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Main Deployment Challenges
The Quarterly: What are the main challenges in deploying technology to support the transformation?
David Fisher: We spend about $2 billion each year on IT business transformation, half of it on enterprise resource planning systems throughout the Department of Defense. Much of the work for these ERP systems focuses on deciding what should be centralized, at the DoD enterprise level, and what should be managed by components-the military services, defense agencies, combatant commands, and military health services. As in any large organization, the people at the enterprise level are consumers of information. As long as information in different systems can be aggregated in a standard way, these people can do their jobs. On the other hand, some decision making is distributed, occurring within organizations that make up the DoD. The challenge lies in the gray area. Where is it more effective to have a single system at the center as opposed to multiple versions that adhere to common standards?
We have 27 systems in our enterprise portfolio today, and many of these are centralized only because the components did not have the ability to run their own when these systems were implemented years ago. As the capabilities of the components mature, we must ask if there are more efficient and effective ways to complete those transactions while still providing the members of our cross-component community with the information they need to do their jobs.
The Quarterly: How do you manage such a large-scale transformation?
David Fisher: Much depends on governance and on discipline in setting and implementing standards. Consider our experience implementing a set of standards for financial data. Initially, the reaction in the field was that this would cost too much to embed in individual IT systems, so we came up with a two-pronged approach.
In the short term, we agreed to create a bridge system to the components' legacy accounting systems, to save costs. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it moved us toward interoperable data at a relatively low cost in a short time frame. Our longer-term challenge involved integrating these standards into various ERP systems. It was critical to get this right, from the beginning. Again, the components' managers were concerned that this would be expensive and difficult to integrate with their SAP and Oracle systems. So we deployed ERP experts among the components who worked with teams there to identify ways to configure the ERP systems so they could work with standardized data. It's been very successful.
The Quarterly: How do you keep people motivated and set performance measures?
David Fisher: When I left the commercial environment, I thought one of the great things about leaving was putting behind me the need to meet quarterly profit-and-loss targets and to deal with the short-term decision making that results from a quarterly focus. But now that I don't have those constraints, I miss having the motivation to hit quarterly numbers. So you have to look for different kinds of motivators to keep projects on time.
The people who go into public service are unbelievably passionate about what they do. There is a tangible internal motivation about doing public service that is different from what you find in the commercial marketplace. It's not something you can necessarily put your finger on, but it's real. We appreciate that. It's very important. That said, we have to find ways to measure accountability. In the commercial world, there's the P&L-you're held accountable for the numbers. We are always in search of ways to hold people accountable, not least because if you succeed at something, you want to be recognized for it.
We and the rest of the Defense Department have recently begun to move away from an old tenure-based performance model to a new system-the National Security Personnel System-that is closer to pay for performance. This is the type of system that's familiar to commercial enterprises, but it's new to this public environment, so we had to spend some time explaining that the goals had to be objective, measurable, time constrained. It's been somewhat controversial because not everyone likes this shift. But as a manager, I have found it a positive shift, especially in terms of getting people to think about time. Sometimes, impatience is exactly right because within the public sector, things do tend to run on for a while. We need to build in that internal motivator that makes people ask, what did I get done today?
In the end, however, while people care about their compensation, just as they should, it's a small part of what motivates people here. It's about the contribution to public service. One of the things that rallies the passion of these folks is seeing that they're making a difference on a national security-related issue that helps the people on the ground.
Next: Managing Megaprojects
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