DoD Deputy Secretary of Defense initiated Business Process Review

Challenge: When a new president is elected, it’s mandatory for the DOD to have a Business Process and Systems Review (BPSR). The review process involves an architecture assessment where top companies like Mckinsey or Deloitte bring in high dollar analyst to try and gather information from unwilling people. Because of this, they ultimately had to make many assumptions so that recommendations could be made quickly to high ranking political appointees about current issue the incoming president could face. This process was started again in 2014, where ACES Group provided a SharePoint based analytics dashboard to visualize the data and track performance. Solution: ACES Group lead the Business Process and Systems Review (BPSR) for the Department of Defense (DoD). This effort was a Deputy Secretary of Defense (DSD) initiative focused on finding ways to save money and improve business operations across the DoD. The DSD tasked one of the DoD Federal agencies to co-lead the effort. ACES was chosen to develop a portal to manage the overall effort, aggregate authoritative DoD data sources, present dashboards to visualize the data and track performance/savings across the department. ACES used existing infrastructure and enterprise IT services such as SQL Server to aggregate data from authoritative sources in the areas of Finance, Manpower, Personnel, Contracts, IT Systems, and Real Property. ACES used existing reporting services and dashboarding capabilities within the environment to generate reports for senior leaders. In an easily digestible manner. Using SharePoint, ACES was able to manage content and processes and present visualizations to enable well-informed decisions. Results: ACES Group led the effort to aggregate data from the various authoritative sources in the DoD and developed senior leader dashboards to aid in quick decision making. In the end, several inefficiencies were discovered and addressed. One of these was the need to consolidate several of IT service providers supporting the Pentagon and DoD within the National Capital Region. The Joint Service Provider was formed and recently celebrated their 2-year anniversary as an organization. They reported a savings of over $343M in IT costs as a result of the consolidation.

For the first time in history, the overall cost of DoD organizations real property, IT systems, contracts, and personnel can be compared and assessed. Redundancies continue to be identified and eliminated. The millions in savings resulting from this transformation continue to be realized and tallied along with the significant improvements to operational efficiencies that are happening every day.