When the U.S. Navy was formed, in the age of iron men and wooden ships, human muscle power was the limiting factor in everything it did. This changed on 8 March 1862, when the USS Monitor ushered in chemistry and physics as the primary drivers of the Navy’s organizational culture. It changed again with the work of Admiral Grace Hopper, when the service began moving to the world of digital information systems.
That last change is driving a revolution in the Navy’s management systems that mirrors what is happening in U.S. society as a whole. Many businesses are moving from a value-creation model that does things to a value-creation model built around digital information systems that guides the organization to do things. Retail firms, for example, have moved from being organizations that sell retail goods to being information systems organizations that sell retail goods.
Following suit, the Navy is becoming an information systems organization that controls the seas and projects forces ashore. Its shore infrastructure system (SIS) is becoming an information systems organization that plans, builds, maintains, and manages the shore infrastructure to support the fleet.
To support the fleet’s future needs, the SIS will have to become a master of digital information systems. Of the three systems important to the Navy—information technology (IT), using digital communications to connect people; operational technology (OT), using digital communications to connect infrastructure; and weapons technology (WT), using digital communications to connect weapon systems—the SIS must be a master of two: IT and OT. These technologies are the backbone of the SIS management systems that provide fleet support.
But change is occurring rapidly. Can the SIS keep up? Does it have the IT and OT systems in place that will ensure it has adequate facilities and capacity to support the fleet?
As it becomes an information and operations systems organization, the SIS must adapt its organizational culture, personnel systems, and business processes. Its people will need more training, a better understanding of big data and analytics, and the ability to turn data into the actionable information that policymakers need to make decisions. The SIS spends significant resources collecting data, but if it cannot separate what is important from what is merely background noise, those resources are wasted.
The biggest change may be to organizational culture, from reactive to proactive. Fixing something that breaks is far more expensive than preventing the breakage. The dollar the SIS does not have to spend because proper planning and maintenance prevented a problem may be the best reason for embracing this new world of information-driven organizations.
The future of warfare—in logistics as well as tactics—is information dominance. The SIS and its asset management team must adapt now to become an information and operations systems organization. They should take the best of the private sector and tailor it to military realities to become world-class managers of assets.
There are three major issues the SIS must address:
• Determine what decisions need to be made at what level. The Navy has a long history of pushing authority and responsibility down the chain of command, trusting its skippers to sail ships through rough seas and for months on end without oversight from higher leadership. Those captains have muscle memory from decades of experience making decisions with expert precision. They are trusted for a reason.
• Address the quality of information. The more information that is demanded from naval bases, the more SIS senior leaders need to ensure the people at the bases have the education, training, manning, and understanding of the requirements to develop that information.
• Make sure the information, data, and analytics deliver the required message to decision-makers. Infrastructure maintenance is not glamorous, but it is critical to minimizing long-term costs and ensuring mission support is there when needed.