Creating an overall strategy is among Farr's top priorities, but perhaps more important is the development of a robust and stable IT operating environment, something Farr feels the DoD currently lacks.
"A lot of IT should be a light switch - you turn it on and it's there," he said.
"You don't care who the electricity supplier is, you don't care which generator they use - you just want it there. You want it reliable, cheap and on demand."
Farr said IT departments can not expect to introduce innovations without a robust underlying IT environment because if they fail to provide one, nobody within the organisation is going to want to talk about anything else.
"And there's still a little bit of that [in the DoD] - people still want to talk about the service problems they're having rather than what strategic IT can do for them," he said.
But it will require more than cosmetic changes to the system to ensure this level of service, which is why Farr believes a paradigm shift is in order.
He wants to relinquish control over the areas his IT team improves upon to the DoD's IT userbase.
"We've just compiled the top 10 irritants list for the defence information environment detailing what is causing people the most grief. We put that together based on feedback that we've received," he said.
Farr wants to "give the users control over the priorities - an IT shop shouldn't really be focused on its own priorities."
Last month's announcement by the Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, that defence was to begin work on a new white paper this year hasn't caused Farr to change his plans, but it has forced him to re-prioritise.
The white paper, the first commissioned since 2000, will require a lot of input from the DoD IT team, Farr acknowledged.
"We have to focus on that white paper during this coming 12 months. It's going to be a very short window for us," he said.
"But at the same time we're doing that, we can't let things slip. So we're going to have to be really determined in what projects we'll undertake [and] how we'll deploy our resources across the ICT community."
Many of the operational changes Farr wants to bring about will rely on the principals of ITSM, a discipline Farr is a strong proponent of.
"I think that it's critical that there is a highly disciplined, highly documented framework if you are going to run IT effectively. I don't think there's any two ways about it," he said.