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home > January/February 2006 issue > article
Blueprint for Battle on the Business Front
By Alan Joch
With the third version of the business enterprise architecture in hand and new oversight processes in place, Defense brass say the department's poised to get its financial systems house in order.
Where's Ty Pennington, the flaky but winsome host of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," when you need him?
For years the Defense Department's efforts to modernize its business systems have resembled a home makeover gone bad, extremely bad. Squabbles over architectural plans, a parade of contractors, spiraling costs, deadlines come and gone, and relentless criticism from Congress and the Government Accountability Office have made DOD's $318 million dream house look like a money pit. With taxpayers shoveling in the money.
But unlike a dream house, the Business Enterprise Architecture is not some luxury item for the department. It's at the core of DOD efforts to simplify business systems and ensure control of finances-control that has been lax for as long as anyone can remember. BEA, currently in its third version, is supposed to guide DOD as it brings more than 4,700 business systems into compliance with an umbrella architecture that squares with the broader Defense EA and Federal Enterprise Architecture. The effort includes eliminating redundant systems and consolidating others.
In its own planning documents, DOD is quite clear and dramatic about why this blueprint is so important to its future: "The highly flexible, yet precise, Armed Forces of the 21st century require an equally flexible and responsive business and financial support infrastructure that is capable of adapting to ever-changing conditions."
When asked in August if taxpayers were getting an adequate return on their investment in streamlined business systems and reliable logistics, payroll and other services, GAO's Randolph Hite gave an answer worthy of a gunnery sergeant: "Not even close." Hite, director of IT architecture and systems issues, had just released the latest in a string of critical reports chronicling the shortcomings of the massive BEA project since its inception in 2001. "To do this right, there are hundreds of stars that have to be aligned, and very few are aligning," he added.
Then, in September, DOD unveiled Version 3.0 of the architecture, its latest attempt to get it right. The department has crafted a new outline and a transition plan to define how the people, processes and technology will fit together in an efficient way. DOD has also instituted managerial checks and balances to keep the effort on track, including monthly reviews of big-ticket spending. The crucial nature of the project is not lost on DOD's top chiefs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and it's now the job of the deputy secretary to do the monthly checks.
Will these changes, along with dogged congressional threats of fines-and even jail time levied under the Antideficiency Act-create a solid foundation for the BEA? Hite says he's still skeptical: "In a utopian world, we'd see a break from what's been going on in a situation where there's some needed change. All that remains to be seen."
RIDDLED PAST
Skepticism is understandable given recent history. In fiscal 2005, DOD received nearly $13.3 billion to run and update the 4,700 systems that support financial, human resources and logistics. But stovepipe and duplicate systems that DOD agencies built with little or no coordination over the years have spawned waste and created the opportunity for fraud and abuse, GAO contends. The federal watchdog describes the current environment as "overly complex and error-prone." What's more, Hite says, many of these systems lack standardization, require the gathering of duplicate data and force the continued use of manual data entry.
But people close to the BEA effort say the changes rolled out in the fall symbolize a fundamental philosophical shift that will bring about benefits. "There's now a focus on war-fighter mission support that is outcome-based, as opposed to developing architecture for the sake of architecture," says Linda Marshall, IBM's business consulting services partner for DOD agencies. Defense awarded IBM a five-year, $95 million contract in 2002 to help it craft the systems blueprint; it bumped up the value of the deal to $250 million in 2004.
But changes in emphasis, no matter how fundamental, won't change one defining factor: the staggering size and complexity of the department itself. Last year, total DOD appropriations approached $417 billion to fund military services and support operations throughout the world. Defense is like an industry more than, say, a corporation, despite repeated analogies by its chiefs to the contrary, with literally thousands of organizations that share some common missions but also have many unique demands.
"There is no organization that is as large as DOD, and trying to develop the Business Enterprise Architecture for the entire department is a massive task," says John Gilligan, who retired as Air Force CIO last year and now is a vice president at SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va. "One of the early beliefs was that there was great commonality in business processes across the department." But that's more perception than reality, he says. Ultimately, Pentagon officials must review each business process to make sure the differences among programs aren't essential to particular missions at particular agencies, Gilligan explains.
In addition to fighting complexity, DOD must formalize the still-evolving enterprise architecture discipline. DOD is "treading on new ground here," says Carolyn Strano, professor of systems management for the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. "If you Google on 'enterprise architecture,' you'll find results that describe a software application, a set of technologies, a description of the physical network or a description of the entire enterprise. All these quite different definitions are reflective of the fact that this is a maturing discipline that's at an immature stage."
