“We’re looking across the entire DoD to look at all the different innovation activity that’s ongoing. I’d like to get my arms around just how many innovation organizations that we have,” she said during an interview with Federal News Network at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference. “We’re asking questions like, ‘What is your mission? What have you procured? What capabilities do these products have? What have you transitioned into the hands of the warfighter, and which company are you buying these products from?’ The second piece I would like to understand is what the best practices are in each organization. If we can share those across the board, that would be valuable.”
… “So all of those things will be pulled together. We’d like to create a database we can tap into so that I can basically Google for a specific capability or product. Right now, you’re making a zillion phone calls.”
USD R&E Heidi Shyu talking with Jared Serbu on Federal News Network. This is one of the challenges faced by leaders who have two-to-four year terms. It’s hard to rein in what’s already going on in a complex organization. Most of the time is spent organizing static information into a portfolio view, and by the time that happens priorities and people change. The challenge will be maturing this into a continuous reporting process and focusing that data on the needs of the R&D community itself rather than directing outcomes from the top.
These efforts to “get a hold” of the DoD’s R&D efforts often remind me of the experience of the department’s Research and Development Board from the late 1940s:
Without complete and accurate information about the services’ research and development projects, including cost data, neither the Research and Development Board’s committees nor the board itself could evaluate them. Obtaining suitable information from the services proved to be a major and enduring problem. The board’s secretariat worked from the “project cards” (actually forms) that had been created by the Joint Research and Development Board for the services to report basic data on each R&D project. In 1948, the Research and Development Board received about 18,000 project cards; approximately 5,000 were completed, cancelled, or superseded during the year, leaving about 13,000 for the board to review and monitor. The shortcomings of the cards generated widespread complaints and forced committee and panel members to seek additional information. In the spring of 1949, a special report prepared for Compton revealed that some 3,500 cards did not list funds, more than 2,000 did not identify the contractor, and about 700 omitted both.
… An especially vexing irritant affecting the Research and Development Board’s ability to evaluate projects was that the services did not have uniform financial accounting systems and reported R&D costs differently. This made it almost impossible to compare how much was actually being spent on similar projects. The Air Force, for example, was the only service to include expenditures for overhead (indirect costs such as maintaining R&D facilities) in its totals. Indirect costs were substantial, amounting to an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the services’ research and development programs.
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