"It is imperative that business operations run flexibly, adaptively, and with greater velocity than ever before to support warfighters effectively with the information and resources they need, when they need them," deputy secretary Gordon England noted in a memo last September when DOD launched its Enterprise Transition Plan.

Despite this new push to improve Defense buying methods and revamp the business enterprise, the department acknowledged the need for such transformation long ago. In February 1998, former undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology Jacques S. Gansler noted, "The Defense Department averages 13 to 15 years from weapon initiation through development to initial production. As budgets have been cut, these cycle times have often been stretched even farther. This costs lots of added dollars; and, worse still, prevents us from deploying modern systems into the field quickly enough."

Today, eight years later, Defense unfortunately still faces many of the same challenges when acquiring business IT tools. We must be more flexible and adaptive and deliver business IT with greater velocity.

So how does the acquisition community take on the challenge? We have to aggressively revisit the way we operate, looking for ways to do things smarter. We must also work within and beyond the acquisition community at all levels to identify ways to expedite IT buys. The requirements process is evolving but remains mostly serial: requirements generation followed by the acquisition phase. That doesn't work for business IT, which requires an early assessment of the needs, and a rigorous trade-off among system and organizational change options.

It is imperative that there be more interactive partnering between those who set the requirements-the functional users and the acquisition team-sooner in the process so the right decisions get made early and there's upfront commitment to the chosen solution. Downstream changes to requirements or reassessments cost too much: Use of enterprise planning can deliver strategic value and bring a sound return on investment. But my team's experience at the Navy has found that a one-day slip in schedule can cost several hundred thousand dollars in lost ROI-real dollars that we cannot afford to lose.

DOD must also commit itself to continuous process improvement so it can discover and eliminate the causes of problems in the buying process. Small incremental improvements can reduce variation, eliminate activities that return no value and improve customer satisfaction.

There is no silver bullet or big-bang solution. Rather than attempting one huge improvement, at the Navy we are using what the Japanese call "kaizen." It involves all our program partners at all levels, from hourly workers to top management, to make significant improvements in program execution.

Successful transformation in business IT requires a disciplined assessment of needs along with a simultaneous assessment of system and organizational options. Transformation in the way we acquire business IT is crucial to supporting our warfighters. The vast Defense acquisition community must come together to identify and define common procurement standards because the business of business IT is an all-hands effort.

Steven M. Ehrler is the Navy's program executive officer for IT. Send him e-mail at steve.ehrler@navy.mil.

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