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Increasing military collaboration and productivity with a modern digital workplace

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As recently as a decade ago, many people in the military did not have mobile phones, and even if they did, the phones were used only for telephone calls. Personal computers (PCs) at home were also fairly limited in speed and functionality, while devices at work were considerably more capable.

Today, like everyone else, the military must operate in our always-on, always-connected world. Not only are the devices we personally own and carry incredibly powerful, but they provide immediate access to a wealth of information and everyday features such as email, applications and a camera. As new generations of increasingly tech-savvy users join the workforce, they also demand to communicate through the most modern applications and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

Indeed, modern enterprises — the military included — cannot ignore the needs of their new hires. Enterprises know that engaged employees, loyalty and staff retention ultimately lead to greater productivity and cost savings. However, this means that employers must understand and accommodate the demands of their staff.

Mobility, personal devices, the cloud and all they enable — access to real-time data, cross-agency collaboration and anytime/anywhere productivity — represent the next frontier in innovation, growth and competitiveness. To do more — and innovate — with less, defense agencies must turn to increasingly mature and robust cloud services and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products to gain greater levels of flexibility, manageability and agility to better meet a range of priorities and demands.

Let’s look at the role these new workplace and mobility technologies play in defining how modern collaboration can support the critical requirements of defense forces while meeting today’s mobility, data and security challenges.

With an intensified drive toward cost savings and doing more with less, military organizations and their partners are looking for ever-increasing productivity from IT. The ability of military planners to deliver critical information on the go to the soldier has become more important than ever as defense agencies operate in an environment of sequestration and highly uncertain budgets. This paper points out how modern workplace technology — especially for communications and collaboration — makes military organizations more efficient and helps them compete for talent with the different military branches and private business.

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Communications are essential

We are all familiar with the activities of the military from a very young age, even if we have never been part of its ranks. We know that the presence or absence of reliable communications can make or break a mission. From the communications between field personnel, to the video link back home to a strategist or politician, to the emails carrying orders, clear communications play an essential role.

Yet, not surprisingly, providing communication and collaboration services to the military and its supply chain partners presents challenges. Public sector organizations are often constrained by budget, time, aging infrastructure and bureaucracy, which can make delivering services difficult. The differing characteristics of the Army, Navy and Air Force also mean that working with a simple industry template is not possible.

Security brings its own separate challenges. Data at rest and in transit must be secure and encrypted. It must be kept, as much as possible, within the territorial limits of the host nation. In addition, for the security of the nation, defense forces generally require any third-party employees interacting with the provisioning of communication and collaboration services to be country nationals and local residents.

Military organizations tend to be siloed in both structure and culture. This inevitably leads to fragmented and incompatible communication and collaboration solutions that frustrate rather than enhance teamwork.

However, there is great potential to overcome these trends, since new mobile technologies offer enhanced opportunities to communicate and collaborate. In turn, this should lead to greater productivity and cost savings.

Supporting mission objectives

The No. 1 priority of defense leaders and their teams is sustainable peace in conflict areas. But what are the high-level requirements to support this objective?

Ultimately, military organizations and their partners seek to understand situations more quickly and respond more rapidly in the face of conflict, major disasters and threats to safety, whether natural or man-made. These organizations must analyze vast amounts of data to make better-informed decisions and identify and communicate speedily with experts and partners to help complete projects.

Equally important, personnel must achieve these goals at any time and in any place through properly equipped platforms, both mobile and fixed.

In deploying solutions, it is imperative to understand the people who use them — an area that is often overlooked. A lack of understanding of users, their level of experience and their training inevitably leads to slow adoption rates and poor technology utilization.

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Requirements focus

Military requirements for communication and collaboration are not dissimilar to many commercial organizations. Better communication and collaboration internally and inter-agency lead to greater information sharing, productivity and cost reductions.

