The Defense Department is creating a central database that managers will be able to use to locate information technology personnel with the right skills at the right time.
At a planning meeting last January, Defense Secretary William Cohen voiced the need for the DoD to identify, detail and capture the skills of its information technology personnel. Cohen's idea was based on a central tenet of knowledge management theory: The answers you need are usually somewhere in your organization; you just have to find them.
Now, the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence/Chief Information Office (C3I/CIO) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense is answering Cohen's call. The office has begun to quietly market its solution, the Defense Planning and Support System (DPSS), to the rest of DoD.
"We're going to the chief information officers and the services saying, 'This is available,' " said William Vass, technical services director in the C3I/CIO. All DoD organizations may tap into the new system at no cost.
"DoD has databases which describe skills and might say if someone is a computer specialist or a computer programmer," said Vass. "But they don't give specifics. We need to identify someone who has Oracle or Sun expertise using Java, for instance, and has been doing that for two years."
Under DPSS, all types of DoD technology experts-active duty personnel, reservists, civilians and even contractors-will fill out an online questionnaire about their IT skills. That information will then be poured into the database.
Defense decision makers will then be able to search the system for employees with specific kinds of expertise. Through the system, the department will also be able to cluster people with similar skills-COBOL programmers, for example-into news groups. So if a work group is stumped by a COBOL problem, a manager could send a message to the COBOL news group seeking advice.
"We want to try and get the people who know with people who need to know," said Vass. "[We] can create custom, DoD-specific news groups and even news groups to solve a specific problem." DPSS can also locate DoD workers with certain expertise by location.
The DPSS will also automatically generate a personalized technology Web portal for each IT professional employed by DoD, based on the employee's skills and interests. A portal is a single Web page that serves as a starting point for locating information across the Internet. The personalized portals will help professionals stay up to date in their rapidly changing fields.
"It's hard for us in DoD to stay up to date with IT skills," said Vass. "Now, [DoD IT professionals] can stay up to date very easily."
To build DPSS, Vass' unit joined forces with the Defense Manpower Data Center and the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, whose existing Joint Reserve Intelligence Planning and Support System (JRIPSS) personnel management system is now part of DPSS.
Vass' unit bought Autonomy Inc.'s Autonomy Portal-In-A-Box knowledge management product. It then fused the capabilities of Autonomy and JRIPSS to create the DPSS.
"Autonomy and JRIPSS are integrated together," said Capt. Greg Hadfield, special assistant for total force and production policy in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. "When decision makers query the system it really is a seamless application."
DPSS is expected to be operational this month. In the future, DPSS could be used for other types of workers besides IT personnel.