Letter to the editor

I found Bill Murray's June 4 article, "Army will stop short of outsourcing," interesting and exciting.

The Army has approved the transformation to Army knowledge management (AKM). The Army chief information officer has a tremendous challenge to evolve to the AKM objective end-state. The biggest hurdle — or possibly the biggest uncontrolled blunder — is the Army's lack of guidance to the information technology and information management activities within the Army that are currently involved in "outsourcing" studies.

The article makes it sound as if the Army has pulled back on outsourcing, especially in the IT/IM arena. This is not true. The Army is steadfastly and hurriedly moving to IT outsourcing studies without AKM visionary guidance from the Army CIO and the Army chief of staff for Installation Management (ACSIM).

The result could be disjointed management of the IT/IM infrastructure maintenance, operations and planning to outsourced environments, without any clear plan as to how the outsourcing will support AKM concept.

I am troubled by this move and think the Army has time to quickly place these studies in suspension and resume them only after a practical, logical outsourcing approach is delineated that is complementary to the AKM vision. Only then can the Army feel comfortable about building and transforming to an knowledge management base fully capable of supporting the best Army leaders and soldiers in the world.

Kenneth Drennan
Army Signal Activity-Military District of Washington