Organizational Transformation: Military Departments Can Improve Their Enterprise Architecture Programs
Abstract
DOD is a massive and complex organization entrusted with more taxpayer dollars than any other federal department or agency. Organizationally, the department includes the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military departments, numerous defense agencies and field activities, and various unified combatant commands that are responsible for either specific geographic regions or specific functions. (See fig. 1 for a simplified depiction of DOD s organizational structure.) In support of its military operations, the department performs an assortment of interrelated and interdependent business functions, such as logistics management, weapons systems management, supply chain management, procurement, health care management, and financial management. For fiscal year 2012, the department requested about $38 billion for its IT investments, of which about $17 billion is intended for its business systems environment and supporting IT infrastructure, which includes systems and processes related to the management of contracts, finances, the supply chain, support infrastructure, and weapons systems acquisition. However, as we have previously reported,6 the DOD systems environment that supports these business functions is overly complex and error prone, and is characterized by (1) little standardization across the department, (2) multiple systems performing the same tasks, (3) the same data being stored in multiple systems, and (4) the need for data to be entered manually into multiple systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA549589
Entities
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office