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Transforming Global Force Information Management Technology Across the Total Army: A Leadership Update

By Francis Frank O'BrienOctober 4, 2023

ARLINGTON, Va. -- U.S. Army Strategic Operations Enterprise Division Chief and Capability Management Officer (CMO) Lori Mongold and Deputy Division Chief Andrew St. Laurent recently sat down for an interview with the Army War College’s “War Room” podcast to provide an update on the Secretary of the Army’s number one defense business system priority. In a segment titled “How Should the Army Run,” these leaders addressed the ongoing transformation of the Army’s Global Force Management (GFM) capabilities and how it will enable a truly data-centric fighting force. A central component in achieving this goal, as they explain, will be the upcoming deployment of the Global Force Information Management Objective Environment (GFIM OE), a new warfighter-focused software capability set to deploy later next year. The podcast is available at: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/podcasts/gfim/.

(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

You and your team are leading this change to modernize the Army enterprise. What’s the current state of these force management information systems?

Lori Mongold: We’ve moved from more of a non-kinetic realm to a kinetic fight, but we haven’t changed our business processes. For 30 years, we’ve been doing business the same way. If you want to adjust the way you fight, get ahead of your adversary, you’ve got to change the way you do business. Looking across the Army at the antiquated systems that support our ability to do that today…getting rid of them and bringing in new emerging and disruptive technology will facilitate action officers and stakeholders across the Army to do their jobs better. GFIM will make their jobs more like an analyst. Users of the data will have the ability to give our senior leaders the space to make decisions rather than be data entry clerks or cobbling together spreadsheets. The capability to be able to determine having the right people at the right place at the right time for the right mission - it’s very exciting.

What kind of decisions do the current systems enable?

Andrew St. Laurent: From my time in uniform in using these force management systems in combat and in humanitarian missions along with at the strategic and tactical levels, I saw firsthand the pain points. We have 15 disparate systems for global force management. They don’t talk to each other. They’re not in the cloud. As a force manager or a CP26 (U.S. Army Manpower and Force Management Civilian Career Person) out in the field or an analyst of any kind, you’re going to be able to use GFIM to determine force requirements. The folks who are going to need GFIM to train the force and mobilize, deploy, employ, and redeploy the force.

If I need a new multi-domain task force your new system will combine force management and force design?

Andy St. Laurent: It absolutely does. One of the greatest examples in my experience was Operation United Assistance where we eradicated Ebola in Africa with the 101st Airborne. For that mission, we were standing up a new capability that had never been done before. I had to rely on systems that didn’t have the correct information or wasn’t 100% accurate. I was constantly calling back to the Pentagon and asking: ‘Hey, help please. What is the ground truth? Can you help us get the equipment? Can you steer us in the right way for the right force structure?’ From the time we were notified until the time we left it was two weeks. We didn’t have a lot of time. The 15 different systems made it almost impossible.

Lori Mongold: For the 15 current systems, 55% of the missions, tasks and activities that folks have to do to be able to design a force and then get that force trained and ready for mobilization, deployment and employment activities is not even done in those systems. Those are swivel chair activities. That’s what we mean when we talk about an end-to-end business process and re-engineering those processes to examine ‘Are we doing the things we need to do?’ and then bring in automation to enable us to do it better.

‘Swivel chair’ activities – Is that an example of the action officer pulling information from one system, putting it in a spreadsheet, maybe entering it in another system to get another output and then putting it in another spreadsheet and eventually making some kind of PowerPoint chart that the general can look at and say, ‘good job?’ Is that what you’re talking about?

Lori Mongold: Absolutely! Here’s a perfect example: let’s just take the designing the force. We’re going into a command plan cycle. We know the force that we want to develop. An organizational integrator sitting in the Army G3 will be able to go in and program that force inside of one system. And they can only have one position at a time. They think that this is the force that they’re going to have. This is the type of structure that we believe the Army needs and we’re going to go to Congress and ask them for money to pay for that structure so that we can then go out, recruit, build equipment, get equipment delivered and actually build that structure.

Organizational integrators put that structure into a system and then there’s another whole entity that must codify the details of that structure inside our requirements and authorization documents. Those two systems - they don’t even talk. (To reconcile them) you need to do the next step in a work process. Somebody is going to print out a spreadsheet and e-mail it to you so you can build the Army. You can see there’s a lot of opportunities for human error and delays. We need to increase our ability to turn around Army decisions quicker…the systems don’t give us…flexibility or agility to do that. Time is not our friend.