To understand the military’s communication and collaboration requirements, we can assess needs in five key categories:

Business intelligence. Insights and analytics tools can enable rapid decision making and mitigate threats. Data visualization can provide accurate and up-to-the-minute views of impending situations, as well as an understanding of the exact location, capacity and status of national and allied land, air and naval forces.

Social collaboration. COTS collaboration tools can enable more efficient joint operations, interoperability and real cooperation among frontline forces, command center personnel, and intra- and inter-agency groups to achieve mission objectives.

Enterprise mobility. Defense staff and military personnel must access the right applications and systems from anywhere to better support operations and speed mission success with appropriate devices.

Security and compliance. Solutions must address data security, privacy and regulatory requirements unique to defense organizations within dedicated, private cloud environments.

Technology platforms. A platform that reduces costs, simplifies management, improves services and provides transparency enables defense and military staff to work together securely across departments and agencies.

Understanding how each of these categories contributes to successful operations in military organizations helps identify the right type of tool, as well as which role or staff profile is most appropriate for that tool.

Let’s examine various roles, their business needs, the nature of the role’s persona and its importance for driving adoption.

Roles and business needs

Military staff must have the most appropriate information and tools to ensure they are effective and productive in their roles. While the simplest solution may be to give all personnel the same access to all information and tools, that is not always possible or desirable. For security-sensitive organizations, giving all personnel the same access could present a high risk. Providing unrestricted rights could also confuse users and make them less, not more, productive. In addition, it is important to recognize that there are licensing cost implications when providing top-of-the-line IT features and benefits that may be excessive if “good enough” will do.

Identifying key roles and aligning business requirements to them results in a more focused, streamlined and efficient use of workplace tools, leading to more effective communication, collaboration and greater productivity.

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Virtual meetings

Secure collaboration

Analytics Finding experts

Security Mobility

Commanders and leaders

• Need constant access to the right people and information to make the best decisions.

• Defense agencies cannot work in silos. Projects that originate in one department could affect a dozen others. Without collaboration among agencies, those projects could fail.

• Make it easy to create a real-time view of tactical data.

• Share that view across the command structure in a highly secure portal or dashboard.

• Find experts quickly to make rapid decisions.

• Get questions from the field answered immediately.

• Ensure that sensitive information is protected across devices and the cloud.

• Ensure that platforms and services meet ISO 27001, EU model clauses, HIPAA BAA, FISMA and FERPA requirements.

• Access information and people anytime, anyplace through mobile platforms (Windows, iOS, Android).

• Work in remote locations without the need for traditional office premises.

Staff and analysts

• Enable multinational staff to engage in coordination with automated translation.

• Improve the quality of briefings.

• Work in teams and co-author documents shared in a central resource for greater productivity.

• Save documents to a single, highly secure site and edit those documents from anywhere on any device.

• Enable more informed decisions by combining data from internal and external data sources.

• Analyze data and share intelligence and operational and logistical insights.

• Insights into economic data, political data and other data can be gathered and shared so that intelligence analysts can make more informed recommendations.

• Decrease decision-making time by reaching experts quickly through new types of real-time communication tools.

• Securely report, update and publish situational awareness data via custom intranet, extranet and internet applications to enable better-informed command and control decisions.

• Work effectively and stay connected to commanders, headquarters and other staff from anywhere.

Infantry soldiers

• Join team meetings remotely with commanders and leaders.

• Connect to shared resources for campaign information, manuals and training.

• Be party to campaign analysis to understand strategy and planning.

• Reach out to experts quickly to help resolve equipment and logistics issues.

• Securely connect to military and other cloud resources.

• Communicate any place, any time with ruggedized devices and mobile applications.

Field personnel and administrative staff

• Participate in role-specific training on any device, reducing the need for instructors to travel.

• Search a knowledge base and connect with experts to find answers to improve service.

• Having access to role-based portal engages personnel.

• Use dashboards to help visualize the levels of supplies needed for troops, leading to better purchasing and logistics decisions.

• Reach out to experts quickly to help resolve equipment and logistics issues.

