DoD seeks to implement a learning ecosystem to radically change education and training enterprise-wide by leveraging data-centric advanced technologies at scale. However, despite the technological feasibility of this vision, organizational and cultural barriers limit its achievement unless the Department’s business processes are readdressed.

As such, a business process reengineering effort led by the Chief Innovation Officer for the Information Enterprise in the DoD Chief Information Office and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative within the Defense Support Services Center, kicked off in January 2022. This process reengineering effort supports Enterprise Digital Learning Modernization (EDLM), a reform that shifts DoD away from legacy learning technologies to interoperable systems of systems.

This process reengineering effort started with a workshop with over 135 military and civilian contributors, representing all Services and major Components. They identified barriers to implementing EDLM including lack of DoD-wide shared services, perceived issues with secondary policy blockers, lack of necessary workforce skills, challenges navigating data governance, a perceived lack of program-level leadership support, lack of transparency and communication across domains, learning technology acquisition challenges, and lack of return-on-investment data for implementing change.

Additionally, the DoD Chief Data Office unveiled its VAULTIS data interoperability maturity model—designed to serve as a fast, uniform way to assess organizations’ data postures for interoperability. Specifically, the model lays out seven goals to make data visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable, and secure. This model creates benchmarks for data maturity, which will help mark EDLM’s transformation progress.

In this paper, we use EDLM as a case study, highlighting real-world barriers to technology modernization—in particular to interoperability—and detailing the business process improvement approaches used to overcome them. This is an empirical paper with generalizable principles and recommendations grounded in the field of Business Process Reengineering.

Ashley Howell

Affiliation

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Technology is the Easy Part: Transforming Business Processes for Interoperability