On Track and Gaining Momentum
ON TRACK AND GAINING MOMENTUM
Since the Business Transformation Agency was established in 2005, transformation of DoD’s
business systems has gained momentum. Despite more than 2,000 logistics systems, those
systems are being integrated and dwindled down. As data standards are defined and enforced, BTA leadership expects the military services to comply with the standards and choose cost efficiencies.
By Marty Kauchak
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld focused on transforming DoD’s business processes, systems and information flow from the earliest days of his tenure. On September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld told attendees at the DoD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week kickoff—Bureaucracy to Battlefield Conference: “Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business. Let’s make no mistake: The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of some urgency. In fact, it could be said that it’s a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s.”
Events less than 24-hours later, on 9/11, and the ensuing global war on terror slowed the department’s dedicated effort to transform its business mission area. That was until the Enterprise Transition Plan (ETP) was released on September 30, 2005. The document provided the DoD’s internal and external stakeholders with a view of the systems and initiatives that will transform the largest business entity in the world.
In less than three years, the business transformation process continues to gain momentum, and important progress has been made across the DoD business enterprise and, in particular, logistics.
Agility and Accountability
The Business Transformation Agency (BTA) is the defense agency chartered to lead and coordinate business transformation across the department. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England established the BTA in a memorandum dated October 7, 2005, and provided it with a mission that significantly evolved from the earliest days of the DoD transformation effort. Approximately 350 personnel are assigned to the Arlington, Va.-based agency.
Two BTA leaders provided an insight into their roles and missions.
The Transformation Priorities and Requirements (TP&R) directorate ensures the priorities related to material visibility, common supplier management, acquisition visibility and real property accountability are reflected in the department’s Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA) and supporting ETP, and in the guidance for business system investment management.
“TP&R’s responsibility is to work closely with our principal staff assistants [under secretaries of defense]—at the deputy under secretaries of defense [DUSDs] level on the OSD staff—who are responsible for defining requirements, and the components’ stakeholders, to prioritize transformation requirements for the department,” explained Kimberly Pisall, director, TP&R, supply chain management. “We also help them define enterprise-level requirements.”
Pisall’s colleagues in the Enterprise Sourcing directorate have “three lines of business focused on personnel systems, financial visibility systems and procurement,” said John O’Brien, program executive officer, enterprise sourcing. Also noting the sourcing mission in his portfolio, O’Brien pointed out his office’s procurement responsibilities were much more focused and different than the broader supply-chain management responsibilities in the TP&R directorate.
“We are more on the logistics side of things. We have come to the conclusion when we look at what is considered enterprise and non-enterprise, that those things around logistics and other aspects of the supply chain should be decentralized and given to the components to implement systems to support those processes,” O’Brien said. “We don’t have any systems that are being implemented to support those types of capabilities.”
Both directorates and their BTA counterparts provide the agility and flexibility necessary to lead change in a war or peace-time department and accountability for the department’s business systems and processes. This environment allows strategic business goals for standards and other foundations of business transformation to be implemented in policy and succeed.
It’s About Standards
Some current policy underpinnings of business transformation would be unfamiliar to the effort’s earliest proponents. “The approach we took starting about four years ago to logistics was a departure from the way DoD had thought about logistics in the past,” recalled Paul Brinkley, deputy under secretary of Defense for business transformation. “One of the fixations the department had wrapped itself around for years was the idea the only way we were going to be able to integrate and create seamless material visibility within the DoD was to migrate all of DoD onto a single logistics system, or a single set of logistics systems that were identical in terms of their system architecture. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system was a push—let’s get everybody on one ERP system, or at least get everyone to standardize on a single suite of ERP systems—and we will have seamlessly integrated logistics.”
One example of a target ERP system to which DoD is migrating is the Army’s Global Combat Support-Army, for materiel supply and service management.
That strategy was grounded on earlier, successful, private-sector efforts that established large-scale ERP systems but did not reflect contemporary logistics models. Current models increasingly rely on standardized and adopted transactional data standards, and material data standards that allow an end-user to look into the supply chain, locate assets and resources and have that information readily available. While ERP programs remain important tools in the DoD business transformation effort, “adopting data and Internet standards put us on a far faster trajectory to opening up the DoD supply chain to support our warfighting mission, than the years it takes to migrate even a single entity within a single organization as big as DoD onto an ERP system,” Brinkley said.
The department’s agents of business transformation focus on finding and identifying data standards, enforcing them and rapidly adopting them in the components. “If it’s in your legacy system then it is in your legacy system. If you are going to implement an ERP make sure you implement it using our logistics material data standards for RFID and other systems,” Brinkley said.
