ARMY AL&T
the full benefit of senior leadership influence until the end of the ATO selection process.
Dr. Freeman (center left) views the latest S&T at the 2010 Army Science Conference with Dr. Malcolm Ross O’Neill (center right), Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology. (U.S. Army photo courtesy of RDECOM.)
The transition goal represents the essence of what we are here to do in S&T, so its priority becomes clear and it becomes one you have to work on first. To address the transition goal, you must have clear programmatic objectives and resources in place to enable you to achieve them. Those resources comprise the balanced portfolio. And transition implies there are people ready to take the hand-off; thus the importance of partnerships— within my office, among all the people who work the different parts of the program, with the other parts of the Army and the people who execute the programs, including the lab directors; the different commands; the end user represented by the PEO and PM community; and the requirements community represented by TRADOC.
Army AL&T: What is the process for carrying out these priorities?
Freeman: Those are my priorities, which therefore become my staff ’s priorities, which I hope become the priorities for the whole S&T workforce. This really represents a top-down approach, which is a significant change from how we did business before when programs and priorities were established from the bottom up. Bottom-up is not a bad thing; but in this environment, especially when you’re financially constrained, what you’re lacking is the
APRIL –JUNE 2011 9
ability to have impact. That has to be driven from the top, and that’s what we’re looking to do.
You have to have processes and tools to establish Armywide priorities. We had an approval process for the major programs in Army S&T, called the ASTAG and ASTWG process. That was the Army S&T Advisory Group, a senior leader four-star group, and the Army S&T Working Group at the two- star level. This process has been around for a long time. Army ATOs [Army Technology Objective programs] were the way we executed. This also was a bottom-up process that did not have
The outcome was that this process had gotten so out of sync with the fiscal decision-making processes, and we were planning programs in the June- July timeframe and getting approval for those programs in the September timeframe at the two-star level, and in a January timeframe, at the four-star level for the fiscal year we were in. By the time we got to Army leadership, they asked, “Why am I even looking at this? We’ve already put a budget for the next fiscal year on the street, and we’re working on the one two years out.”
So now we’re not going to have ATOs. Not that management by objective is a bad thing. It is a good thing, but the process everybody associates with ATOs is not going to happen anymore, because it was so out of sync with everything else. An ATO was a piece of a puzzle. The objective was a component, a subsystem, a system—6.1, 6.2, or 6.3. It was not a concept that would enable a capability. At the end of the day, you have just a bunch of piece-parts and a very hard puzzle that may or may not fit
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