Gaining the Digital Edge in the DoD: A View from the Digital Trenches
by Dustin Thomas, Eric Heller & David Schiff
Hopper is DEF’s innovation consultancy, a community of volunteers who leverage their expertise in national security issues to address challenges of senior leaders in government.
Digital technology is changing the workspace. Digital innovation will be critical if we want to maintain a competitive advantage in the future. Recruiting, training, and retaining digital talent in the DoD is a national security priority, but is not receiving the time, attention, funds, or other resources necessary to ensure future mission needs are met. The Defense Innovation Board (DIB) produced a series of recommendations, entitled Workforce Now (WFN), that highlighted the digital crisis facing the DoD and urged them to take near-term action to better use and retain its existing digital talent.
Last year, the Defense Entrepreneur’s Forum (DEF) launched its innovation consultancy, Hopper. Hopper seeks to channel the power of the DEF network into tangible solutions. We do this by mobilizing the DEF community to generate and solicit ideas for national security decision-makers. There is no shortage of problems from which to choose; however, Hopper decided to tackle the DIB’s WFN recommendation.
The Workforce Now workshop participants, coming from a broad swath of defense backgrounds, determined that defined career paths, the desire for operational experience, rigid billeting systems, and readiness priorities prevent the military from retaining those with digital skillsets. Many digital and innovation skill sets do not fit within existing career tracks; therefore, service members with these skills are often left unidentified and ignored (so-called digital orphans) in DoD’s current talent management systems or are forced to perform these duties without recognition or compensation (usually in their “free” time).
Hopper hosted three facilitated workshops and a data call to curate the problem and connect relevant experts to develop potential solutions for the Workforce Now proposal. Two of these events were in-person and the most recent event was virtual due to COVID19.
We originally sought to leverage the DEF community to identify issues and propose solutions to the digital talent crisis that might inform the ultimate DIB Workforce Now recommendations. This proved not to be our primary value.
Rather, our membership took the underlying, systemic issues associated with digital talent (vice the recommendations) and sought to identify opportunities at the individual and unit level where we can help drive meaningful change; we also identified issues that require senior-level attention, many of which are consistent with those the DIB touched on in the WFN study.
While the discussions validated many of the original themes uncovered as part of the WFN study, there were several areas where discussions went deeper and/or explored new areas.
Through all of our discussions, what was clear is that these systemic issues are not solely the purview of senior policymakers and military officials. Junior and mid-level national security professionals should not absolve themselves of a role driving needed change. In short, the leaders of the Workforce of the Future are the Workforce Now.
With that framing in mind, our discussion allowed us to bin categories of action by leadership level. Those actions tend to be more formal at the senior levels, and more informal at junior and mid-levels, but all have value for promoting the culture needed to drive organizational, technological, and operating model changes needed to meet the national security challenges of our day. While by no means exhaustive, some of the actions by seniority included:
Senior Leaders need to help drive:
- Modernizing the talent management system writ large
- And, with that, changes to hiring and billeting systems, such as creative uses of excepted service to getting coding certain jobs as eligible for highly qualified expert (HQE)
- Maintaining knowledge of and relationships with networks that operate on the periphery of the formal bureaucracy but serve key roles in the broader innovation ecosystem, such as DEF, FIN, DIN, etc.
- Driving the use of digital aptitude tests and using their metrics to make systemic decisions
- Managing a new generation of learning and professional development opportunities, capitalizing on the value the bring without stifling the democratized benefits they offer the broad workforce
Unit-level leaders should focus on:
- Seeing the unit commander’s role as integrating — both hierarchically and culturally — the digital civilian, military, and contract workforce
- Maintain knowledge of and relationships with those same peripheral networks senior leaders must work with, but using them to solve problems at the unit level
- Adopt informal approaches to using aptitude tests and metrics, such as additional skill identifiers not officially tracked by the human capital system to ensure digital orphans do not exist for lack of awareness of their skills locally
- Create information and semi-formal professional development opportunities at the unit-level, such as lunch and learns with technologists and opportunities to interact with the digital talent in the local community’s digital ecosystem, such as local universities, tech firms, and innovation networks
Individual national security professionals are also responsible for driving change by:
- Understanding and capitalizing on peripheral networks for things ranging from upskilling/re-skilling opportunities to learning about novel approaches in other branches of service or organizations to similar challenges faced at the individual level
- Communicating their skills — not just certificates and degrees — to promote a strong feedback look between junior managers and their subordinates to understand how their digital skills can best support their unit and to ensure managers have a partner to identify forward-leaning digitally-informed solutions
- Seeking out the aforementioned aptitude tests and metrics as a benchmark to understand what they actually know (and what they still need to learn), not simply a list of certifications
Our data call inputs echoed culture change and talent management demands elucidated in articles in Strategy Bridge and War on the Rocks. The people who possess the digital competencies that the DoD needs are not afforded the training, protection, advocacy nor the encouragement to pursue them.
Our current “personnel systems discourage risk-taking in career management choices and in professional performance”. Defined career paths keep service members from straying outside of “key assignments” so they do not get passed over for promotion. Individuals put their career at risk by taking an assignment off of this path that may be of more interest to them (and, ironically, of high long-term value to the Department).
This led to a personnel management system that was designed to create fillable, replaceable billets for an industrial era, resulting in an assembly line-like system “that moves traditional personnel from one established billet to another, treating them as items to assign to a unit, where the goal is filling vacancies, rather than a personalized approach to talent management where the goal is to align skills to teams and missions”.
“The essence of all manpower systems is to encourage those you need and want to stay and separate those who are not performing to standards. Our current system lacks the authorities and tools to accomplish that simple outcome in anything but a blunt way. Our manpower model is based primarily on time and experience, not talent or performance or potential future performance.” — Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps
This talent must be acquired and then cultivated. The Air Force Academy and West Point have both announced Data Science degrees in their curriculums but this is only one small step toward acquiring and investing in digital talent. AF Digital University is also a great effort to help transform the way the Air Force trains and recruits digital talent.
The Navy and Marine Corps, Air Force, and Army all have heroic digital “splinter cells” operating with various degrees of support, but without the higher level resourcing or coordination required to win a future war. However, those who have generally been interested in or pursued these digital competencies, have generally not been encouraged or protected.
Digital readiness is an issue we will be facing for the foreseeable future. Embracing digital modernization across the Department will be an imperative step to deliver our combat advantage. There is a lot of work to be done, but leaders at all levels can take action now.
Leaders must first begin by discussing this new type of readiness, identifying talent they currently have, and then encouraging its relentless pursuit. This type of revolution starts with culture enabled by leadership.
Next, the DoD must find a way to routinely evaluate its state of digital readiness, and test its incoming talent for technical abilities.
Lastly, the DoD must acknowledge that this new digital force will present itself as an attractive fishing pond to private sector companies looking for ripe, digitally competent employees. Retaining these members with proper pay, career flexibility (remote options), and promotions, will be critical to seeing this effort through.
Going forward, we need to focus on the glimmers of real progress and be ruthless about calling out the theatre that won’t get us to the digital readiness we need.
Hopper is DEF’s innovation consultancy for the national security community. Hopper brings the expertise of DEF’s national security expert network together with cutting edge approaches to refine complex problems, integrate expert perspectives, and develop recommended solutions, plans, and/or policies for project sponsors.
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