Letter: DOD's problem isn't a lack of communication

A reader writes that the Defense Department suffers from more than poor information sharing.

Regarding "GAO: DOD must keep Army in the loop on HR modernization," While GAO is able to locate something to justify their existence, the Defense Department — in particular the Business Transformation Agency — does an excellent job of communicating. The problem is that the Army has selective listening. Unless you communicate exactly what the Army wants, they are being left out of the loop. The Army had the opportunity to deal directly with the Northrop Grumman IT developer without the BTA Enterprise Program Manager able to control the Army who desired to be the designer and supervise the developer.

The problem — plain and simple — is the DOD politics. The Secretary of Defense — no one else — needs to communicate to the services to change their business processes, get standard data in throughout the department and let the service secretaries know that the cost of enterprise resource programs will be taken from the services portfolio.

I don't think that the program has lacked in sharing information with the Army. 

DOD needs leadership to make the hard decisions.