How digital reform is providing greater value to the Army

The Army Digital Transformation Strategy (ADTS) has three objectives, aligned with the Army’s strategic pillars: modernization and readiness, reform, people and partnerships. Part one of this series introduced the ADTS: the overarching framework established by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Part two of this series discussed Objective 1, which was focused on how the U.S. Army is bolstering their modernization and readiness efforts. Part three of this series illuminates ADTS Objective 2. ADTS Objective 2: Reform, is optimizing mission-aligned digital investments to provide greater value to the Army.

Operational excellence is an imperative for the Army in light of its tight fiscal reality for the upcoming years. With the evolution of technology, commercial organizations find lower cost, more efficient, and innovative ways to run and invest in their enterprises. The Army seeks to maintain pace with the evolving advancement of technologies, but this requires a re-evaluation of priorities, resourcing, and investments.

Current challenges include limited visibility into Army IT portfolios, inflexible and waterfall IT acquisition processes, and ineffective IT investment accountability and oversight. These challenges prevent the Army from ensuring its resources and spending are best aligned to save costs, improve operations, and ultimately redirect savings to digitally transform the Army.

The ADTS reform objective aims to optimize the Army’s resources and enable confident investment decisions that are data-driven and aligned to wider Army priorities. With agile institutional processes for acquisition, portfolio management, and planning, programming, budgeting and execution (PPBE), the Army can better align digital resources to current and future digital requirements.

The following lines of effort (LOE) will reform the enterprise and drive the Army’s ability to optimize investments. Strategic collaboration across the Army will give rise to key initiatives supporting each LOE, including the examples highlighted below.

LOE 2.1: Optimize resource allocation and investment decisions by increasing visibility into portfolios

Increasing visibility into the Army’s current PPBE process will support a holistic understanding of how portfolio integrates to provide best value to meet the Army’s priorities. The Army is fundamentally reassessing how the digital budget is addressed in the PPBE process to address this opportunity. To advance this LOE, the Army is maturing digital resourcing visibility into a Technology Business Management construct that enables the Army to validate, rationalize, and synchronize digital resource requirements, and prioritize digital investments to ensure that fully informed resource decisions are being made. This construct also empowers the Army to prioritize and divest legacy systems in each mission area to meet future Army digital requirements.

LOE 2.2: Increase Army’s purchasing power by consolidating enterprise digital requirements

The Army’s purchasing power, meaning the financial ability to buy goods and services with the most value, has untapped utilization potential due to the current decentralized approach to procuring IT software, hardware, and services. To advance the Army’s purchasing power, industry data shows significant cost savings through a category management approach, meaning breaking down purchases into categories so that the Army has a sense of any digital overlap of capabilities. To advance this LOE, the Army is implementing a Software Asset Management (SAM) tool to determine the usage of procured software and whether the Army is overpaying vendors for unused licenses to bolster the category management approach. In addition, the Army is establishing Enterprise License Agreements (ELA), which are contracts between the Army and a vendor for a discounted product for a set amount of time, to achieve costs savings and reduce procurement manpower. These initiatives will increase Army’s purchasing power, reducing costs and allowing the Army to redirect savings to other mission priorities.

LOE 2.3: Drive audit readiness and remediation

The Army will achieve a clean Working Capital Fund (WCF) and General Fund (GF) audit opinions. By achieving clean audit opinions, the Army can assure the government and taxpayers that their funds are being used in the most impactful way. To accomplish clean audit opinions, the Army will remediate all Notice of Findings and Recommendations (NFR), meaning IT audit findings and recommendations from the Office of the Inspector General. To advance this LOE, the Army is prioritizing financial auditability in new capabilities to ensure financial data is processed, stored, and shared completely and accurately. This includes implementing tools needed to address access control issues and prioritization of duties related to NFR’s. These efforts will increase business resiliency and technology security for the digital Army while at the same time supporting Army’s goal of achieving a Congressionally-mandated clean audit opinion for the Department.

LOE 2.4: Increase IT investment accountability by establishing robust financial analytics and governance

Currently, the traceability and oversight of the execution of the Army’s digital budget by Commands is hindered due to a lack of data. To address this challenge, the Army will employ strong fiscal stewardship (through enterprise-wide councils) of its IT and cyber activities budget to improve business outcomes and increase mission value. To advance this LOE, the Army stood up the Army Digital Oversight Council (ADOC) to help inform Army requirements and resourcing while also supporting technical integration of digital transformation efforts across the Army. The Army will also continue to expand and scale the use of analytics to identify potential risks and issues in the execution of digital investments.

The nexus of these reform LOEs will advance Army data-driven decision making and optimize investments to address the challenges of today and meet the demands of an unpredictable future.

“In the face of determined adversaries and accelerating technological advances, we must transform today to meet tomorrow’s challenges,” said General James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the Army.

Want to learn more? Read?the full strategy, visit the?Army CIO website,?and stay tuned to Army CIO channels for parts three and four of this ADTS feature series.