Business Transformation at the Department of Defense
Dennis Wisnosky, CTO of the Department of Defense Business Mission Area talks about the process of transforming the world’s largest business from an "as-is" to a "to-be" state.
CIO — Dennis Wisnosky is chief technical officer of the Department of Defense (DoD) Business Mission Area within the office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation (OUSD (BT)). He is recognized as a creator of the Integrated Definition language, the standard for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement efforts. Wisnosky holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from California University of Pennsylvania, a master’s in management science from the University of Dayton, and a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. Writer Ben Bradley recently spoke with Wisnosky about his role and the process of moving the world’s largest business from "as-is" to a "to-be" state.
Ben Bradley: What is your role?
Dennis Wisnosky: I have two roles. As chief technical officer my job is to look over the horizon at transformational technologies. As chief architect, my role is oversight of the business enterprise architecture (BEA) and the netcentric architectures to which it federates within the Business Mission Area (BMA). These architectures define the corporate systems, processes, business infrastructure services, laws, rules, polices and data standards common to the DoD and related agencies.
How did you get here?
I worked for the Air Force on manufacturing architectures in the late 1970s, so I am familiar with what goes on here. After that, I went into the private sector and started my own company and wrote books about automation, business process reeingineering (BPR) and simplifying IT investments by improving architectures.
A few years ago, I sent some ideas to Donald Rumsfeld. That letter was forwarded to Paul Brinkley [Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation]. We met and agreed immediately on all the things that needed to be done and could be done. I joined as a contractor and about a year later, they made it official and asked if I would join the Department.
In the private sector, Paul Brinkley led one of the largest business transformation efforts in the technology industry sector. What approach is he using to staff the Business Transformation Agency (BTA)?
Before he was appointed to Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation, Brinkley transformed JDS Uniphase by migrating 40 acquired companies with nearly 30,000 worldwide employees onto common enterprisewide processes and technologies in less than two years. Now the task is even bigger. We’re teaching the world’s largest employer (1.6 million active duty personnel and 1 million reservists and 900,000 civilians) to manage and embrace a technology refresh every 18 months.
To do this, we’re operating at startup speed. Brinkley is using a hiring process more typical to Silicon Valley than the Pentagon: He is looking for highly qualified individuals from all walks of life and he is using every rule and role that he can to find to put the right people in the right roles. He is absolutely going out after the best and the brightest. He has a combination of young people with 10 and 15 years experience and some like me who have been around for a long-time.
