The Army has about 300 ideas of where to apply automation technology to simplify and accelerate low-value or mundane work.

The job to decide which ideas are best falls to the Army’s chief information officer, Leo Garciga.

The initial focus for the Army is automating what Garciga calls “administrivia.”

Leonel Garciga is the Army’s chief information officer.

“The undersecretary [Mike Obadal] put out a memo really focused around where do we have opportunities across the Army? And that wasn’t just like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this in the Pentagon only.’ It was pushed across the entire Army, all the major commands, the program executive offices and the secretary’s office for everybody to really focus on, where do we think there’s these opportunities to start either process automation or to enable AI to really take some of the cognitive burden off our workforce, focus less on the ‘administrivia’ of day-to-day and open up some time for folks to really focus on some of our hard problems,” Garciga said on Ask the CIO. “We got a lot of great feedback, 300 plus submissions that came back to us in CIO, and we’ve been slowly kind of triaging those over time to look at where do we get the most bang for our buck? It’s been an interesting experience to watch across the Army.”

Of the initial list of ideas, the Army focused on some of the low-hanging fruit first. One idea was to apply artificial intelligence and automation to personnel records. Another was to improve cross training for service members and civilian employees.

Garciga said Army employees were spending too much time reviewing PDF documents located in folders to answer personnel questions.

“Let’s put AI against it to really reduce that cognitive burden. I think the big thing being that response time to that customer, whether that be an active duty soldier, a veteran or a civilian, and just reducing that time so we can actually get the right action done,” he said. “Cross training is always an interesting space, though very back office heavy. It’s how do you get both automation and AI involved in that to reduce that time and make sure that soldiers or civilians are in the right place and where they need to be in their lifecycle from a training perspective. So we’re really excited about the submissions.”

Garciga said with so many ideas and limited resources to undertake them, his team judged the ideas based on a few simple concepts. The first was impact on the soldiers and civilians. The second was the ability to scale it across the Army. And third was both cost and impact of that investment. The team ended up choosing five out of the initial 300 ideas to start working on.

“We did find out that some of the little stuff was interesting because it was like these folks should be doing this anyways. But I don’t know if at an enterprise level, we want to tackle this. Some of it was like, ‘Hey, maybe you need to relook at that business process too,’” he said. “What we did find, though, is some of the submissions came up and we said, ‘Oh, hey, by the way, that policy changed. You don’t even have to do that anymore.’ So we found some efficiencies inadvertently as we worked through the process. I think we had a good triage mechanism, which was really focused on soldiers and on where we can make the most impact as quickly as possible to reduce the ‘administrivia’ type work or just cognitive burden on soldiers.”

Business systems reengineering initial focus

Garciga said in the coming months, the Army will move on to the next set of AI and automation projects.

These initial projects are helping the Army better understand what it takes to modernize these long-standing processes.

Garciga said sometimes it’s a data challenge and other times the focus is less on the technology and on the process itself.

“We’ve been really focused on looking at those areas where we really believe that we can have the most impact directly to soldiers or civilian workforce, and then backing that into a couple of things, like does the business process still make sense? That’s always a great question to ask because by nature of our size, 1.3 million plus humans, lots of different mission areas, sometimes we get lost in the process, and just things don’t catch up,” he said. “The next piece is, do we have the data right? A lot of times we find that there’s a lot of problems we want to apply AI to, and it’s like, ‘Hey, this is really a data problem.’ Or, it’s a ‘Hey, we could just automate and workflow this process,’ and all of a sudden we don’t even need the rest of this stuff. It kind of it becomes self-curing. Most of the time, if people know what they want to do, they’ve got a good problem to solve and the process makes sense, right, then we can usually apply technology against it. I think the new piece is somewhere in between the process and the technology is data.”

At the same time, the Army is tackling its business process challenge with a specific focus, at least initially, on business systems.

In July, Garciga issued a memo outlining the new definition of a business system and implementation guidance to further consolidate and optimize those systems.

“The guidance defines a [defense business system], facilitating appropriate binning, legal compliance, budget management, and connection with Department of Defense (DoD)-wide strategic goals — ultimately enhancing mission readiness and operational efficiency,” the memo stated. “A DBS is a comprehensive software solution that integrates both front-end and back-end technologies to support Army business operations. It would be designed to handle data processing, security, interoperability, and compliance.”

Slimming down requirements

The memo was the first step in a bigger effort to initiate business process reengineering across business systems.

Garciga said this effort actually started about two years ago with a team of experts from across the Army analyzing the current status of business systems.

“We’re trying to converge almost 100 business systems in less than a year, and they have been kind of very critical in jumping in and working with those functional stakeholders,” he said. “The folks delivering the capability to really triage that people, process, data and technology piece to make some big decisions on behalf of the Army.”

The next step is a new memo that will further change the Army regulations for how office manage these business systems.

Garciga said the new approach will slim down and make the requirements a little bit easier while also giving the service a more clear understanding of the systems, their role and the people, technology and processes associated with them.

“We really pushed hard to start building out this no code, low code Center of Excellence that is really focused around a little bit more of a centralized approach, so we can take out the cybersecurity and the bespoke system challenges that we’ve had across the Army. I think this next step was to actually define by law what a business system is, so we could separate things into things that are real, business systems and things that are just it that supports business systems. We recently put out some guidance on redefining that, which is going to redefine our landscape in a big way.”

Garciga added this new approach will make it easier to converge, modernize and improve how the systems deliver data and capabilities to the service.

“The conversation we’re having across the Army right now, is, how do we make some of these trades over the next two years? How do we accelerate big programs like enterprise business systems, convergence? How do we give commanders some capabilities that we would traditionally call the agility layer or just visualization and quick analytics? We can use some of our already approved platforms to shrink that time to delivery to soldiers and to the civilian and contract workforce, but at the same time  buy back some of that technical debt that we’ve had with these legacy systems, so we’re really excited about it,” he said. “The most important part of that is part of our big push is you don’t get to come in and say, ‘I’m keeping my system because this is how we do it.’ It’s more of a ‘We’ve looked at our process and this is why we do it, or this is what we’ve done to change it, and this is what’s given us some of those options and opportunities.’”

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