• Securely provide field reports and analyses to HQ.

• Deliver communications and data access to mobile personnel.

Figure 1. Military roles and business needs

Figure 1 displays various key roles and highlights key concepts for efficient information sharing and collaboration.

Role

s

Business needs

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For a detailed view of each role’s requirements (versus personas, which are discussed later), further analysis is required.

We use a template to evaluate responsibilities, challenges, work styles, needs and wants, device requirements, capability needs and typical scenarios. For example, the infantry soldier role template looks at the related responsibilities of combat troops and conflict area forces (as shown in Figure 2). It reviews the combat zone challenges and the communication needs of soldiers and their extremely mobile work style, as well as internal and field collaboration requirements, and the need for connectivity. This leads to determining the device types that are available to meet these needs and the scenarios in which infantry soldiers use the technology.

Our analysis finds that the infantry soldier’s extremely mobile work style often plays out in a hostile and unpredictable environment. Communication is key, and access to the latest dispatches and briefing information is critical. Modern portable devices, along with collaboration technology, are essential for rapid response to developing situations.

Figure 2. Infantry soldier’s responsibilities, work style and needs

Related roles:

• Light cavalry crewman• Engineer troop officer• Engineer IT systems operator• Military police officer

Infantry soldier Responsibilities

• Combat troop against enemy forces• Front-line defense force• Conflict area police force• Conflict area peacekeepers• Manpower during humanitarian crisis• Public face to people in conflict areas

Work style

Internal mobility

External mobility

Internal collaboration

External collaboration

Place dependency

Connectivity dependency

Capability needs

Document creation

Real-time communication

Collaboration

Finding information and people

LOB applications

Reporting and analytics

Challenges

• Combat zone • Communicate with command and

control in conflict situations• Dangerous and hazardous

environments — weather extremes• Communicating with home while

on mission

Need & wants

• Reliable and ruggedized communications devices

• Access required training, service manuals and videos for troubleshooting, onboarding content and to stay informed

• Small, mobile, but feature-rich communication devices

Key scenarios

1. Smarter meetings √

2. Communication and community √

3. Work from anywhere √

4. Training and onboarding √

5. Discover people and content √

6. Team collaboration √

7. Schedule and task management

Device needs

Current technology

Desired future technology

Mobile

Pad and pen

Smartphone Headset

Tablet

Windows To Go

Windows To Go

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In contrast, the staff and analysts’ role requirements center on providing reports and data analysis. Secure, encrypted communication and access to automated workflow tools that can provide detailed insights into operational data are essential.

Field personnel and administrative roles have their own unique requirements, often related to managing equipment/logistics issues and other communication among various entities and players.

Finally, commanders and leaders need constant and secure access to the right people and information to make the best decisions. They need to be able to retrieve data on a number of devices, both mobile and static, according to the situation.

Two personas

We have discussed the high-level requirements of a defense organization and how roles in an organization inform the types of workplace tools that are required. Now let’s examine how understanding personas can improve adoption of workplace and mobility tools. Remember, personas and roles are different.

A persona defines, more specifically, a type of worker within a role. There are different types of personas (users) in a single role, from the technophile to the technophobe. Let’s look at two personas in the field personnel and administrative role.

• Mark — Mark has been with the Army for many years. He signed up for active duty, but after 15 years of active service transitioned into a role that better suited his family life. He generally works in an office and oversees, among other activities, some elements of vendor management. He has a phone on his desk and a PC running Windows 7 with a single browser and Office 2013. He also has a mobile phone but doesn’t really use it for anything other than making calls.

• Rachel — Rachel is fresh out of school and keen to become a field service engineer. Her duties include working on military bases locally and overseas, as well as seeing active duty. She uses PCs, tablets and mobile phones for all types of communication and interaction with internet applications. She is on Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram but doesn’t have a great deal of experience with Microsoft products.

