Case in Point: DoD Approach Identified as Commercial Best Practice

The Department of Defense often seeks the best commercial practices of industry and other government agencies as the foundation of transformational activity. Rarely does industry look to the Department for models of business transformation, but this was indeed the case when the Department developed the Real Property Unique Identifier (RPUID). Industry leaders in utilities, transportation, and real property management provided input to this comprehensive, standardized approach for real property accountability, which has now been declared a commercial best practice.

The RPUID was developed as an essential component of the Department's Real Property Inventory Requirements (RPIR). Published in January 2005, the RPIR advanced several fundamental concepts for real property accountability including management and inventory strategies for both assets and sites at the installation level. Assets are defined as land parcels, buildings, structures, or linear structures. Sites are defined as one or more contiguous parcels of land and/or a collection of buildings, structures, or linear structures. Additionally, the definition of an installation has been standardized to meet management constructs without regard to boundaries. Through the association of assets to sites and sites to installations the Department will accurately account for its real property interests. This organizational and functional concept was incorporated in all Services' real property information systems.

The Department's real property portfolio consists of more than $700 billion in real property assets, including airports, wharves, warehouses, barracks, cafeterias, offices, tank farms, storage facilities, training ranges, and more. More than 2.4 billion square feet of building space is located on more than 5,300 sites on approximately 32 million acres of land. Therefore, the association of assets and sites required a strong linking mechanism with unique characteristics to cross Service real property stovepipes into functional business areas across the Department. The RPUID was designed for this purpose. It provides permanent unique identification of sites and assets throughout the lifecycle from acquisition to disposal, when the RPUID will be archived and never re-used.

The Services' inventory systems are able to obtain an RPUID for a site from the Real Property Unique Identifier Registry. This Registry stores limited site information. Through Service-Oriented Architecture, more information on a site will be accessible through the Global Information Grid regardless of business mission area. It is anticipated that assets will receive RPUIDs in December 2007 and the detailed asset and site information resident in the Services' real property systems will be increasingly available to others within the Department.

During the initial phase of Registry development, the Open Standards Consortium of Real Estate (OSCRE) approached the Department of Defense to learn more. OSCRE is an initiative of CoreNet, a global organization of real estate professionals. The mission of OSCRE is to facilitate a greater level of coordination, standardization and collaboration across the key stakeholders in the commercial real estate industry. The integration of standardized business processes and data elements presented in the RPIR, in concert with the RPUID, produced a key outcome: integrated, accurate, consistent, and complete real property data available for decision making at a variety of levels. OSCRE and the Department initiated regular weekly working group sessions via web-conferencing to further explore RPUID concepts and applications. As the Registry approached full operational capability for sites, OSCRE held two working group sessions to learn more from the Department on implementation, processes, and technical aspects of the Registry. OSCRE continues to interface weekly with the Department.

At the April 2007 CoreNet Global Summit the Department of Defense RPUID was pronounced as the commercial best practice for real property unique identification. The Department is pleased to have made this positive contribution to both private and other government organizations for use in the commercial real estate industry. The Department will see the benefits of sharing a common data standard with industry in the form of lowered information technology support costs.