ORION
What is it'
ORION is a ecosystem of private, protected web-enabled professional forums for senior leaders in the Army's generating force. This initiative leverages the benefits of collaborative technologies in support of our senior leader forums and decision-making processes. Developed within milSuite, a collection of secure online tools that promote workforce collaboration across the Department of Defense, <a href="https://orion.army.mil" target="_blank">ORION</a> provides a common, virtual workspace for leaders to interact on decisions, create and access shared documents, and share ideas around core activities and emerging initiatives. ORION provides the ability to establish private sub-communities, where members of varied synchronization and governance forums, staff groups, special task forces or tiger teams can easily connect and collaborate within their team space, and as applicable, horizontally across organizational boundaries.
What has the Army done'
ORION is currently being developed as a Chief Management Officer initiative through a partnership with the Chief Information Office (CIO)/G6, Office of Business Transformation (OBT), Vice Director of the Army Staff (VDAS), and Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO-C3T). Launched late in 2010, ORION Beta is used by the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Strategy Implementation Team, the Business Systems Information Technology Executive Steering Group, other OBT-facilitated initiatives, and most recently supported the Chief of Staff of the Army Transition Team.
What continued efforts does the Army have planned for the future'
<a href="https://orion.army.mil" target="_blank">ORION</a> is envisioned as a virtual workspace for Army generating force leaders that is seamlessly integrated with business operations. To facilitate this business transformation, OBT and CIO/G6 are co-sponsoring monthly knowledge management (KM) forums to establish a HQDA KM community of practice, promote the use of collaborative technologies and share lessons learned. Additionally, OBT and VDAS are conducting a review of senior leader forums with a partial objective of identifying forums in which collaborative technology can be used to replace some meetings, while making others more efficient and effective. The long term vision for ORION includes all applicable senior leader forums within the generating force having a shared private, virtual forum that supports ongoing collaboration and decision making.
Why is this important for the Army'
ORION enables simplified collaboration and greater efficiencies in arriving at informed decisions. Currently, the predominant ways that leaders in the generating force collaborate and make decisions are face-to-face meetings and email distribution. As we all experience on a daily basis, email is not an efficient collaboration tool, often requiring team members to sort through multiple "replies to all" and manage numerous drafts of the same document. And, face to face meetings are often difficult to arrange in a timely manner when aligning already overly-committed calendars. Furthermore, because leaders rotate through assignments, there is often insight about a key decision that resides in the organization but is not present in the room. To help overcome some of these challenges, ORION provides a common collaboration space that reduces primary dependency on mass email distribution and frequent face-to-face meetings to coordinate effort, develop and refine issues, and make decisions. Over time, ORION will serve as a dynamic knowledge repository around the body of a leadership team's work that can be readily accessed to support future decisions and onboard new team members.
Resources:
<a href="https://orion.army.mil" target="_blank">ORION</a>
<a href="https://www.milsuite.mil" target="_blank">MilSuite </a>
<a href="http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2011/02/25/" target="_blank"> STAND-TO! edition: Feb. 24, 2011 MilSuite</a>
For more information or interest <a href="mailto: orion.team@us.army.mil" target="_blank"> email </a> the ORION team.
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