WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Aug. 4, 2009) -- The Army's new Enterprise Task Force held its first engagement with business leaders July 23-24, by hosting 20 industry and academic leaders from Kentucky at the Pentagon and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
This first engagement, and the one to follow in late September when Army leaders will visit corporations in Kentucky, focuses on providing the managers of Army core enterprises with insights into enterprise management principles.
Secretary of the Army Pete Geren and Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. chartered the ETF to lead the adaptation of Army culture, organizations, and processes so that leaders take a holistic approach to running the Army. With this in mind, Army senior leaders are reaching out to look for innovative ways to solve strategic problems.
Lt. Gen. Robert Durbin, director of the Enterprise Task Force, told the group from Kentucky's Fourth Congressional District that the Army faces many challenges due to a complex strategic environment and the persistent demand for forces. In order to respond to these demands, the Army must adapt, especially in how it generates and supports forces, how requirements are determined and how resources are allocated.
"Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before," Durbin said, quoting Bill Gates.
Some of the work of Durbin's task force's is already underway. In January, Secretary Geren signed a memorandum that formally established Institutional Adaptation as a component of Army transformation. In response to this, the Army has aligned functionally into four core enterprises representing the building blocks of Army Force Generation or ARFORGEN. They are: Human Capital, Materiel, Readiness, and Services & Infrastructure.
"Their outputs are inputs into ARFORGEN", Durbin said about the core enterprises. Each core enterprise focuses on its primary function and major activities are coordinated through synchronization boards.
The Army is working within each core enterprise and across the entire Army enterprise to develop partnerships that yield more effective and efficient results. "Which directly translates to a lighter load for our Soldiers and families," Durbin added.
"We must take a good, hard, and honest look at our current processes and develop ways to more effectively and more efficiently serve our Soldiers, their families, and our country," Durbin said.
Durbin told the delegation his hope was for Army leadership to learn from them and hopefully they will take something away with them that will give them a better understanding of the Army and possibly help them with their business endeavors.
The general explained to the group that institutional adaptation, as a component of the Army's transformation, is the Army's holistic approach to improve how it trains, equips, and deploys Soldiers, executes decision-making processes, and empowers its leadership to pilot the Army's efforts. He said this is not a regional or functional change but rather an institutional change where success depends on an immense cultural change.
"Our job is to facilitate change by helping to transform the Army's current business practices to its strategic environment," said Durbin. He told them that the Army is working to empower and leverage senior, civilian, and military leadership to adopt an enterprise approach, and conduct organizational analyses and suggest institutional designs which help to reform resource processes.
(Lt. Col. Brodrick Bailey serves with the Army's Enterprise Task Force.)
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