The Need for “Acquisition Visibility”

A Case Study for Change

Acquisition Visibility is a case study in cross-organizational leadership, the use of best business practices, and technical competency within the Federal Government.  Implementing this service required a significant amount of leadership, change management, and alignment of disparate defense organizations from Acquisition Visibility delivery teams.  Teams constantly engaged and collaborated with acquisition organizations across the Department.  They remained flexible to address leadership’s ever-changing data, service and technical requirements.  Support constantly evolved as Acquisition Visibility adapted to and embraced cutting-edge technologies and concepts improving performance.  In addition, AV leadership deliberately used agile methodologies to create synergies among delivery teams, including the Components, to meet strategic, functional, data and technical requirements more effectively.

Acquisition leadership agrees this remains an optimal approach despite the need for perpetual agility.  By having instant access to authoritative acquisition information, leadership has insight into major acquisition programs more effectively.  Performance data ensures Components are meeting cost, budget and specification targets while offering clues as to why certain programs may not be meeting their performance objectives.  Data-driven decisions will help the Department address and overcome current and future acquisition challenges, whether organizational, budgetary or technical.  The Department can reliably report on the performance and status of each major acquisition program to stakeholders – and Congress – to improve transparency.  The ability to capture growing amounts of acquisition information exposes the Department to the strengths of data analytics, providing leadership with even more powerful information to drive critical decision making and oversight in the future.

Viewing Acquisition Visibility from strategic, functional and technical perspectives provides insight as to why the Department created this service to be the authoritative source for acquisition information and the primary tool to improve management, oversight and decision making on the acquisition portfolio.  These perspectives highlight how and why specific techniques were used, their impact to operations, and the benefits of using these strategies, so other organizations can replicate similar techniques across Department.

 

Table 1
Action or Activity	Impact on Acquisition Management and the Acquisition Portfolio
Development of an information sharing framework	Structured acquisition information to manage the $1.7 trillion acquisition portfolio Data serves as the foundation for AT&L reporting and analysis Measures for implementing the (USD)AT&L’s Better Buying Power Initiative Compliance with statutory reporting, organizational and analytical requirements A service that shares acquisition information to leadership within an on-demand environment versus ad hoc briefings
Deliberate and perpetual use of agile methodologies	Requirements definition to delivery within 60 days Collaboration among all delivery teams produces a shared services mentality Ability to implement new information requirements consistently and quickly across all delivery teams and the Department Mitigate single points of failure through the inclusion of delivery teams in all efforts Achieve the ultimate goal of being responsive to the customer (USD(AT&L))

Strategic Perspective:  Acquisition Visibility was an effective means to provide structured, and eventually unstructured, acquisition data and reports to leadership and acquisition stakeholders.  Use of acquisition information – as a service – exploded  as DoD leadership realized the value of authoritative, reliable acquisition information to manage, oversee and support informed decision making on major acquisition expenditures.  Consequently, Acquisition Visibility’s vision and mission has adapted since its pilot/implementation phase to account for the USD(AT&L)’s data requirements and growing uses for acquisition information.  DoD leadership expects and requires timely, “ground truth” information regarding the acquisition portfolio, and Acquisition Visibility evolved into the service that provides it to them.  What was once organizationally consuming to manage (data), is now a real-time data service executed by strong governance and technical competency.  To implement this type of service, AV leadership needed a strategic information framework to manage acquisition information across the Department (Table 1).  This framework needed to identify data requirements, support both functional and technical processes, and posses the appropriate infrastructure to connect with acquisition leadership.  This framework needed to be agile with a focus on immediately – both effectively and efficiently – responding to acquisition leadership.

Functional Perspective:  Customers who use service providers rarely consider the processes or technical infrastructure needed to meet their requirements; they simply demand the service they request as expeditiously as possible.  A key component to Acquisition Visibility’s success is the delivery teams’ focus on end-users’ (customers) requirements for acquisition information.  Thus, the service provides the right information through functions that are easy to use while meeting leadership’s demands at the same time.  USD(AT&L) leadership ensures collaboration across organizational boundaries to obtain acquisition information.  This collaborative environment lets delivery teams not only understand the type of information end-users need, it also allows them to understand how end-users would like to obtain, access and see the data.  Governance and enterprise-level business process modeling (Table 2) streamlines and aligns business processes and rules across the Department to allow Acquisition Visibility to meet acquisition data requirements more effectively (Components maintain the flexibility to management their own internal data processes as appropriate).

Table 2
Action or Activity	Impact on Acquisition Management and the Acquisition Portfolio
Enterprise-level data governance	Data transparency and accountability for informed decision-making on acquisition programs The ability to access and obtain Component-managed data and infrastructure specifications Consistent and defined acquisition data for multiple uses across the Department A structure for working within a disparate and bureaucratic environment Identifies the authoritative sources of acquisition data and where they maintain the data
Adoption of business process modeling techniques	Consistent processes for working with acquisition portfolios across DoD Easily incorporates new stakeholders or acquisition information into the AV environment Scalable processes that account for the complexities of meeting unique data requirements Process clarity and cross-team integration by illustrating roles and activities across DoD

 

Table 3
Action or Activity	Impact on Acquisition Management and the Acquisition Portfolio
Use of SOA as the core of net-centricity	Creates a comprehensive, shared services environment with the ability to get acquisition information to leadership instantaneously Components transition at their own pace without sub optimizing processes and information reporting Less system-to-system / point-to-point coupling via an enterprise-wide information broker Leadership has single access to Component-managed data and infrastructure Avoids costly future integration efforts for data providers by streamlining data collection and dissemination
Focus on leveraging services and tools that already exist	Access to existing DoD infrastructure via enterprise messaging reducing hardware costs to OSD and Military Departments Lightweight and flexible information sharing that complies with Joint specifications Reduces network load across Component acquisition systems Minimizes re-training and work stoppages since Components spend less time implementing new services Ensure information exchange efficiencies as more data sources are consumed
Publish and subscribe approach	Unifies the Services and Component acquisition community with a federated information sharing approach that reduce costs and significantly improves timeliness and reliability Opportunities for more real-time data capabilities for information analysts/users and tools