The Department of Defense announced today completion of the DoD Business Initiative Council (BIC) Phase lead by the Department of the Army; and a total of 48
initiatives intended to improve business processes across the Department of Defense enhance support to the warfighter.
Leadership of the DoD BIC is transferred among the military departments in phases to sustain the engery level and fresh perspectives necessary to accomplish BIC goals. The eleven most recently approved initiatives, Round Six, cover a wide range of functional areas. Examples include making better use of activity-based costing to improve installation management; exploring options for further reducing the overhead in selected DoD agencies; taking advantage of DoD's considerable buying power to acquire DoD-wide licenses for electronic content at optimum prices; streamlining the Department's policies and procedures for granting security clearances; and using more efficient approaches to contracting for environmental clean-up at DoD installations.
The benefits from the BIC-approved initiatives include streamlined business processes that will enable DoD military and civilian personnel to make better use of their time, cost avoidance in several functional areas, more rapid achievement of DoD goals and objectives, less down-time for military and civilian personnel in waiting for security clearances to be processed, and improved transfer of government-to-government information. Currently, annual savings are estimated to average $200 to $400 million for the period fiscal 2004-2009. These savings will be reflected in future budget documents as they are realigned to other high priority requirements.
The council, established and presided over by Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Pete Aldridge, is composed of the military department secretaries, the under secretary of defense for comptroller,the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The BIC reports directly to the Senior Executive Council, whose members include the secretary and deputy secretary of defense; the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics; and the military department secretaries.
The BIC was launched in July 2001 to implement bureaucracy-reducing and/or money-saving opportunities in the business practices of the Department of Defense. This is core to Secretary Rumsfeld's broader "Battle on Bureaucracy" campaign, announced on Sept. 10, 2001.
In approving the latest round of BIC initiatives, Aldridge noted that the BIC has begun to broaden its focus by dealing with initiatives that are more complex and challenging than those approved in the past. Aldridge observed that "these broader initiatives will require a considerable amount of time and effort to complete, but we believe that the potential benefits justify the additional effort."
