MilTech supports virtual workforce while transitioning to new home at PEO EIS

October 1, 2020 may be just another standard work day for the Military Technical Solutions (MilTech) team based at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, but it’s the official day when the program becomes solely operated and supported by PEO EIS.

Known largely for providing information management and knowledge management solutions to Army and DOD organizations, MilTech supports over 1.5 million users, including active/reserve military, DOD civilians and approved contractors from every DOD service.

As directed by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)) last November, MilTech began its transition from PEO Command, Control, and Communications – Tactical (PEO C3T) to PEO EIS’s Enterprise Computing product office at the start of 2020. A few weeks before PEO EIS was scheduled to assume operational management of MilTech on April 1, COVID-19 forced the PEO and other federal government offices to shift to a telework environment. For the MilTech transition team, however, this wasn’t a huge challenge.

“COVID-19 didn’t really impact our productivity,” said Tom Curran, product lead for MilTech. “We’re a pretty technical group, so we’re accustomed to telework and efficient at it.”

In the initial weeks of the PEO’s transition to telework, MilTech provided extensive support to the newly virtual acquisition workforce. MilTech’s CIO/G6-funded milSuite application — a secure information and collaboration hub where users can learn and share knowledge (via milUniversity and milWiki), connect and collaborate (milBook), post and watch videos (milTube), and create and distribute surveys (milSurvey) — experienced a huge surge in traffic. The most popular uses of milSuite were for creating online virtual classrooms, uploading videos and collaborating with teams, according to Curran.

Additionally, MilTech found an increased interest in the capabilities it offers to the 11 members of its Knowledge Management Consortium, a shared technology and knowledge management investment pool, perhaps best known for its SharePoint offering. During the pandemic, three consortium members — including ASA(ALT) and PEO EIS — were on-boarded to MilTech’s Manpower Information Retrieval and Reporting System (MIRARS), which was updated to support new telework and contact tracing options.

Prior to the rollout of the DOD’s commercial virtual remote (CVR) environment, MilTech’s teleconferencing services experienced a 400+ percent increase in use by consortium members. MilTech staff also created a milWiki entitled the “DoD Guide to Virtual Work,” outlining all known telework tools across the DoD, and the “MilTech Solutions Guide to Virtual Work” tailored to consortium members. This education campaign was time-consuming but necessary, according to Dan Hamilton, assistant program manager for MilTech.

“Many people aren’t familiar with MilTech and were surprised at the depth and breadth of the things we do,” he said. “Everyone thinks we just do SharePoint; we do way more than that.”

PEO EIS staff members involved with the integration of MilTech are active users of its solutions. By creating a community of practice in milBook, the transition team has been able to share virtual documents and capture notes, linking to a SharePoint site where the documents can be edited in real-time. The DOD Board on Diversity and Inclusion is also an active milBook user and is currently crowdsourcing ideas on those topics by October 16. This specific milSuite effort was announced by the U.S. Secretary of Defense via Twitter.

Looking ahead to fiscal year 2021, MilTech has identified a couple of key priorities. First, they are planning to start the migration of SharePoint from an on premise “brick and mortar” facility to a commercial cloud service. The program also plans to divest its Green Forest Tracker (GFT), an online collaboration tool providing real-time secure instant messaging, due to its replacement by Microsoft Teams. This divestiture will reduce the cost of consortium membership, according to Curran.

To learn more about MilTech Solutions, visit https://www.milsuite.mil/wiki/Product_Lead_Military_Technical_Solutions. To access and learn more about milSuite, visit https://www.milsuite.mil.