Take the AKO (Army Knowledge Online) portal and messaging platform. It began life in the 1990s as a way for the Army's top brass to swap notes and chat with one another online. It's now one of the world's bigger intranets and is set to spearhead the entire U.S. military's move to network-centric operations.

And then there's HSPD-12 (Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12). That's the tongue-twisting moniker for an effort to establish a single, governmentwide security pass that will give holders access to any government building or computer, and it's something many believe could finally shake hidebound agencies loose of their stovepiped past.

The Army's ever-expanding portal

The AKO had just 97,000 users in October 2000, a year after it went live, but usage ballooned after Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are now more than 1.8 million account holders. On March 17 this year, a new record was established with nearly 755,000 log-ins in one day.

One major problem in establishing the AKO was accessing the data contained in the large number of legacy systems the Army had built around the world. Physically replacing or otherwise integrating those systems using middleware would have been prohibitively expensive, so the Army instead opted for a single data warehouse using Oracle.