While the Army has mountains of relevant data, it is not always readily accessible, verified or authoritative. Compounding the matter even further, data is frequently duplicated or of questionable quality.
To put the problem in perspective, Dr. Bruce D. Jette, Army acquisition executive, shared a tongue-in-cheek anecdote during a town hall meeting in November at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about how he might determine the exact number of tanks the Army has.
“I call J.B., my XO [executive officer],” Jette said. “I ask him, ‘J.B., how many tanks do we have?’ He says, ‘Sir, I’ll find out and get right back to you.’ Right back to me is a week.” Jette illustrated the chain of events that might follow. His executive officer would ask someone, who would call someone else, before the task eventually fell to the person who would walk out into the rain to manually count tanks in a parking lot.
The anecdote illustrates a complex problem that leaders face every day: Army data is housed in hundreds, if not thousands, of disparate systems that typically don’t communicate with one another. Sometimes the single, authoritative source for one type of data is a spreadsheet on a supply sergeant’s desk. So how might senior leaders access that information when it is needed?
That was Ellen Summey writing in Army AL&T, “Army Leader Dashboard, Creating Insight-Driven Decisions.”
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