint Warfighter Computing Contract (JWCC) or to get more data center capacity.”
The cloud brokers office’s new mantra is “the right solution for the right purpose,” he said.
Marshall created three different offices inside the Hybrid Cloud Broker Office to make sure they were meeting the goals of that mantra:
- One is a public-facing sales force.
- The second is a customer success team, which serves as the conduit between what the warfighter needs and how the HaC supports them.
- The third is a marketing team, which is a new idea to DISA.
“Initially, my focus was on the customer success segment. I really wanted the team to understand that we just don’t survive without the customer, without the warfighter. We really had to spend some time on what does that mean? How do we go about that as a strategy? How do we engage with the existing customers in order to allow them to understand that we’re here for them? We’re here to listen. We want them to be a part of a feedback loop in order to provide better service to them and improve the quality of the product that they get,” Marshall said.
“We also hear what their demand is or what else they’d like to see out of us. With that, I then focus on the marketing aspect. I’ve been looking at our website, HACC.mil, and looking at, what can we do to actually modernize that? What can we do to make it more have a feel of private industry in the sense that we have great products. How do we showcase those so that the warfighter can easily understand what it is and decide that they need that or not, and then be able to talk to that sales team on the front end to do that?”
Governance drives decisions on how DISA supports warfighters
Internally, J9 has a process to decide how to meet warfighter demands today and in the future.
Marshall said he relies on two committees, one focused on technology and another on business operations, to help with the direction of HaC.
“Once we have the recommendations from the two committees, it’ll come up to the senior leadership within J9 to the governance board, and then we will make a decision about whether we go with it,” he explained. “If it is an existing product, we may keep it, we may get rid of it or we may expand it if the financials look right. Or we may look at, how can we combine that with something else we have in order to make a better product family?”
A recent example of that process in action was J9’s Vulcan offering, which is a DevSecOps toolset.
Marshall said DISA’s Program Executive Office Services also offered a similar DevSecOps pipeline called Citadel. The two organizations recently decided to move Vulcan from J9 to the PEO Services office. It will eventually be called DISA DevSecOps, providing both the services of Vulcan and Citadel.
J9 is now developing a new service based on customer feedback. Marshall said later in 2025 his team will launch Project Fangorn, which is a mainframe refactoring platform.
“DISA J9 is seeking innovative solutions from industry to develop a single environment that rationalizes and encompasses all IBM z environments managed by the J9 within DISA data centers, merging disparate software and hardware components into a modernized infrastructure and services offering,” DISA wrote in a request for solutions issued in December. “The prototype solution, titled Project Fangorn, will include a modern technology implementation strategy to achieve a rapid deployment of the new prototype and migration of existing workloads hosted in the J9’s current IBM z environments.”
Marshall said the idea is to offer a platform that will use artificial intelligence to help customers currently using a mainframe get off old COBOL code.
“We’re going to help them to be able to refactor that so they can move it into a virtual machine space, and then they can go to Stratus [DISA’s on-premise cloud hosting offering], and then from there, that gives them the time to figure out how they want to then move from that into a cloud native distributed model,” he said.
“We’ve been working on it through an other transaction authority so we expect that that should be awarded sometime in the next couple of months. I’m not exactly sure the date, but we’re ready for it, and we’re looking forward to working with some of our Defense agencies and military services as we help them move into the modernization.”
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The post DoD Modernization Exchange 2025: DISA’s Jeff Marshall on aligning tech to solving warfighter problems first appeared on Federal News Network.