At the end of the day, standards and supporting processes are expected to dramatically increase data visibility for DoD decision-makers in key roles, including the warfighter (end users) and logisticians in geographically disparate areas. “This is a hugely important effort BTA is working, funding and piloting to incentivize the services to rapidly adopt data standards, including the 856 [Standard Ship Notice/Manifest Transaction Set], which creates visibility,” Brinkley said.
Beyond a Number
There are about 2,000 DoD logistics systems that generate materially significant transactions in terms of money. While some observers inside and outside government point to this figure as one indication of the department’s bureaucratic largess and inefficiencies, the business transformation leadership looks beyond this metric.
“What matters to us is if a military service has 500 systems that generate logistics transactions and they are all running on different data standards. Up here at headquarters we say, ‘I need you to adopt standard RFID transactions, unique identifiers, electronic data interchange-compliant transactions for material maintenance, and also standards for finance and personnel, and I want all your acquisition programs to be visible.’ That’s what I care about. At headquarters I care about us making decisions,” Brinkley said. Once data standards are defined and enforced, and the service states it can keep its systems and meet all of the standards, it is within their prerogative to do so under U.S. Code Title 10-Armed Forces. “That’s their decision as a service headquarters. But I know from an efficiency and a cost perspective they won’t decide to keep 500 systems. They, to comply with these data standards, will find it is better to have 50, or four, or another number,” said Brinkley.
Industry Partner
DoD’s business transformation effort is a collaborative process with industry. One partner, Oracle Corporation, has supported the department since the company’s founding in 1978. Oracle’s applications are used in more than 30 different DoD organizations, including Air Force and Marine Corps logistics systems.
Oracle’s primary role in supporting the DoD business transformation effort is to provide commercial-off-the-shelf software to satisfy both the business functions and technical infrastructure needs of the department. “The department made a conscious decision to COTS software rather than building unique software to satisfy each set of functional needs,” said Tamara Greenspan, vice president, Department of Defense, Oracle.
Oracle also provides a solution to allow the continuance of department legacy systems in a next-generation ERP environment by integrating the data needed by both the next-generation and legacy systems.
“While a goal of implementing new COTS systems is to eliminate legacy systems, it is a reality that in some cases, versions of the legacy systems may have to operate for some period of time. To support the integration of data needed by both the old and new systems, Oracle offers our customers several ways to accomplish this,” Greenspan said.
The company offers its software to support service-oriented architecture allowing organizations to access data as needed. Another option is to directly access data from different systems. “Oracle provides its Application Integration Architecture tools and methodologies—based on Oracle Fusion Middleware—to support this. In other cases, the data from legacy systems can simply be passed from the legacy system to the new ERP for storage an access purposes,” concluded Greenspan.
One Challenge
A number of institutional and external impediments have prevented the department from more rapidly and efficiently consolidating its logistics systems. The rapid fielding of new technology allows the department to infuse technical solutions across the business enterprise—but at a cost. “The problem with being an early adopter is you are never ready for the standards that come after everything has settled out,” Brinkley said.
Indeed, one gap or shortfall in enterprise-level standards and business rules that was identified early in BTA’s directorates’ processes includes an absence of a procurement data standard. “We’re aware of that and are in the process of building it,” noted Pisall.
O’Brien added: “The process reviews not only include the definition of what functionally has to be communicated between the components’ systems and the enterprise systems, but also from a technical perspective, what’s the guide book that we are going to give to the components as they build their developing systems and their ERPs so we give them one way to communicate with the enterprise so they don’t have to proliferate point-to-point communications among systems.”
Successes
With BTA’s third anniversary approaching, the organization can already claim a number of victories.
At the field level in Iraq and Afghanistan, the BTA funded specific tactical deployments of RFID, and was the proponent for the Joint Contingency Contracting System (JCCS). The system allows in theater, on-scene commanders to locally allocate and award contracts.
“We’ve done extensive work in both those areas, in terms of RFID, or automated visibility at the unit level, but also for contingency contracting. We have done a lot of work to make that process and the IT systems that support the process much more user friendly,” said Brinkley. Two of many IT-enabled enhancements to JCCS increased access by in-theatre contracting offices to system information and posted contract opportunities in English (full contract) and Arabic (summarized version).
BTA has also achieved successes through its collaboration with DLA and the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), and providing seed money to allow the components to migrate from an 80-card count, character-based standard to the contemporary Enterprise Data Interchange Standard or, when necessary, XML.
“We have worked extensively with those groups to help define standard processes and business rules, as well as funding some of the efforts within DLA and USTRANSCOM to make that happen,” said Pisall.
As the TP&R directorate defines standards it also works with its transformation planning group to integrate those standards into the Business Enterprise Architecture. As standards are defined in accordance with business rules, processes and data standards, the components then assume responsibility for compliance issues for those standards that support the Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. ♦