Ken Waldrop
U.S. Army Product Manager Acquisition Business (PM AcqBusiness) has earned the distinction of being a 2012 Laureate in the International Data Group’s (IDG’s) Computerworld Honors Program. Founded by IDG in 1988, the program is governed by the not-for-profit Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation. The annual awards honor visionary applications of information technology (IT) promoting positive social, economic, and educational change.
LTC Maurice “Mo” Stewart, PM AcqBusiness in the Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, Fort Belvoir, VA, attended the gala awards ceremony June 4 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC.
“There’s no question technology plays a vital role in driving business forward. It ensures an organization’s ability to compete, innovate, and communicate and to thrive. What the Computerworld Honors Laureates so clearly demonstrate is technology’s role in moving society forward,” said John Amato, Vice President and Publisher of Computerworld. “Computerworld is proud to name the 2012 Class of Laureates and celebrate their initiatives benefiting society through the innovative use of IT.”
As an organization, PM AcqBusiness has been working closely with a number of Army Acquisition organizations to implement a highly virtualized Next Generation Business Environment (NGBE) that would solve some complex acquisition challenges. “Our commitment to our stakeholders is that we’ll continue to strive toward modernizing their information systems and enhancing the way the Army conducts acquisition business to become more efficient,” Stewart said. “For our efforts to be recognized by a panel of industry experts makes me very proud of this team and their hard work.”
AcqBusiness delivers enterprise service-oriented solutions to the Army Acquisition community that increase situational awareness and enhance decision support, maintaining more than 70 Web-based Army applications that serve more than 80,000 users worldwide. The NGBE fundamentally changes the methods whereby AcqBusiness hosts its products. (See Access AL&T article, “Next Generation Business Environment.”) For example, systems were required to go through lengthy acquisition cycles to procure hardware and software, cycles that could take anywhere from weeks to months.
The configuration process was also cumbersome as it depended on external parties to execute, and those parties were not beholden to AcqBusiness schedules. NGBE successfully transformed the AcqBusiness enterprise, including infrastructure, architecture, and the development and sustainment processes, to enable efficient solution delivery. PM AcqBusiness began to decommission systems and remove redundant capabilities by introducing a new solution design paradigm that transformed development from application-centric to service-centric.
AcqBusiness realized the critical need to consolidate both the IT portfolio and the IT infrastructure. NGBE established key goals, such as a more consolidated hardware infrastructure, a defined and standardized suite of software, strong promotion of Web services, and an enterprise data access strategy that seeks to reduce the number of existing applications and increase reusability.
For more information on the Computerworld Honors Program and an archive of past Laureate case studies, as well as oral histories of Leadership Award recipients, go to http://www.cwhonors.org/. For more information on Computerworld, go to www.computerworld.com.
- KEN WALDROP is Program Management Director, PM AcqBusiness, with oversight of product life-cycle planning, PM operations, and project management. Waldrop holds a B.A. in accounting from Georgia State University and an M.S. in information technology management from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
