Enable Rapid Access to Information for Strategic Decisions

To make sound and timely decisions, senior DoD leaders need deeper insight into the Department’s business operations; improved knowledge of supply chain operations; centrally available, secure, integrated data about military and civilian personnel and their locations, assignments, compensation, and duty status; and timely budgeting, accounting, and financial information. The Department's legacy business application environment spans thousands of individual information systems that were implemented over decades to meet various DoD mission needs, with the result that information does not readily flow to decision makers across the business and warfighting communities.

Senior decision makers need consistent, aggregated views of operational and financial performance information. Access to reliable management information provides DoD leadership with increasingly better opportunities to make sound decisions that impact the Department’s human resource capabilities and requirements; the condition, status and location of assets supporting warfighters; and how DoD is investing funds to best enable the warfighting mission. A key enabler to providing access to reliable management information is the continued migration to a networked (net-centric) information environment. The power obtained by leveraging digital networks will more optimally distribute information currently locked in isolated applications and will enable visibility across end-to-end processes.

Information Visibility Driving Enterprise Priorities

At the Enterprise level of the Department, DoD has identified and focused its transformation efforts on six strategic Business Enterprise Priorities, each making critical business information more visible and accessible:

• Personnel Visibility
• Acquisition Visibility
• Common Supplier Engagement
• Materiel Visibility
• Real Property Accountability
• Financial Visibility

These priorities represent those areas where increased focus will bring the most dramatic and immediate positive impact on the business missions of DoD, enabling the Department to better answer basic questions about its people, its assets, its suppliers, and its investments. The plan for each priority details measurable program and Business Capability deliverables spread over the next several years. Achieving the objectives of these priorities will provide enduring improvements to the Department’s business infrastructure, benefiting the warfighter by integrating enterprise business processes, reducing system redundancies, and continuously improving financial transparency.

Achieving the priorities will improve DoD’s ability to answer essential questions such as:

• Who are our people? What are their skills? Where are they located?
• Who are our industry partners, and what is the state of our relationship with them?
• What assets are we providing to support the warfighter, and where are these assets deployed?
• How are we investing our funds to best enable the warfighting mission?