The sense-and-respond approach, based on a revolutionary managerial framework developed at IBM’s Advanced Business Institute, aims at letting organizations adapt effectively to what is happening—rather than focusing on carrying out plans based on predictions of what will happen. So, a strategy is no longer a plan of action but a design of capabilities for action.

Logistically, that means the military could look forward to abandoning the mass-based approach that led to what DOD brass call “iron mountains” of equipment, commodities and other items—just in case they are needed. Instead, by relying on highly adaptive, self-synchronizing and dynamic physical and functional processes, sense-and-respond logistics—as conceptualized by OFT—would predict, anticipate and coordinate actions across services and organizations, providing “an end-to-end, point-of-effect to source-of-support network of logistics resources and capabilities.”

Sounds great, but three years after unveiling the idea, excitement over sense-and-respond’s promise has dulled, in large part because of cultural and turf hurdles that make the required organizational transformation difficult to achieve.

“Sense-and-respond is not the magic bullet,” says Jim Hall, acting assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense for logistics plans and programs. Hall says that DOD continues to investigate the use of performance-based logistics, supply chain management concepts, condition-based maintenance and radio frequency identification technologies to improve information access and decision-making. “It’s one more tool in the tool kit, another contributor to performance. But it is certainly a capability we want to develop.”

For now, that’s being done through experimentation and pilots. Initially, OFT tried to keep the focus on cultural considerations. Under the direction of the project’s creator, retired Capt. Linda Lewandowski, a series of workshops sponsored by OFT and the Marine Corps investigated such issues as how to get users to embrace the idea and how to express a commander’s intent and let Marines in the field adapt planning and execution to accomplish it.

But as responsibility for the project shifted from OFT to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, the projects have become more focused on technology. Within the Common Logistics Operating Environment, for example, the Army is investigating the value of collecting and transmitting performance and maintenance data from sensors on M1 Abrams Tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, while the Marine Corps is taking a broader look at how to accomplish joint theater logistics by monitoring the health of sensor-outfitted vehicles and weapons systems. Another project looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of conducting technical data transfer using sensors on the F-18 aircraft to pre-position contact teams and parts on the ground and reduce repair cycle times.

“The Sense and Respond Logistics Concept is one that everyone is beginning to say: ‘I need to understand this more, see how it applies and do some

Rick Steele
“What we want to do is try to get a handle on all the things that are going on and decide where we need to be filling in the gaps.” — DOD’s Jerry Hall

tests and experiments,’ ” says Hall. His organization must provide a cohesive view of the different efforts, identify the value of sense-and-respond applications and technologies being developed within academia and industry, and work with the services to identify and develop their potential for use within the military. “What we want to do is try to get a handle on all the things that are going on and decide where we need to be filling in the gaps.”

Still, there is concern among sense-and-respond advocates that the real need for across-the-board organizational change has lost out to technology development. Stephan H. Haeckel, who created the original sense-and-respond theory for IBM and worked as an adviser on OFT’s logistics concept initiative, believes that technical personnel have co-opted much of the work. “To be honest, there’s been a lot of really nifty stuff done in sense-and-respond logistics: I’m impressed as hell in terms of the decision support, the sensor technology and the use of agents,” he says. “But until it is leveraged by an adaptive managerial framework, the payoff is going to be quite limited.”

Ideas Adrift?
Lewandowski, now a principal at ICF International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., which built a small-scale prototype of the original Sense and Respond Logistics Concept, laments the fact that many military decision-makers have embraced sense-and-respond more as bumper sticker terminology than a transformational ideology. She emphatically believes that the effort has lost its original focus and direction.

“They’ve been down the road for a few years with these pilots, and there have been some success stories, but we don’t have the processes and the systems and the organizational changes in place to actually make it all work together,” she says. “DOD’s sense-and-respond initiative was about catalyzing change toward being able to make better decisions in network-centric environments. At this point, they’re just paving the cowpaths with a lot of very expensive technology, but they’re not going to be able to make decisions better and faster through organizational transformation, to leverage information across organizations instead of in stovepipes, which is what the goal always was.”

Implementation efforts have also veered away from the original sense-and-respond logistics premise by taking a back-end department approach, rather than first focusing efforts on the tactical level and working backwards.

“That’s where your greatest dynamic is and where they have the least connectivity and visibility,” Lewandowski says, noting that personnel on the front line are already mimicking sense-and-respond concepts by performing manual workarounds to locate items and order parts—whether it’s by cell phone or hopping in a jeep and going to the rear to get the information they need to make decisions. “It’s just not being done in a systematic, coherent way.”

The Push Outward
The original prototype, Lewandowski notes, mimicked the system used for the stock market, relying on commercial applications, accommodating thousands of transactions and enabling people to access information instantaneously to make decisions. When the project’s user group was presented with the sense-and-respond capabilities, they had more options and could make decisions and

Rick Steele
“They’ve been down the road for a few years with these pilots, and there have been some success stories, but we don’t have the processes and the systems and the organizational changes in place to actually make it all work together,” Linda Lewandowski says.

get their orders faster. “They absolutely saw how they could begin to change their operations, including removing the extra layers in their command hierarchy that added no value,” she says.

Small-scale pilot projects and enterprisewide implementation and acceptance are different, counters Don Davidson, a transformation specialist working on Hall’s team. One early concern in many circles was that sense-and-respond would bring a level of automation to the logistics chain that could serve to largely take the human factor out of the loop. For this reason, a third layer—interpretation—was added to the concept to let personnel realize that human judgment and decision-making aren’t being circumvented.

Hall agrees that the organizational change inherent in making sense-and-respond viable is its most challenging aspect. But he also thinks that the complexity of deploying it across the entire department requires education and a more decentralized approach to ensure that users understand and accept the concepts involved. “The more you talk about it in this forum and get people to express their opinions and ideas for how they might use this kind of capability, [the more] they embrace the idea,” he says. “And once you get them talking about it, they sort of have pride and ownership that they are part of the process.”

Going forward, Hall says, the steps must involve helping the services understand the global possibilities for sense-and-respond, rather than just the local opportunities and helping them understand the long-term value rather than immediate improvements. “This isn’t a pipe dream. It’s not something that some professor is talking about or people are just writing about. We’ve got little islands of sense-and-respond around the department, and we’re looking to see how we can really expand on those,” he says.

As that expansion occurs, Hall says, the military across all functions will begin to enjoy tangible benefits, including increases in traditional supply-chain metrics like responsiveness, availability, productivity and efficiency. “It will do this by giving us more and better information and getting it to the right people sooner,” he says.

The good news, Haeckel says, is that the military environment is more conducive to sense-and-respond ideals than the corporate world. He notes that frontline forces are unknowingly using aspects of the concept, with activities and commitments and decision-making often being handled sideways between organizations rather than up and down the hierarchical authority chain.

A perfect example, he explains, occurred in the early days of the Afghanistan deployment, when frontline intelligence officers had authority to make immediate decisions and even pay cash to the locals to achieve the commander’s objective, which in this case was to obtain the necessary intelligence for Special Operations to effectively deploy assets. “That type of behavior just has to be systematized across all functions—but with the managerial framework in place so they can make allocations of logistics, intel and operations resources dynamically on the spot,” Haeckel says.

To read an IBM white paper, go to www.defensesystems.com and enter 123 in the Quickfind search box. For IBM’s framework, enter 124. For OFT info, enter 125.

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