With 3.2 million employees, the U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer.  In addition to millions of enlisted warfighters and officers, the DoD also employs over 700,000 civilians ranging from physicians to accountants to custodians.  

In environments this large and, let’s be honest, bureaucratic, scaling digital transformation efforts can be incredibly difficult. However, when successful, reap major rewards. Today we’re going to look at a handful of such projects - digital initiatives that helped units within the DoD not only increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness, but maximize military readiness, on both the physical and digital battleground. 

Building an Automation Army

Though the DoD had been experimenting with robotic process automation (RPA) and similar technologies for a number of years, The Defense Logistics Agency was the first DoD department to deploy unattended RPA back in 2018. Since then it has deployed over 111 “bots,” 80% of them unattended, to automate high-volume, manual tasks such as D-1425 approvals, IDOC error correction, inventory audits and even parts of the employee onboarding process. 

However, the DoD didn’t stop there. In order to scale the adoption of automation across the DoD, the DLA has developed hundreds of prebuilt automations that other departments can quickly and easily adopt. In addition, they’ve also implemented wide-spread data literacy training to build an “army” of citizen developers to help reduce the burden on RPA experts. 

“The RPA capability is something we have needed for a long time,” Spencer Shaffer, DLA Aviation Business Process Support deputy director explained in a recent DLA news item. “It gives us the ability to execute more workload without increasing the size of our workforce.”

DoD Finance Transformation 

When you’re managing a budget that exceeds $700 billion dollars, standard financial management systems aren’t exactly going to cut it. 

For example, less than 1% of DoD transactions involve unmatched funds. However, these mislabeled and unmatched transactions can amount to billions of dollars if left unchecked. Though robotic process automation (RPA) proved to be a powerful tool for identifying unmatched funds, as these transactions tend to be more complex, a human still had to go in and manually fix the issue. 

With the help of solution providers DataRobot and Summit2Sea, the Defense Innovation Unit teamed up with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to develop a new intelligent automation (IA) tool that combines RPA with machine learning (ML). This new application is not only capable of identifying unmatched funds, it can correct them, increasing accuracy by a significant margin.

As summarized by Bryan Lane, chief of business and health transformation, JAIC in a recent FedScoop article,  “The collective team identified the unmatched transaction use case to be highly suitable for automation while delivering significant mission impact.” 

Another area automation has transformed is policy management and contract analysis. The DoD handles an unfathomable amount of documents that outline budgets and the policies they correlate to. However, a small percentage of these documents are either out of date/no longer needed or contain errors of some sort.

RPA bots can rapidly “read” these documents, identify potential errors and alert the appropriate team who can then, if needed, reallocate the funding elsewhere. According to Gregory Little, DOD's deputy comptroller for enterprise data and business performance, these 43 budget analysis bots have saved the Pentagon's business analysts 30,000 hours of work reallocated $4 billion over the past year.

Forging Ahead

Despite these significant wins, the DoD’s digital transformation journey is only just beginning. Going forward they will not only be prioritizing automated solutions that reduce costs and increase operational efficiency, they will be looking to invest in solutions that will help them harness the almost unfathomable amount of data it has at its fingertips. Solutions like intelligent document processing (IDP) to enable them to transform unstructured data into strategic insoghts. 

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