‘TRAIL BOSSING’ THE NIE
WE’RE HERE TO FIGURE OUT HOW THE ARMY CAN
MANAGE CAPABILITIES THAT ARE AVA I L A B L E NOW AND
LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGIES THAT
MAY ADDRESS REQUIREMENTS DOWN THE ROAD THAT WE HAVEN’T EVEN THOUGHT OF YET.
HOW WILL THE ARMY BENEFIT FROM THE INTEGRATION WORK TAKING PLACE DURING THE NIE? The major semiannual integration events ultimately will help the Army make bet- ter acquisition decisions and establish a network baseline. We’re forcing levels and degrees of integration that we’ve never thought of by pulling together schedules, performance aspects, technical require- ments, and various other pieces of the pie. Doing the integration work upfront at Fort Bliss, TX, and White Sands, NM, before putting these systems in the hands of our Soldiers is extremely beneficial because it alleviates having to force pain- ful arbitration and integration work on our deployed troops.
WHAT TOOLS ARE HELPING TO FACILITATE NIE SYNCHRONIZATION EFFORTS? IN OTHER WORDS, HOW ARE YOU CARRYING OUT AN EFFORT OF THIS MAGNITUDE? All of the program and product managers are working together for the first time. This has never been done, and while it’s uncom- fortable, it is very good for the Army.
We have hundreds of subject-matter experts from the test, acquisition, and
14 Army AL&T Magazine
requirements communities down here at Fort Bliss providing full-time support to this monumental effort. The integration scope exceeds anything I’ve ever seen.
We’ve identified trail bosses and assembled the best overlapping and complementary team to make sure we can synchronize the technologies into a composite bri- gade formation, while working to ensure proper instrumentation from a data col- lection standpoint.
The materiel development community has designated a trail boss for each of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division battalions, who have the overarching responsibility to ensure that the mate- riel development community is meeting all of the unit’s needs for the systems in the NIE, including planning, field- ing, installation, performance checkout, integration, instrumentation, support, and maintenance.
We’ve established a knowledge manage- ment repository to create a common operational picture across the entire Army enterprise. It’s a single domain where everyone involved in the integration work can post schedules, updates, master plans, and so on.
Additionally, we’ve created a “horse- blanket” as a way to bring all entities
”
together. This enables us to look at thou- sands of platforms across the brigade and decide where we’ll put them, when we’ll move equipment, and where it will go, as well as how we will improve various plat- forms during the process.
This is the first year the Army has under- taken this type of large-scale test and evaluation, and we’ve been empowered to meet this challenge and to figure out how to streamline efficiencies. These events will help inform long-term network strat- egy and will provide valuable feedback to develop doctrine.
We do not expect that all aspects will go perfectly during the June-July NIE, but it is important to remember that these events are not individual activities but part of a culminating process that will allow the Army to establish a network baseline and then fill it with the best applications and systems that the network can handle.
A large part of NIE’s success will be attributed to taking the lessons we learn as we work to integrate the individual parts of the network into the whole, and use those lessons to help inform the process as we move into the 2012 evalu- ation cycle.
—By PEO Integration staff
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