Let’s consider the requirements of Mark and Rachel and the challenges they may face. Mark and Rachel have different backgrounds and experience with technology, meaning that their approach to their work activities and technology is different.

Mark may be more used to joining teleconferences from his phone and may also have some experience using Skype on his PC or making a Microsoft Office 365 video call. Mark also may have some experience working in Microsoft SharePoint to share documents with administrators and other third parties.

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On the other hand, Rachel may be comfortable with video calling from her mobile phone. She also would be more apt to use a social media app such as Yammer to collaborate with colleagues in the field and with superior officers.

Mark is used to sharing a desktop with colleagues; for Rachel, this is something she’s not had experience with in the past. Outside of work, Mark’s role means that he is never far from home. Family time is less likely to be a challenge for him than for Rachel. Rachel is used to communicating through voice, video and text without restriction with her friends and family, but in the field this becomes a significant challenge.

In the past, the military might have had a less accommodating approach to its staff. However, in today’s society, military recruiters know that they are competing for top talent and they can attract that talent only with a modern workplace environment.

To ensure that Mark, Rachel and their colleagues make the best use of collaboration solutions, it is important for military organizations to consider how their staff will interact with new technologies by understanding their staffs’ backgrounds.

Creating adoption strategies that cater to the business needs of the organization and promote the highest levels of usage and productivity is as important as choosing the correct tools and platforms for the various tasks.

The future looks productive

Today, various platforms allow users to communicate and collaborate easily without being aware of the technology running in the background. Workers can create documents, prepare presentations, chat online, make calls and hold conferences all through one interface.

Furthermore, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are now being included in that interface. You can see information about people, the organization and things that are critical to your work without having to access multiple applications. The information you need is automatically delivered when and where you need it.

Extending this further, software vendors are focusing on creating a “hub” for all your work needs rather than expecting users to know and use multiple applications, file stores and permissions. This makes the experience more user-centric and efficient. Examples of such hubs — all in the cloud — are Microsoft Teams, Google Plus, Slack and Facebook.

This change of view will allow organizations, including the military, to create workspaces that have meaningful descriptors and that foster interactions around projects and communication channels in a much more personal way. This will inevitably increase productivity, as confusing interfaces are replaced with a simple view, as well as AI, to enable much easier interaction with content and people in the context of the individual user’s work.

DXC Technology provides workplace solutions that meet military objectives

DXC Technology has supplied IT services and solutions to defense and intelligence services for 40 years. This includes everything from training, mission planning and logistics to infrastructure, workplace and cyber services — whether within offices, embassies and recruitment centers or on the front line. As a result of this close collaboration, many DXC employees have now been vetted to hold a high-level security clearance (SC) to work on defense projects.

DXC’s people understand the defense sector. Many of our team are former military, some work on military bases and others are deployed on operations in direct support of the armed forces. We understand that real-time, accurate, secure and usable information is vital to the defense sector. It provides an essential tactical or strategic advantage. Providing the right information to officers, ranks and civilian staff is our goal, enabling them to act quickly and safely and fulfil their tasks effectively.

DXC provides the services, technology and advice to enable key military information-sharing around the world, quickly and securely, at all security levels. The drive toward digital and modern work styles is essential for defense organizations to remain agile and responsive in an often chaotic, unpredictable and dangerous world. Building on our heritage, DXC is uniquely qualified with the knowledge and capability to find solutions that meet the specific requirements of the military and its partners to transform to the modern workplace.

About the author

Philip Joslin is a product and portfolio business consultant for DXC Technology. He specializes in unified communications and productivity solutions, with particular expertise in Microsoft’s Skype for Business and Office 365. Philip works with account and sales teams providing consulting to customers on unified communication and collaboration products, as well as related DXC offerings.

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Learn more at www.dxc.technology/workplace_and_mobility

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About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, helping clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. Created by the merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, DXC Technology serves nearly 6,000 private and public sector clients across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network combine to deliver powerful next-generation IT services and solutions. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

© 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. MD_7892a-18. March 2018