Andrew St. Laurent: Sometimes our legacy systems were built on the classified side out of convenience. There was no rhyme or reason to it. What happens is you’re out in the field and you have to request forces, equipment, but you don’t have any classified network to do it in even though the information is unclassified most of the time. That was a sticking point. Even if we did have the right systems, we had to have 15 different logins, 15 user roles and permissions, to do what GFIM will do with one log in, one system, one cross-domain solution. Through GFIM, I can go from a classified setting to unclassified and back and forth depending on my requirements. Imagine the capability of that when you’re in an austere environment. It’s a combat multiplier in and of itself.

It sounds like you’re just trying to do what is easy today in most other systems. Why is this hard for the Army? Why haven’t we done it already? Why do we need this large transformation effort?

Lori Mongold: The Army has recently delivered updated personnel, pay and logistics systems, but nobody has spent the time to look at the underpinning of authoritative data that gives leaders that demand signal to man, equip, train, and resource an Army. It’s hard. Our force is so large and all the rules and policies for the Army we need versus the Army we can afford, versus the Army we can man, versus the Army we can equip, versus the Army we can train and have ready. We’ve never been able to compare those variables to each other in parallel. We’ve just done our best guess. Okay, here’s the Army that we think we need based upon the information that we could cobble together. Here’s the Army we’re going to go ask for and then the policies and the processes have been so bureaucratic that you are stuck with that decision.

There’s no agility built into the processes or systems to give leaders the opportunity to make decisions when new information becomes available; to capitalize on information advantage. That’s one of the things that has held us back. Technologies can allow for that. We’ve spent a lot of time investing resources into the warfight when the demand signal and the authoritative data is generated from the business side to inform our ability to do the warfight. The warfight is informing our ability to do business, but we’ve never brought the two together to reconcile that position.

Andrew St. Laurent: We started the sprints 18 months ago. The force management community went from “heck no, we’re not doing this” to “I’m all about it. How can I help? I want to be a part of this transformation.” It’s been wonderful. We’re using agile methodology for software development to go through the iterations and give the community something they want. We’re bringing them along. Cultural change takes time, but we’re getting there.

Does it work right now? Where are we in the implementation of the GFIM OE?

Lori Mongold: We are delivering GFIM underneath the adaptive acquisition framework. This is one of the first applications within the Defense Business System Mission Area that has gone through that framework. It gives us the ability to do different types of contracts to deliver capabilities and agile methodologies. It gives us way more flexibility with our industry partners, so we get to sit down and have more conversations. Gone are the days of developing a requirement, throwing it over the fence and waiting for 7-10 years for something to be delivered and by the time it arrives it’s obsolete.

We’re going through a six-month rearchitecture from a software business solution putting this application inside cArmy which is the Army’s cloud. We operate underneath the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency and the Army CIO and we’re integrating that transactional capability with a data and an analytical layer. We expect a production-ready capability later in FY24. The entire GFIM application will be production ready no later than 2025. It’s not just the Army G3 that’s all in. GFIM is the Secretary of the Army’s number one business priority currently right now.

Andy St. Laurent: We lean forward to prioritize what we need built first to get the maximum amount of capabilitie

s out soonest. We can’t have everything we want right now, but we have prioritized for the requirements to maximize what we can do in the next 18 months… bring in the innovation from industry on our problems.

I’ll give each of you last word if you’d like before we end the podcast.

Lori Mongold: I just got a new granddaughter and every time I go forward to do things, I’m thinking – everything we do on a daily basis is going to leave behind a better Army to protect and defend our Nation so my grandchildren will see a completely different Army, a completely different Nation. They’ll be able to feel safer because of the work we do here. It feels good to be part of that.

Andy St. Laurent: Living it from an operator perspective in combat, in humanitarian missions and of course at the Pentagon and places in between…I believe in this transformational approach. It will make the Army better in terms of global force management but also the data and the capabilities that are resident in GFIM will enable our personnelists or acquisitionists to do a better job. Throughout the end-to-end business processes, GFIM will help enable the Army leaders and combatant commanders to be able to make better decisions, because they can see the Army’s force structure positions both now and in the future in real time. It’s a powerful initiative and I’m honored to be a part of it. Thanks for having us today.

Lori Mongold currently serves as the Division Chief for the Strategic Operations Enterprise Division (DAMO-SOE) on the Army Staff, which is leading the service’s global force management transformation effort. Through her innovative efforts, the Army’s global force management processes will move from the industrial to cognitive era. Ms. Mongold has over 30 years of experience supporting Army program management, global force management, and readiness initiatives at the Pentagon, Joint Force headquarters, and Army Reserve.

Andrew St. Laurent currently serves as the Deputy Division Chief for DAMO-SOE. He previously served as Deputy Product Lead for Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems, Branch Chief for the Army Requirements Oversight Council at HQDA G8, and the Force Structure Division Chief at Army Cyber Command. Andy has deployed in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.