Case in Point: Data Integration Enables Army to See How Resource Management Decisions Affect Manpower and Budget Allocations

For decades the Army’s programming, budgeting, accounting, and manpower management systems operated independently of one another. Furthermore, each of the Army’s Major Commands (MACOMs) had its own unique set of business processes, systems, and staffs to capture, maintain, and report accounting, resourcing, and personnel-related financial data. This operating environment created numerous obstacles for the Army:  reliance on manual processes, delays in getting timely information, labor-intensive data calls, and most important, an inability to quickly know the true impact of Army resource management decisions on the joint warfighter.

But these barriers are being eliminated by integrating data from existing resource management systems into a single, web-enabled environment. This environment, known as the Enterprise Army Workload Performance System (eAWPS), comprises a number of applications that automatically extract data from legacy or evolving financial and personnel systems to provide Army leadership with a comprehensive view of how the Army is supporting the warfighter.

One of the first operational components of eAWPS is the Resource Management Tool (RMT), which consolidates programming, budgeting, funding, accounting, and manpower authorization data from ten different applications into one place. As such, RMT has consolidated many of the operations performed by each individual Army Command Resource Management office, providing a common solution for manpower distribution, workload forecasting, and performance measurement. The Army chose RMT by first conducting a business process analysis and then selecting the appropriate IT solution, which was to modify existing systems and develop data interchanges vs. procuring a new COTS application. The analysis involved consulting with users across the Army MACOMs and Comptroller communities as well as mapping the various business process flows related to enterprise management decisions support.

Through RMT, the Army is realizing a number of improvements. These include the ability to understand the impact on manpower planning when funding is reprogrammed; the relationship of obligations and commitments, leading to better cash flow management; and fully automating the funds control process. RMT is also delivering a real-time capability to track budget execution and adjust current-year obligation plans, budgets, and out-year programs to the fiscal realities of an ever-changing financial environment. Finally, RMT lets financial managers track and audit the movement of resources among appropriations, programs, and subprograms throughout the year plus establish fiscal rules to flag or prevent unauthorized movement of funds.

As RMT is enabling more responsive business processes through rapid access to quality data, an important byproduct is the anticipated cost avoidance benefits for the Army. Based on early analysis, the total cost avoidance potential through 2013 is estimated to be $98.8M. Additionally, the deployment of RMT will provide opportunities to ensure that funds allocated are not diverted to non-mission essential tasks and functions.

The RMT implementation has also yielded significant lessons learned related to IT-driven change management. As a result, the Army is developing new organizational methods to help staff understand new ways of doing business, adopt more collaborative work habits, and embrace network-centric applications in lieu of legacy processes.

Underlying both the challenges and lessons learned are the needs for business transformation processes to be based in both organizational structure and culture, and for IT systems to serve the information needs of decision makers and users, always benefiting the warfighter.