Critics, and there are many, say that over the decades DOD has wasted billions of dollars by buying and building redundant and mismatched systems as well as signing off on programs not guided by any overarching business or architectural framework.

Estimates vary on how many business systems the department runs. But it’s somewhere north of 4,000. “That’s too many,” says Paul Brinkley, the department’s deputy undersecretary for business transformation. Brinkley told me recently: “I have no idea how many business systems we should have. To some extent, I don’t care. What I care about is that we have financial transparency.”

Lack of transparency can result in waste and abuse, even fraud. The department has set deadlines upon deadlines to achieve a clean audit, but is it possible? And is it the main objective anyway? Quite a few people in and out of DOD doubt that yes is the answer to either of these questions.

“The books are such a mess … it would be an improvement for DOD to flunk” an audit, says Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information in our feature story, “Beyond Bean Counting,”.

Today, you’re more likely to hear DOD brass say publicly that a clean audit in and of itself is no longer precisely the goal. It’s really more of a byproduct of the transparency that the department expects to achieve from integrating thousands of business systems and aligning them under a consistent enterprise architecture.

“One of the roots of the program was a clean audit,” Carol Macha, chief architect in the Business Transformation Agency, explains. “This was our No. 1 goal. But if we get the processes right and the data right, a byproduct of that will be a clean audit.”

This is a good thing. Without a clean audit, or a clear understanding of where the money is going, you’ve got to wonder whether DOD can transform.

DAWN S. ONLEY, Editor
donley@postnewsweektech.com

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