Army transformation team ready

The first of three teams focused on key areas of the Army Enterprise Infostructure Transformation (AEIT) will begin work this week.

A trio of integrated process teams will focus on requirements, architecture and acquisition strategy, said T. Kevin Carroll, program executive officer for Standard Army Management Information Systems and leader of the AEIT effort.

The requirements team begins work this week, with the goal of having a statement of objective for the project ready by May, if not sooner, Carroll said.

"As they come up with firmer requirements, [that] team will feed data to the architecture team, which is looking at the Army's 'as is' architecture and, to move forward, needs requirements," Carroll said.

Those two teams will then feed the acquisition strategy unit, which will examine factors including whether the AEIT project will be done in phases and whether a new contract is even necessary.

"There may or may not be an acquisition out of this," Carroll said, adding that he was perplexed by reports that vendors were already talking about teaming up for the project. "We could use existing contracts. The Army doesn't know."

As a baseline for their work, the integrated process teams, which include one representative from all of the Army's major commands — functional and information technology-related — will use the "golden nuggets" mined from the 65 industry responses to a request for information that the Army reviewed late last year.

Those responses, combined with subsequent interviews of a dozen of the Army's senior IT leaders on topics ranging from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet to application server consolidation, helped form a consensus to move forward, Carroll said.

Throughout the process, the teams will provide updates to the Army's Chief Information Officer Advisory Board, Carroll said.

By March, he said he expects to see some "meat around the requirements," and by May, he would like to issue a draft request for information or statement of objective, "which is when we can integrate industry." The timetable is flexible, he said, and if it can be done faster, it will.