Army wants its future business systems to be intuitive for users

The Army is in the early stages of converging five of its large, legacy business processing systems into a streamlined process that the service can leverage.

The hope is to save money and make these enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems more accessible through cloud access and better user experiences.

The service is in the process of soliciting industry ideas on the best ways to achieve this feat, and is asking companies for new and exciting ideas that will take the system to the next level.

“A lot of people will think this is a pure integration job,” Young Bang, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for procurement, logistics and technology, said Tuesday at the Enterprise Business Solutions – Convergence (EBS-C) industry day. “There may be some of these, but a large part of them will be related to software development. We want companies to innovate, offer us different solutions, enable us to develop software in an agile way. Don’t give us the traditional big bang approach. We really want innovative solutions across the board.”

Much like many of the military’s IT ventures in recent years, the Army wants EBS-C to be rooted in agile development, DevSevOps, and with the program easily portable to troops.

The army’s digital transformation strategy explicitly calls for the convergence of EBS.

“The Army’s EBS should aim to provide the warfighter with the most advanced capabilities available to conduct sustainment or tax management operations and to be interoperable with sustainment capabilities present in current and future warfare mission systems,” the strategy reads . “The Army will revamp its business processes to align with commercial and threat mitigation best practices and leverage commercial off-the-shelf software capabilities where possible. The Army will also establish an open technical architecture and open application programming interfaces for integration and interoperability to minimize vendor lock-in and retain the flexibility to adopt newer technologies in the future.”

The Army says the industry will not be alone in creating this model. The service’s chief information officer, Raj Iyer, noted that the Army could offer software licenses, DevSecOps tools, and COTS programs that are out-of-the-box and approved for use.

A key motive the Army is looking for in developing EBS-C is intuitiveness. Bang, Iyer, Ross Guckert, the program manager for enterprise information systems, and Brig. Gen. Gen. Michael Lalor, executive director of EBS, reiterated that they want soldiers and civilians to adopt the system quickly.

“Whatever we create has to be intuitive enough that you don’t need new training or instruction manuals to use the application, so set that as a benchmark for what you need to be aware of,” Iyer said.

Lalor added that the more intuitively the Army can make EBS-C, the faster it can be implemented, the more it saves on training, and the faster services can integrate the program into their ranks.

“The focus remains on the user experience and making sure it’s as intuitive and as simple as possible,” he said. “However, we are absolutely committed to ensuring that our operators and teammates are fully conversant with the skills and training required to run the specific platform or software that we are actually using.”

Iyer told Federal News Network earlier this summer that he plans to spend $1.4 billion this year maintaining the five ERPs that will replace EBS-C and their 150 support systems.

“Our main concern in 2023 will be our implementation or initial prototyping for our new convergence of enterprise systems,” he said. “We try to bring them together in a single architecture or, if possible, in a single system. More importantly, if we have one built-in capability, it is the data we can share across this spectrum of operations for analysis. It is a massive, multi-year modernization effort. We anticipate that it will take up to 10 years to achieve this modernization effort. But the approach we’re taking isn’t the big bang approach we’ve typically used in the past. It will be more of an evolutionary approach to modernization.”

The Army plans to award multiple prototype contracts through other transaction authorities for EBS-C by early 2023. These have a term of one year to 18 months.