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A trial program to revamp the Defense Department's process for acquiring business systems will be formally announced in the next four to six weeks, an official leading the Pentagon's business transformation efforts said this week.

The five to seven years that it can take to field information technology systems is too long, and the process needs to move faster if the department is to adopt industry best practices, said Paul Brinkley, Defense deputy undersecretary for business transformation and co-director of the newly created Business Transformation Agency.

The pilot program will streamline the process for buying business setups such as the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, which Brinkley said is the same as that used for weapons system purchases.

Speaking at an Information Technology Association of America luncheon on Monday, Brinkley said it is impossible for the department to know what IT systems will look like 10 years down the road. The new program will speed up the process and will be more aggressive in assessing the risk involved in major business systems purchases.

"We need industry to be vocal about where we are missing the ball," Brinkley said. "There's ample opportunity to grow business with the government in helping it adopt best practices."

A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to provide further details on how the pilot program will work.

Brinkley said the BTA has no plans to take over major service-specific business programs, such as the Army's automated enterprise resource planning system, because the Pentagon's goal is to create a corporate-like headquarters that officials believe the department lacks and needs.

"We're not creating a Trojan horse that's going to swoop in and take over agency-specific initiatives," Brinkley said. "This Defense agency has been established to get the things that [the department is] already trying to do centrally, under control."

Thomas Modly, Defense deputy undersecretary for financial management and co-director of the BTA, said the transformation effort will last for at least a decade and will "probably never end."

Modly said missed business transformation milestones, described in a report to Congress published last week, represent an opportunity for the agency to bring theses issues to the attention of senior management.

"I think 76 percent is good ... But I'm happier about the 24 percent we didn't hit," Modly said. "Now we can go to these managers and talk about why we didn't hit these milestones."

COMMENTS

• BMMP (business modernization) is a multi-million dollar effort by DoD under contract to IBM. However, every systems firm that works for the government is a subcontractor to IBM on the project. These guys sit around for months debating what is needed to do the job that DoD should be doing. They have a major problem, however. They decide things by numbers and rank. They take the ideas of 10,000 people rather than the correct position of a few people that know what is going on. The systems are doomed to failure because they are not listening to people that are correct but rather to the "majority" view of what needs to be done. When they are done they will require us to collect any information that anyone can think up now and that will increase the cost to the government by many millions of dollars in operations, just to collect data -- much of which is unnecessary. Congress is a major source of the need for unnecessary data. Because some congressman, or their high school summer intern, wants a piece of data, the DoD develops systems to provide it. It is totally unnecessary from an operational point of view and generally results from the ignorance of Congress about the process. Congressional ignorance costs the taxpayer many millions of dollars every year and is only getting worse! Taxpayer Posted March 27, 2006 9:06 AM
• Well, this will work -- until someone in the Pentagon or Congress decides to "tweak" something "just a bit" which will set everything back about 6-12 months while the whole thing is rewritten to accommodate the "tweak." Or Congress won't fund the new system correctly which will mean it will take longer (and cost more), etc, etc, etc. GovExec.com reader Posted March 22, 2006 9:35 AM