U.S. Army Capt. Jonathan J. Springer tests his new smart phone application in eastern Afghanistan’s Pech River Valley Jan. 17, 2011. (Photo by: U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Shoemaker)
WASHINGTON: Pushing the Army though a vast digital transformation is a challenge not just because the technological problems are “complex,” but because it requires a basic shift in the service’s culture and mindset, the Army’s chief information officer said today.
“We have to change how we operate internally,” Raj Iyer said during the JADC2’s Data Dilemma virtual event hosted by C4ISRNET webcast. “The changing pace of technology means we have to adapt some of our bureaucratic practices to be more agile. This takes time, but we can’t just give up on it.”
Iyer was echoing key parts of the Army’s Digital Transformation Strategy, which was published Wednesday and quotes Iyer as saying, “Going digital is a mindset, it’s culture change.”
“It’s about how we can fundamentally change how we operate as an Army through transformative digital technologies, empowering our workforce, and re-engineering our rigid institutional processes to be more agile,” the report says.
Iyer said the ADTS represents a commercial best practice “just now hitting the Army,” and it comes amid the service’s broader modernization push — what he called the “greatest modernization we have seen in our history.”
Iyer said that, prior to the ADTS, “What we lacked in the Army was an integrator… a unity of effort to modernize. That’s what the DTS is about.”
Army CIO Dr. Raj Iyer at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes Dec. 15. (DVIDS)
ADTS’s professed mission, it says, is to “[d]rive digital transformation, innovation and reform through strategy, policy, governance, oversight and rapid capabilities to establish an operational Multi-Domain Operation force” in hopes of creating a “digital Army of 2028 [that is] able to deliver overmatch through MDO leveraging innovative and transformative technologies.”
The overarching goal of the ADTS is to move the service toward its envisioned Joint Multi-Domain Operations concept, dubbed Waypoint 2028.
The ADTS lays out three objectives: Modernization and readiness, reform, and people and partnerships. Each of these objectives are, in turn, supported by multiple lines of effort.
On the partnerships side, Iyer noted that the ADTS is meant to align the Army with industry and coalition partners. But he emphasized the role of and partnership with industry in the ADTS especially, as long as they have their priorities straight.
“The reason why we made the strategy a public document is that we believe it captures the voice of industry and allows industry to come back to us and align to us,” he said. “[But if] you are a business working with the military or the DoD, you can’t put your revenue first. We’ve got to make sure we put the mission first.”
