A BOLD FUTURE FOR THE ARMY
the shape of firm fixed-price contracts for specified outcomes, shifting the risk to vendors and allowing the vendor and the Army to share the benefits of rapid and efficient delivery.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN THE LOGISTICS ENTERPRISE Te wide-scale deployment of ERPs enabled organizations to harvest mass amounts of data to enhance their decision-making processes, a process commonly referred to as business intelligence. In the early years of ERPs, business intelligence development relied on a few technical experts working with key “super users” to gather requirements and then build and deploy reports. Te process was slow and often not scalable (i.e., replicable on a larger scale). Te inability to deliver these capabilities efficiently on a large scale led to an emphasis on extreme consensus, through prioritization across multiple organizations.
Te result was reports that often did not meet users’ specific requirements. Users were also left believing their data was locked away, beyond their reach. Tus began the era of local data marts. Today, the Army is flooded with an uncountable number of local data marts, from enterprise-wide systems like the Logistics Infor- mation Warehouse and the Army Workload and Performance System to smaller, localized battalion or brigade databases. Te proliferation has led to tremendous cost in terms of resources consumed and multiple versions of “truth.” (See Figure 2.)
In contrast, in the private sector, today’s self-service analytics technologies have all but eliminated the need for “super users,” report developers and redundant data marts. Instead, ordinary users are empowered to create their own reports and conduct their own analytics through intuitive self-service applications like Tableau and Qlik.
To unlock the same outcomes in the Army, ERP sustainment orga- nizations and program offices must get out of the report-generating business. Tey need to shift the responsibility for analytics and report-creation away from centralized information technology (IT) organizations to actual users. Tey should invest in self-service analytics tools and grant regular users access to data. Ten, to make these changes permanent, they should eliminate budgets for report development and decommission local data marts.
LOGISTICS IN THE CLOUD Having completed the transformative steps of consolidating sustainment and democratizing business intelligence and making it available for everyone to access, regardless of background or position, the Army can proceed toward the most significant step
112 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2019
of modernizing its ERP landscape: collapsing siloed functions and user bases into a single, unified ERP. Skeptics of such a consol- idation will cite organization-specific complexities and unique Army requirements. However, transitions like this happen every day in industry. Companies as diverse as food and beverage and clothing sales have successfully consolidated ERPs after merg- ers and acquisitions.
Te bottom line is that the Army’s focus should be on increas- ing readiness and lethality, not hosting software. For the Army to free up the millions of dollars needed for modernization and sustaining its high operations tempo, it is imperative to find leap- ahead efficiencies; marginal changes will not move the needle. Fortunately, recent advances in secure, cloud-based computing and storage are allowing industry and U.S. intelligence agencies to unlock tremendous savings in operating costs, while also having access to cutting-edge applications in the cloud.
Of course, for the Army, more than savings is at stake: Near-peer adversaries are seeking every opportunity to achieve parity with the U.S. in any domain. “One of the surest ways for our Army to ensure ‘IT overmatch’ is to get into the cloud,” as retired Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence, former Army chief information officer/G-6 who now leads the Army and Air Force portfolio within Accen- ture Federal Services’ national security practice, said recently.
Te Army should seize the opportunity for overmatch and plan for its unified logistics ERP to operate from the cloud. Beyond the strategic advantages that will accrue, moving away from fixed government data centers to cloud-based managed services will also allow for more precise and efficient ways to pay for what is needed. As the Army’s cloud-based environment automati- cally scales up or down based on consumption, a “pay by the drink” model will derive costs directly from usage, as opposed to basing them on fixed labor pools and fixed hardware costs. Tis approach will eliminate the requirement for the Army to plan, program and budget for IT infrastructure procurement, main- tenance and refresh.
CONCLUSION Te business economics today are simply different from just a few years ago. Even complex ERP services can now be delivered in a relatively low-risk and cost-effective way, primarily because of the modern capabilities of cloud technology. Unlike the Army’s expe- rience with outsourcing LMP in the 1990s, today the Army can transition ERPs into outcome-based managed services and then change contractors at any time, without fear of losing control of its data or intellectual property.
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