By Carla Faison
FORT BELVOIR, Va. – For the last year and a half, the AcqBusiness program office has been hard at work prototyping, developing and piloting an executive dashboard to support the Army acquisition community. The Army Acquisition Dashboard (AAD) provides Army acquisition leaders with critical data from the program executive office level down to the program level including associated assessments, contracts, funding, risks, and schedules.
The goal is to leverage outputs from existing authoritative data sources to allow for consistent views across programs to Acquisition community senior leadership.
“The Army Acquisition Dashboard introduces a fundamental change to how Army Acquisition Leaders manage and convey information,” said Mr. Douglas Wiltsie, program executive officer, Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), “Not only will this dashboard dramatically reduce the administrative overhead associated with preparing monthly or quarterly PowerPoint briefings, it will also provide senior leadership with ubiquitous access to critical acquisition information when they need it.”
The AAD was developed in response to a request from the Honorable Heidi Shyu, the Army acquisition executive and assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology (ASA(ALT)). Dashboards permits users to access raw data through a user-friendly computer interface, combining authoritative data from many functional areas with custom data visualization. This visualization allows leaders to advance directly to decision making.
The AAD’s capability needs statement was developed in August of 2011, initiating a series of prototype demonstrations with Army acquisition leaders. The feedback gathered during these demonstrations incorporated the needs of acquisition leaders and helped to fine tune the dashboard.
In October of 2012, PEO EIS and AcqBusiness provided a status briefing and a live demonstration on the progress of the AAD’s development to acquisition leadership. The briefing highlighted AcqBusiness’ recent accomplishments to include the consolidation of portals and the reduction in servers, and key time and cost drivers for the AAD effort. Following the approval to move forward, the AAD was released on a limited basis in late October and then made available to a wider community of acquisition professionals in December 2012.
The initial release of AAD made available to end users all acquisition category (ACAT) I data for executive summary reporting on Army programs. ASA(ALT) is currently developing a policy and timeline to extend data reporting to include other Army programs. The ultimate goal is to have data for ACAT I, II and III programs available in the AAD and to conduct Army program reviews from the AAD rather than from manually-generated PowerPoint slides.
AcqBusiness continues to add capabilities and new information from authoritative sources as data becomes available. Training opportunities are available via the calendar tab on the Army Acquisition Business Enterprise Portal (AABEP).
To request access to the AAD, go to AABEP at https://acqdomain.army.mil and click on the “request access” link next to the “Army Acquisition Dashboard” link on the landing page.