Until enterprise architecture methods become more mature, "there's always the possibility that the tool will not be used or not used properly," she adds.
"To do this right, there are hundreds of stars that have to be aligned, and very few are aligning." -GAO's Randolph Hite
FRESH START
Although daunting, the process of creating a workable BEA offers DOD a way to tame some of the complexities brought on by organizational size and mission, contends Dick De Santis, an enterprise architect consultant in Culpepper, Va. "It forces people to step back and look at how they achieve their objectives," he says. "Architecture itself is not an end; it's something that helps you identify the changes you need to make."
Gilligan agrees. During his stint as Air Force CIO, which began in 2001, he led the service's own enterprise architecture efforts. "We thought we needed to get a handle on our business processes," Gilligan says, because the patchwork of systems made it difficult for HR, finance, supply chain and procurement units to interact. "At one point we recognized 600 key interfaces" among the service's systems, he says.
But creating the architecture paid off. Once the Air Force could identify the specific data transactions needed, it also could begin making systems decisions based on hard data, Gilligan says. "If you don't have a formal method of representing the information and then analyzing it, you're doing this by the seat of your pants-and that's pretty risky."
DOD's sweeping attempt at a business systems makeover has undergone a number of revisions since Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created the Business Management Modernization Program in July 2001. Defense hailed BMMP's original charter as an effort to develop and launch an architecture to standardize business processes.
As part of last September's realignments, DOD created the Business Transformation Agency. BTA, which subsumed the BMMP office, has taken on the 18 largest DOD business programs, ranging from travel and HR to standard procurements and cash accounting.
Defense brass and top management are aware they need some successes in business re-engineering. To push its agenda, the Defense Business Systems Management Committee, led by deputy secretary Gordon England, has designated six core areas as targets for quick and dramatic modernization results. Dubbed business enterprise priorities, the core areas cover acquisition, finance, logistics, personnel, purchasing and real property.
In addition to the management oversight changes, DOD has pumped more guts into Version 3.0 of the BEA. It further defines the architectural underpinning for data standards, interfaces, process rules and policies for business systems. DOD has added what it calls "tiered accountability," which holds individual organizations within the larger enterprise accountable for meeting BEA's specific goals.
The architecture also details the interactions among enterprisewide activities and those that occur at lower organizational tiers in agencies and the services. The latest version requires the lower-tier organizations to create and maintain their own enterprise architectures that mesh with the overarching BEA. "This federated approach for the BEA is markedly different from earlier attempts to manage a single, centralized architecture spanning the full range of functions and activities of the department," a DOD spokesman says. The layered approach will help DOD make sure that its systems dovetail with the Federal Enterprise Architecture.
Shortly after Version 3.0 was released, Hite submitted a preliminary assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In it, he credited DOD with making progress, but added, "More needs to be done."
In particular, although Version 3.0 moves the department transformation goals, the "primary focus appears to be on business systems modernization," Hite's analysis concluded. "Business transformation is much broader and encompasses planning, management, structures and processes related to all key business areas. As DOD continues to evolve its transformation efforts, critical to successful reform are sustained leadership, structures, and a clear strategic and integrated plan that encompass all major business areas."
TAKING ACTION
One former Defense veteran likes to point out that the hardest challenges still remain. "Architecture is easy: It's drawings and text that may or may not be converted into reality," says Paul A. Strassmann, author of Information Productivity and considered Defense's first CIO when he worked as director of Defense information during the first President Bush's administration. "What matters is an actionable plan for how to migrate from what is unsatisfactory today to what will be delivering information superiority. The enterprise architecture for information should deliver options on how to redo all application plans every two to four years, as circumstances change, while delivering improvements immediately."
His advice? "If the BEA proposes to deliver network-centric designs, DOD should take a hard look at the design of the Google network instead of pursuing enhancements to the existing client-centric designs," Strassmann contends. "It is the accelerated migration from 'fat' to 'thin' clients that will deliver architectural success."
Fred Czerner, vice president of ICF Consulting of Fairfax, Va., adds that although the BEA "talks about transformation, it still talks in terms of static elements and relationships. It doesn't talk about promoting an adaptive capability, which is what's really necessary as we move into the next generation of warfighting."
Gilligan also believes that enterprise architectures must primarily support strategic operations. "In many cases, we are building architectures only to find out that they don't really support the decisions that we need to make," he says. Enterprise architects must ask themselves what decisions are most critical to an organization and then identify the information they need to inform those decisions, he says, because only then will DOD be able to develop architectural products that support its activities.
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