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AJPO Mission

Formally, the AJPO's mission was "to oversee the maintenance of the Ada language and the insertion of Ada-related technology into the Department of Defense." (DoDD 3405-1, 1987)

The AJPO followed from the Common DoD High Order Language Program, which began in 1974, and whose mission was "to produce a minimal number of common, modern, high order computer programming languages for Department of Defense embedded computer systems applications and to assure a unified, well-supported, widely available, and powerful programming support environment for these languages" (as explained by Col. Whitaker).

The AJPO's 1994 annual report states its goals and strategies as follows:

The AJPO: Providing Leadership

Visionary leadership, a changing marketplace, and a new guiding organization-- these were part of the Ada program's game plan at the onset of FY94. When the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) took responsibility for the Ada program in the last quarter of FY93, the primary goal was to revitalize Ada to encourage broad-based use by academia, commercial firms, and the Department of Defense.
DISA knew that in order to be successful in the 90s and beyond, the promises for the new version of Ada had to be satisfied. High quality tools and environments needed to be readily available to software engineers. Ada would be embraced by the commercial sector-- recognizing that Ada's inherent technical strengths would prove to be a competitive advantage_ only if high quality Ada products were provided. DISA charged its Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO) to make Ada the language of choice for academic, commercial, and defense applications.
To accomplish this goal, the AJPO established the following four primary objectives:

Build on Success
Increase Commercial Use
Create Dual Use Partnerships
Maximize Return on Investment
The primary strategies employed to achieve these goals are:

Create the initial momentum needed to boost Ada's expansion.
Stimulate enough commercial market appeal to enable Ada to stand on its own without DoD support.

More recent AJPO project information is available in AJPO's 1997 annual report, detailing AJPO's support for the warfighter, academia, industry, the AdaIC, and outreach.