The Navy is killing its most promising talent management initiatives through inaction, bureaucracy, and a nonexistent implementation strategy. To blame are the Navy’s antiquated software approval processes, a manpower and personnel transformation initiative that has proven to be anything but transformational, and a lack of engaged leadership to provide insightful guidance on how approved pilot programs are deployed and scaled. To right the ship, the Navy must reexamine its talent management processes and provide an avenue for its ready-to-deploy pilot programs. It must immediately identify what talent management initiatives are ready-to-implement platforms versus ready-to-brief concepts—and determine acceleration strategies for all. Finally, it must reevaluate its cloud computing and software certification processes to fall in line with the Office of the Secretary of Defense Software Development Guidance, to accelerate innovation. Failure to do so leaves its most important weapon system, its people, further behind in their professional growth.
The principle focus for Navy talent management initiatives is the integration of modern software systems for strategic placement and development of its personnel. This modernization effort is absolutely critical. The Navy currently manages its personnel through more than 50 different legacy systems, most of which do not communicate with each other. Its primary job placement, or “detailing” tool, is a DOS-based system so archaic that it precludes the use of a computer mouse. While this may seem a simple fix with today’s technological advances, the unfortunate truth is that designing, developing, and implementing modern management software is not something the Navy is well positioned to do. Here’s why.
The Department of the Navy’s platform IT guidance is the text-book story of how bureaucracy and parochial middle management stymie innovation. It is frustrating for designers, developers, acquisition professionals, and warfighters because the Navy’s approval process structure is the antithesis of commercial software design methodology. Where unflexing process meets innovation, friction is inevitable. Herein lies the rub.
When beginning to create commercial software for organizations, designers look to first understand their end-users. Using design-thinking frameworks they build software archetypes, or personas, that represent how customers might use the platform. Mapping out potential pain points and needs, core features are designed to meet user needs. But this is only a starting point. To understand how people actually will use the software, a minimal viable product (MVP) is usually piloted to a smaller subset of users, which allows learning to occur without widespread disruption of the current ecosystem. The idea is to live test without rocking the whole boat. Understanding the enhancements or integration issues thus found, the development team can learn and spirally iterate. While this process seems obvious to industry, the Navy approvals process for software does not align with this agile development framework.
Agile development, the process of learning, designing, and refining as end-users use the product, is key to creating a system people want. Rapid iteration ensures efficient use of time and resources to create software that solves human-centered problems. While new Pentagon-led acquisition authorities are allowing more agile development strategies, the Department of the Navy has yet to revise its downstream process approvals to integrate and accelerate their use. The consequence of this lack of integration, sadly, is killing many Navy pilot programs.
To address this issue, the Navy’s IT Risk Management Framework, designed to validate cyber security controls for IT systems, should take its cues from the Air Force’s Kessel Run project. Kessel Run has a validated cybersecurity process that enables every project and new software update to be immediately fielded to end-users. In contrast, the Navy requires each individual product to burn months trying to achieve validation for initial launch. Worse, Navy software reenters the queue for changes, which is the death of agile development. This process is not efficient or cost effective, and it does not serves warfighters. Even more concerning is that the Navy’s process is redundant to the U.S. Department of Defense certification process. To use Defense Information System Agency-approved cloud platforms, Navy pilot programs still need to route through the Navy’s approval process. This means the Navy recertifies a Department of Defense-certified cloud platform. This happens despite no new measures implemented and unchanged security controls.
Ultimately, restrictive processes such as these prevent efficiencies in deploying software systems across the Department of Defense. This issue is indicative of a wider Navy paradigm in which each lower echelon implements a more stringent set of rules theoretically to mitigate perceived risk. For example, the recertification of a certified platform. The net result is that innovation gets strangled and risk incentivization remains misaligned with warfighter needs. This risk-averse culture is seen in many areas of the service, though easily exemplified in the software approval process.
A vignette of how this process currently is failing a ready-to-implement pilot program is the story of the Jetstream Detailing Marketplace. Three years ago, with assistance from the Defense Innovation Unit, the Navy explosive ordnance disposal community embarked on a journey to build a modern talent management system. Using a San Francisco based design firm, it mapped its community’s experience and talent assignment requirements through an extensive design-thinking process and developed a prototype system. This design process built a platform derived directly from consistent engagement and identified needs of sailors, detailers, placement officers, and Navy leaders. It is the foundation for a data-driven talent management solution on par with the best that Silicon Valley has to offer. The platform also is a proving ground for an algorithm skills/job matching solution that leverages data to provide personnel placement recommendations. This matching algorithm, developed by another group of innovative naval officers (who adeptly brought focus to talent management problems in the first place: WOTR: Good Will Hunting Problem) is waiting for pilot programs such as Jetstream to deploy. Without a powerful, data-rich software platform, impressive talent-matching algorithms have nowhere to be implemented.
Currently, the Jetstream platform is configured, the minimum viable product is ready, end-users have tested it and have login licenses, and the pilot is sitting in a Pentagon-approved cloud waiting to be used. The only hold-up: the Navy has yet to approve it for use.
Meanwhile, developer contracts and licensing fees are languishing and taxpayer money is burning. A product that could have been fielded in August 2019 now is penciled in for November, at best. Adding insult to injury, the platform is being held in purgatory by the Navy’s IT approval process, despite the system being designed on an already approved Department of Defense cloud computing platform as a service (PaaS), Salesforce.com. This partially a result of the previously mentioned redundancies, but also because these processes subject modern cloud programs to certification analysis created for legacy hardware requirements. Like other pilot programs across the Navy, redesigned platforms that optimize user interfaces but do not compromise underlying security features are being held in limbo. Meanwhile, the Navy continues to manage its talent with one-off excel spreadsheets, Post-it notes, and white boards. This is not hyperbole. This is the current status-quo.
In the absence of piloting available solutions, the Navy details its most important asset, its people, through a DOS-based computer system from the early 1990s. While the corporate world invests in human resource software with artificial intelligence capabilities, the Navy continues to use a software system from an era best known for its signature game, The Oregon Trail. The result is an overtaxed human resourcing staff and detailers that resort to ad-hoc, inefficient solutions. It is unsurprising that the Navy has a talent management crisis.
Navy transformation initiatives need a better process for evaluating, supporting, and accelerating pilot programs. Many of these projects are funded by warfare communities in desperate need of a solution, but left languishing in various states of maturity. Today, in the talent management portfolio, there exist both platform-ready pilots and concept-strategy pilots. It is time to separate wheat from chaff. Powerpoint concepts are not pilot-ready platforms. The two categories need to be evaluated independently, and the Navy needs a process for accelerating projects that are ready to test, iterate, and mature. It also needs to assist innovative platforms across the chasm of seemingly unending bureaucracy. Failing to test and evaluate bought-and-paid-for pilots ensures that time, money, and resources are wasted.
If the Department of the Navy is serious about modernization and incentivizing private industry to provide a much-needed overhaul of its grossly archaic systems; it must pay more than lip service to its string of approved pilot programs. The ground truth is, the Navy’s transformation and talent management initiatives don’t have a problem with innovation—they have a problem with development and implementation.
The views expressed here are the authors’ own and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, the Navy, or the Defense Innovation Unit.
