The Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer (DON CIO) presented the Knowledge Management (KM) Team of Naval Personnel Development Command (NPDC) and the Support Team from the Navy Individual Augmentee Combat Training (NIACT) Center a Department of the Navy Information Management/Information Technology Excellence Award for their collaborative work in constructing the Individual Augmentee Community of Practice (IA CoP) on Navy Knowledge Online (NKO). The two teams accepted their award in San Diego in February.
"The real winners here are the Sailors who have benefited from the information we have been able to put out," said Tony Martin, a retired chief petty officer and NPDC KM team member who has been at the tip of the spear in developing the IA CoP. "The CoP was created to address the inconsistencies with the flow of information. Sailors are being asked to take on completely unfamiliar duties in dangerous places, and the last thing we want is for them to go in unprepared and uninformed or worrying about their records being accurate."
The IA CoP, which has assisted thousands of IA Sailors in getting the necessary information to make their tour as successful as possible, was created in response to the Chief of Naval Operations' 2005 agreement to assist the Army due to a shortage of Soldiers supporting the global war on terrorism. It was decided the Army would train the Sailors at McGrady Training Center near Fort Jackson in Columbia, S.C., with an initial goal of putting through 10,000 Sailors (to date more than 9,300 have graduated NIACT).
From the beginning, the key challenge was disseminating the information to the prospective IA Sailors. It didn't take long for Martin and his team to determine that NKO would be the optimal medium for delivery.
"The CoP had to address the challenge of communication to a geographically disbursed group of people where timeliness, accuracy and accessibility were critical issues," Martin said. "NKO provided the means for one-stop-shopping."
Finding the hosting site, however, was only the beginning. Martin and team members, Jon Harris, Leonard Coley, Ken Decker and Theresia Reistad, immediately hit the road to begin gathering information and collaborating with a myriad of individuals who would eventually turn the IA CoP into a living community.
The first visit was to PERS 463/464 in Millington, Tenn., which worked to make a connection between the Pentagon and the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Next came three separate site visits to McGrady to meet with the NIACT team.
The NIACT Team, consisting of Master Chief Yeoman (SW) Larkin Whetstone, Chief Hospital Corpsman (AW/SW) Alex Garza, Chief Master-At-Arms Charline Mayo, Yeoman First Class Rosalyn Reeder, Hospital Corpsman First Class Angela Martin, Storekeeper First Class Lexington Harris, Personnel Specialist Second Class Katrina Mackey, Hospital Corpsman Second Class Duval Raines and Storekeeper Second Class Byron Moore, were responsible for the readiness, outfitting, training and transfer of the augmentees to various locations supporting the GWOT.
According to Whetstone, the former senior enlisted adviser at NIACT, the site visits proved to be invaluable in getting the right information to Sailors and their families and easing the tension about what they could expect during their training.
"In the beginning of the NIACT training process there were a lot of 'mess deck rumors' about what specifically was being trained at NIACT and what the training was like," he said. "No one knew what to bring with them to NIACT, what military documentation was required, what type of equipment they would receive, what type of medical/dental screening was required, if they would receive a weapon, and the list just goes on and on."
Martin, Larkin and their teams set out to answer these questions through personal observation of the training and several meetings and one-on-one interviews with Sailors who had been through the process, paying close attention to their frustrations and suggestions on improvement.
In between the second and third visit to NIACT, Martin made a connection with Capt. Rhetta Bailey, who was already in Baghdad, and she became a vital source of information through feedback from Sailors who had just completed the training.
"Capt. Bailey is really the one who catapulted the IA CoP," Martin said. "She sent updates every weekend that I could in turn input into CoP. It was helpful in keeping information current and making sure we were aware of what our Sailors needed."
Using that knowledge, the CoP was designed to include pages for the countries where Sailors would deploy, key points of contact, maps, checklists for medical and dental requirements and a list of required e-Learning courses. The CoP also includes a discussion forum for deploying and deployed Sailors to share unclassified information.
Whetstone cited the discussion forum element of the CoP as one of its most useful components. "The message board the team created was extremely helpful to the Sailors. Not only could they post questions to the NIACT staff, but they could also get information from Sailors who had been through the training or that had previously been on an IA assignment," he said.
The IA CoP went live on Feb. 10, 2006, and has since had more than 1.3 million visitors. Although it is now managed by the Expeditionary Combat Readiness Center, the mission remains the same, and it remains a vital tool for a smooth and successful IA tour.