‘GovExec’ interview with Mr. Ross Guckert at AUSA 2023

“GovExec” Events Director George Jackson interviewed PEO EIS program executive officer Ross Guckert at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference on Oct. 10. The interview is transcribed below.

Give us some context. Talk about your role in the PEO. What is part of your expansive portfolio?
We recently moved two of our project managers (PMs) to other PEOs. We moved our enterprise network PM to PEO C3T and our defensive cyber PM to PEO IEW&S. The intent of the Army is to move everything “network” under one PEO and everything “cyber” under another PEO.

But we still remain a very large, and I think the most complex, portfolio in the Army with 37 acquisition programs. We changed our mission to make sure we deliver value in a rapid and iterative fashion. Every PEO’s mission should be about delivering capability. And we are on a journey to be a really world-class IT organization.

We are a critical enabler for just about every enterprise in the Army: finance; logistics; contracting; HR; military personnel and pay; tuition for civilians, Soldiers and cadets; and contract writing. We are a key enabler of just about every enterprise.

We can't continue to just sustain. We have to continuously modernize our systems. That means adopting best practices from industry. That means delivering an amazing user experience, making sure we are cyber hardened and creating efficiencies in automation to the greatest extent across our portfolio.

We are at full speed with our transformation: everything from how we contract to how we define our organization to how we do cost estimating to how we upskill and redefine technical services that support us.

Our across-the-board, wholesale Agile transformation has produced some amazing successes just over the past 10 months, starting with IPPS-A, the integrated personnel pay system for the Army — we pushed that out last November to 1.2 million Soldiers creating the largest PeopleSoft instantiation in the world.

In July, we pushed out an Army Contract Writing System minimum viable product — that’s the program’s first time delivering capability after years of development.

In August, we pushed out ArmyIgnitEd’s full capability less than 15 months after we inherited that program, which delivers tuition for Soldiers, civilians and cadets.

Finally, just last week, we pushed out Accessions Information Environment, the software preview of that will be a critical enabler as the Army addresses its recruiting crisis.

We also put the Enterprise Business Systems – Convergence program on a great glide path. We awarded our prototypes this past August and are starting the prototype phase — setting us up to push out that first increment in fiscal year 2025.

I am really excited about the transformation and progress to date.

It may be obvious. Moving to one PEO — what are the bigger-picture mission objectives there? Is it speed? Is it visibility? Is it consistency? Is it all of the above?
It's all of the above. When you look at the network, it's about being unified. PEO C3T had the tactical piece of the network. I had the enterprise piece. Two separate PEOs. By putting them under one PEO, you really are a forcing function to get to a unified, integrated, seamless network — from the foxhole all the way back to the enterprise.  

We are here at AUSA, the Army's annual conference in Washington DC. A big focus for you and your colleagues is Army 2030. Can you talk a bit about how that factors into your larger mission objectives and this concept of multi-domain operations (MDO) ready forces?
I am excited about the progress we have made. It's not just pockets of excellence. We have had successes across our portfolio. To that end, we have put the tools and processes in place to make sure we deliver rapid capability in a responsive fashion to the warfighters. We are also able to adapt and change on the fly to make sure Soldiers have what they need when they need it.

Our enterprise services, Enterprise Resource Planning systems and business systems are key enablers for that MDO fight. A great example is disconnected operations. In a disconnected, intermittent or limited (DIL) environment, Soldiers are still able to do logistics, planning and readiness. And when the network reestablishes, that's transparent to the user. It's in the background so it allows the Soldier to stay focused on the fight. That combined with the convergence that I talked about (and the efficiencies in the automation that we'll get from convergence) really gives time back to the Soldier to focus on multi-domain operations.

Talk about the role of data. It seems like it is coming through nearly everything that you are talking about. Am I reading that right?
Absolutely. The right data at the right time to the right leader is a game changer. It really means decision dominance. And it's a weapons system. It's ammunition. The Secretary of the Army has endorsed it as one of her priorities.

You've heard other leaders talk about liberating the data. It's also about managing the vast amounts of data, understanding what data needs to go where and understanding that the data is visible, accessible, understandable, trusted, interoperable and secure (VAUTIS).

The unified data reference architecture that we are developing with ASA(ALT) is going to be a key enabler to make sure data is discoverable, accessible, federated, distributed and accessible in a data-mesh type of construct. That combined with what’s called Enterprise Data Services Catalog — where the data owners catalog, curate and standardize their data and data products — that framework really gets us delivering the right capability at the right time to the right leaders. And it doesn't bog down the network because it's federated and distributed. It creates that unfair fight.

And we have an Army Data Platform program. The Vantage program has been an amazing tool for data analytics and visualization. And it's proven itself, example after example, whether it's managing the Afghan withdrawal, doing weapons systems accountability, Soldier risk, unit readiness and unliquidated obligations (putting a billion dollars back in the Army coffers), it’s a very powerful tool. Over 130 authoritative sources come into the Vantage program, but that's going to be a really critical element of that unified data reference architecture as that matures over time. We are really excited to see how that's going to play out working with our ASA(ALT) partners.

I'd love to stay on that architecture point just for a second. As you map this future for data, and I'm informed by a conversation I had yesterday with Lt. Gen. Morrison around his push for a unified network, has it started to change the way the IT infrastructure is built — the elements that go into it? Are there pieces in there that weren't there before?
From a network perspective, they are doing everything from modernizing the camps, posts and stations with servers, routers and copper-to-fiber. They are doing Secret Internet Protocol Router (SIPR) modernization — regionalizing a SIPR capability across the Army from, like I said, the foxhole to the enterprise, doing voice modernization taking hard clients off the tables and replacing those with soft clients. That combined with a unified architecture for the network will create a very powerful capability that makes sure that data gets to the tactical edge where it needs to, when it needs to get to the right leaders.

Ross, you are a huge proponent of Agile methodology. Could you tell me why and what that's required culturally from your workforce to really bring that into the next phase?
It’s been really important to address the culture upfront. We made a wholesale change from waterfall to Agile. We changed our mission to: “deliver rapid value to our customers in an iterative fashion.”

And those quick wins I talked about were really, really important. As part of our transformation, we mapped out a number of lines of effort, and I manage those very aggressively every month with my leaders.

We upskilled the workforce. We created an aggressive strategic communications program.

We worked very closely with our functionals to make sure they understand their role —everything from how they write the requirement to how they do business process reengineering and how they manage and prioritize the backlog. Functionals are integrated on our teams and help us define “done” every time we push capability out.

Organizational change management gets the users ready to receive a capability before we deploy it.

In the time we have left, I’d like you to give a little advice to your colleagues in the Department of Defense around this future of innovation, this future of supporting the warfighter. What should they be focused on right now? What should their industry partners be focused on right now?
I would tell them to be flexible, agile and collaborative. I would tell them to get buy in. Chart out their journey and get those quick wins. Train their functional and make sure their functional understands their roles. Upskill their workforce. Get the skill sets in the workforce that they need to execute that Agile process. And, most importantly, team with industry. I can't say enough how much industry has brought to our portfolio from an innovation and contracting perspective.

We are reinventing how we do contracting. We have great models in what we look for in industry. We try before we buy. We look at how they do a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, how they do human-centered design, how they move data from one system to another and how they do the Agile process. We measure that and prototype that before we bring them into production. It's a very powerful tool and it's worked very well for us.